We all know and understand the importance of managing stress before it builds up and impacts our health and life negatively. Some people use exercise, the outdoors, or calming activities to manage stress. Meditation is another excellent strategy to add to your repertoire of stress management techniques. It can help us by calming our nervous system, emotionally regulating ourselves and increasing our stress tolerance.
Stress is all around us, and it can feel unavoidable. While we can’t eradicate it from our lives—stress does have its merits, after all—we can manage it. Stress doesn’t have to dictate how your day goes, how you react, or how you plan for the future. Mindful Meditation has been proven to reduce stress levels and increase resilience to stress.
How does meditation decrease stress levels? Let’s look at three ways:
1. Activates the parasympathetic nervous system:
Your body has two types of nervous systems that alert your body and mind to dangers: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. The sympathetic nervous system is the guard dog that alerts to any sign of danger. This is great when we are in actual danger, but can be harmful to our bodies when we are not in a life-or-death situation. Chronic stress can lead to long-term stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, causing systemic issues such as increasing Cortisol, hypertension, heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and arthritis, as well as mental health issues like anxiety and depression.
Meditation, on the other hand, activates the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system lets our body know that everything is okay. It helps bring down what the sympathetic nervous system brought up. Through activating the parasympathetic nervous system, meditation relaxes the body and calms the mind. This has both the short-term effect of eliminating stress and the long-term effect of preventing physical and mental illness caused by chronic stress.
2. Less likely to react to stressful thoughts and emotions
There’s feeling stressed, and then there’s letting the stress dictate your actions. We’ve all been there: you’re already at your limit, and then someone cuts you off on the highway, or your toddler starts to cry, or you get one more passive-aggressive email from your boss. Suddenly, you’re in your fight-or-flight mind, your body thinks you’re fighting to survive, and you react to your heightened emotions rather than make thoughtful decisions based on your values.
Mindfulness can help raise the threshold for which we can handle stress and help us distinguish between our body’s helpful alarms and its not-so-helpful alarms. Through meditation, we learn to watch thoughts pass by without putting any judgment or moral weight on them. The same can be done to stressful thoughts and emotions. Do they exist? Yes. Are they valid? Absolutely! Do they have truth and power over you? No. The only one making your decisions for yourself… is you.
3. Helps with emotional regulation
If you add a teaspoon of water to an already-full cup, the water is going to spill over. But, if you add a teaspoon to a half-full cup, nothing changes. The water stays in the cup. Our emotions, especially stress, are a lot like the water in this cup. We can handle a quarter cup of stress. We can handle a half cup of stress. We can even handle a full cup of stress, but now we’re running the chance that even the slightest bit of stress will put us over the edge.
Emotional regulation is a brain function that helps control our stress levels so we never get to the cup brimming with stress, just waiting for one drop to push us over the edge. Meditation develops this skill of emotional regulation. In fact, researchers have found that mindfulness meditation activates and strengthens the frontal limbic networks of your brain, the area that is responsible for emotional regulation.
At Elevated Meditations in Colorado Springs, we believe everyone should have access to the knowledge and healing power of meditation. Our classes are beginner-friendly, and we have advanced courses for those who want to push their meditation prowess.
If you want to learn how to better manage stress in your life, meditation is a great first step. Give our team a call to learn more about how meditation can help you today.
