How Meditation and Mindfulness can Reduce Stress to Give You a Healthy Lifestyle?

How Meditation and Mindfulness can Reduce Stress to Give You a Healthy Lifestyle?

When someone says they want to stay fit and healthy, most people will automatically think that they are talking about physical fitness and health. While it is necessary to stay healthy physically, the talk about mental health and fitness is critically undermined by a large part of Indian society.

As of mid-2020, following the pandemic and nationwide lockdown, a report shows that 43% of Indians suffer from depression making it the second country with the highest rate of depression following China and preceding the US.

Mental health and fitness are as important as physical health if not more and that is fitness centers offering meditation and mindfulness are gaining popularity in many urban Indian localities.

In this blog, we will dive deeper into the health aspects of mindfulness and meditation. Keep reading to know how it helps you in more ways than simply reducing your stress.

What is Mindfulness Meditation?

Mindfulness meditation is a practice of being aware of what is happening inside and around you while not getting involved in it. It may sound a little ironic but acknowledging the events and how they affect your body physically, mentally, and emotionally without getting invested in them has been proven to improve people’s mental health and help them to lead a happier life.

Mindfulness is an act of being aware of your present. It focuses on concentrating on how you feel at the moment without worrying about the past or the future. The practice helps you get a deeper understanding of yourself and increases self-awareness.

In today’s world where people have started giving more importance to a healthy mind (almost as much important as a healthy body, if not more), many people prefer to join a fitness and yoga center that also offers mindfulness classes.

How does Mindfulness Meditation help?

Medical researches and interventions show that mindfulness and meditation reduce mental stress, symptoms of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other similar stress-related mental illnesses.

Such mental illnesses have a direct connection with your physical well-being as well. When you are healthier mentally, the positive effects of it can be seen on your body as well.

The idea of focusing on your present events, sensations, feelings, and emotions helps you to slow down and be fully aware of your current experiences. While it is a relatively easier part, the important part of mindfulness is to acknowledge these experiences without judging them good or bad, or getting involved in them.

Mindfulness meditation practice helps you in many ways including:

• Building a higher capacity of mental endurance,
• Improving concentration,
• Inducing positive thoughts and rational thinking,
• Increasing ability to cope with mental and physical pain,
• And acceptance of self and others.

These and similar benefits are the main reason why mindfulness meditation practice has been proven to be helpful for people suffering from stress-related mental diseases. It has been used as a therapy for patients suffering from such mental illnesses, the therapy is known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

The effects of Mindfulness Meditation on your lifestyle

Recent studies and reviews show that mindfulness has a positive effect on your physical fitness and well-being as well.

A healthy lifestyle means that you are fit and healthy, inside and out. Let’s see how mindfulness meditation helps you stay physically healthy as well.

It improves pain tolerance

One of the techniques of mindfulness meditation is that of physical sensations, to acknowledge them and let them go so they can reduce with time. The physical sensation can be anything from an itch to physical pain.

Research by D. Sharma et. al. shows that mindfulness has a positive effect on pain tolerance and pain perception along with the mental health of injured athletes.

It can be helpful in irritable bowel syndrome

Many times, people’s physical ailments become the cause of their stress which, in turn, worsens their physical condition. Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) can be such an illness for patients suffering through it.

Mindfulness meditation can reduce the gastrointestinal symptoms along with the stress caused by them to the patients. It also improves their quality of life.

It can improve stress-related physical illnesses as well

Similar to IBS, other stress-related physical problems can also be controlled using mindfulness meditation.

These diseases can include clinical cold, diabetes, and psoriasis. Such illnesses can worsen due to stress, and while mindfulness can reduce stress to control the illnesses, it also helps to reduce their severity.

It can help with pain-related diseases

Arthritis and Fibromyalgia are conditions that induce chronic pain in the person’s body. As mentioned earlier, mindfulness meditation can improve pain tolerance and this benefit also translates to pain-related diseases.

Studies suggest that mindfulness-based interventions can help relieve psychological distress and increase mental endurance for pain.

FAQs

What are the health benefits of mindfulness?

Mindfulness meditation has multiple health benefits including mental and physical. It can also improve conditions related to stress like insomnia and psoriasis and alleviate their symptoms to help you relax.

What does mindfulness do to your brain?

When you are stressed, your brain releases a hormone that produces inflammation-causing chemicals. Such neurogenic inflammation can be a cause of many ailments like pain, swelling, fever, and tenderness.

With regular practice of mindfulness, you can control your stress levels which will reduce the inflammation giving you a healthier mind and brain.

How long do you need to meditate to see results?

For beginners, it can be as little as 10-15 minutes every day. With practice, you can amp up your time practicing to 40-50 minutes a day.

There is no such thing as meditating too much as mindfulness meditation is a practice of becoming self-aware, it will only benefit you in the long term.

Conclusion

As the world gets busier, gyms and fitness facilities will be the places where humans will be able to be with themselves, self-reflect on themselves, and get in touch with their innate awareness.

The practice of mindfulness has already been backed up by science and today many gym and fitness centers offer meditation classes to stay fit and healthy both mentally and physically.

If you are planning on adding a mindfulness meditation class to your fitness center, then gym management software can help you manage all the additional work you need to manage your offerings.

To know how it can help your yoga retreat center, fitness center, or gym, simply take a free trial of gym management software. It will allow you to know the different features that it offers and how it can help your facility get more productive and efficient to gain higher profits.

What are your thoughts on mindfulness meditation? Tell us in the comments below and be sure to share this blog with anyone whom you think may get benefitted from it.