Mindfulness techniques have been used to train the human mind to stay in the present moment without any judgments and interpretations.
Many famous companies such as Google, Aetna, Intel, general mills, Goldman Sachs, etc., allow Mindfulness and meditation training programs and their regular practices for their employees because they know the potential of Mindfulness in the field of self-development, leadership building, interpersonal relationships, productivity and efficacy in work, and many more.
How Mindfulness meditation helps you?
A consistent practice of Mindfulness meditation helps to:
- Reduce negative thoughts and feeling
- Control stress and anxiety
- Decrease depressive symptoms
- Improve physical and emotional health
- Increase self-awareness
- Boost creativity
- Improve concentration
- Fight addiction
From this, you may have an idea of how Mindfulness leverages well-being for us and the people around us. In this article, I have shared some interesting studies that suggest how Mindfulness could benefit our body and mind.
Remember, consistent practice is essential to develop Mindfulness; whatever benefits are introduced in this article emphasize the regular practice of Mindfulness. Merely few days a month can’t give you those welfares.
There are many scientifically proven studies that justify these advantages of Mindfulness. Let me elaborate on these benefits of Mindfulness with pieces of evidence.
#1. Reduce negative thoughts and emotions
A negative thought is a starting point of any chaos, so it’s important to learn the art of handling negative thoughts.
Negative thoughts and emotions drain our positive energies lead to an ocean of miseries.
When one negative thought arises in the mind, it attracts the same types of thoughts and generates the same emotions in abundance. If you don’t have any tool to control this process, this cycle goes on and on continuously.
But, Mindfulness can obstruct this loop and gives you room for headspace.
One experiment was done on Mindfulness, where participants had to view negative and positive images with and without Mindfulness meditation. The result showed that participants who practiced mindfulness meditation before experienced less negative thoughts while viewing negative images than non-practitioners.
However, in the response of viewing positive image results were different. This means Mindfulness may attenuate thoughts that emphasize negativity but not those that emphasize positivity.
#2. Control stress and anxiety
Most people try Mindfulness or meditation to reduce their stress and anxiety. In this age of technology, everyone is busy in their fast life. They have very little time for themselves compare to their social communities.
They find pleasers in someone or something and completely ignore themselves. One good quote coming into my mind, “Expectations are the thief of joy.”
Remember, when you give access your life to someone else’s hand, you’re sure to meet failures.
Most of the day, we either live in the past with worries or in the future with expectations and totally ignore the present moment. That’s the main cause of stress, anxiety, and depression.
As a solution to this, Mindfulness allows us to live in the present and keep us separate from overthinking.
One research suggests that after using the mindfulness meditation app for 8-weeks, employees experienced decreased distress and job strain and improved well-being.
An experiment on Mindfulness intervention indicates that Mindfulness-based therapy reduces stress and anxiety.
#3. Decrease depressive symptoms
Depression may result from stress or anxiety or due to physical health problems. People with chronic pain, cancer, asthma, etc., often lose interest in life and experience depression, anger, and sadness.
Depression is a growing issue, especially among teenagers, in immature they often face this problem during their exam time or due to relationships.
We can decrease depression by practicing Mindfulness. It trains our mind to live in the present moment, untouched from thoughts and emotions.
Reviewing 3515 patients, one experiment showed that mindfulness meditation helps improve the symptoms of depression and mental health.
#4. Improve physical and emotional health
Emotional health is as important as physical health, we know how to enhance our physical health, but many people face trouble developing emotional health. An emotionally healthy person is mostly blessed with good physical health and can easily cope with the health problem.
Mindfulness helps generate kindness, love, compassion, and many other good emotions, also it helps to decrease the symptoms of physical problems or disorders.
A year-long experiment on patients with chronic pain who likely to be anxious and depressed due to inflammation experienced a noticeable improvement in depression, anxiety, and pain.
One study of 50 college students showed that Loving-kindness meditation increases positive emotions, improves interpersonal relationships and understanding of others after 4-weeks.
#5. Increase self-awareness
Self-awareness seems ordinary, many people don’t know its value and ignore it, but self-awareness is a valuable quality of mind to direct your life according to your rules.
With increased self-awareness, you may take correct decisions and better choices in life. You can disconnect from negative thoughts or redirect them in a constructive manner with the help of self-awareness. Also, it helps boost your productivity and efficacy in work.
One biological study concluded that regular practice of mindfulness meditation and yoga increase awareness without thoughts. This non-judgmental awareness helps to obtain self-resilience.
#6. Boost creativity
With creative thinking or creative imagination, you may achieve great success in life. History is full of those examples that men who had creativity or out of box thinking accumulated great fortunes or talent.
Consistent mindfulness practice could develop creativity by connecting your brain with the source of infinite intelligence where the new ideas come in the form of flashes or hunches. In other words, it could bring you in a “flow state” where you have fully absorbed in the activity and do something creative.
One research found the Focused attention and open-monitoring meditation (Mindful watching) exert a specific effect on creativity. It allows diverse thinking ability that generates many new ideas. However, other different meditation techniques may dive into this same specific state of cognition.
An article published in the Harvard business review suggests that meditation is useful not only for stress reduction but also for creativity. Even daily 10-12 minutes of short meditation sessions may bring a big change in creative thinking.
#7. Improve concentration
Mindfulness improves concentration and lengthens the attention span, which aids you to do tasks more efficiently and with minimum distractions.
One beautiful quote describes the value of concentration:
Related Article: Meditation and mindfulness will make you a better leader.
Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to present activity without any judgment. By practicing so, your concentration power will naturally grow.
This study on Mindfulness supports that even brief mindfulness meditation practice improves the allocation of attentional resources and accuracy while doing a task.
A similar study suggests that daily 13-minutes of guided meditation can increases cognition and memory after 8-weeks.
#8. Fight addiction
Addiction is compulsive behavior with a strong neural pattern. When you take the drug, your body releases pleasurable hormones, and you reach somewhere in the world. Then body wants to repeat this experience and ask for more drugs. This behavior gets stronger and stronger with every action, and after one point, you lost your control, and it becomes a solid habit or addiction.
Mindfulness increases neuroplasticity which means your brain can be molded faster to adopt new behavior with Mindfulness. Due to this quality, Mindfulness is used to erase the behavior of addiction and develop good habits.
This sounds interesting, right?
One study of Mindfulness-based treatment suggests that Mindfulness helps break dependencies on addiction by developing better self-control and awareness for compulsive behavior triggers.
Another research on Mindfulness concluded that mindful people could redirect their attention and emotions, also they have increased understanding of the cause behind the source of feelings.
There are many other benefits of mindfulness and mindfulness meditation, but I have listed some of them that everyone wants in life.
Consistent practice of Mindfulness and developing the habit of it would bring abundant positive changes in life.
So, if you are exercising Mindfulness daily, then that’s perfect, and if you haven’t yet, then start practicing mindfulness meditation consistently.
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