Meditation against stress
Stress can affect all facets of your life and arise from a variety of circumstances in your life. Stress is generally associated with work, but that's not the only place you can get stress from. Personal life problems and serious illnesses in yourself and those around you can also cause stress. Especially long-term or chronic stress is unhealthy for the body.
Therefore, in this article, I discuss the benefits of meditation against stress.
Stress is a state of your body designed to increase your chances of survival in the event of danger. In today's society, this state of your body is not needed 24/7, but unfortunately sometimes your body thinks it is.
When you experience a moment of stress, your body produces the stress hormone cortisol, which temporarily shuts down your immune system so that all your energy can be used to freeze, flee, or fight. You’ve never been able to run so fast, and you’ve never been as strong as you are in a moment of acute stress. This is also because your body releases adrenaline at that moment.
However with prolonged stress and stress to a situation where fleeing or freezing or fighting does not apply at all, stress can actually cause distraction and weakness.
Stress symptoms
When you suffer from long-term stress, you notice it in your body and your mental capacity. Symptoms vary from person to person, but stress affects your emotions, behavior, thinking skills and physical health.
Mental symptoms of stress
Mental symptoms of stress are about the way you think and perform tasks that require focus and concentration. If you suffer from prolonged stress, it can affect your ability to think logically. This can cause you to make wrong decisions that in turn increase your stress level. In addition, you may also suffer from other mental complaints, such as:
- You get easily agitated and agitated or irritated.
- You may feel an overwhelming sense of loss of control where you want it.
- You have trouble relaxing and calming your thoughts.
- You may experience a lack of self-confidence, a feeling of loneliness, or a sense of worthlessness.
- You avoid other people.
- You have constant concerns.
- Your mind just keeps going and going.
- You're suddenly oblivious.
- You can't focus.
- You're a lot more pessimistic.
- You may be experiencing depression or anxiety.
Physical symptoms of stress
You may also notice physical signs that you’ve been dealing with excessive stress for a long time. For example, you might experience low energy and insomnia. In addition, you may also experience the following physical symptoms associated with stress:
- Headache(s).
- Gastrointestinal issues.
- Pains and tense muscles.
- Chest pain and rapid heart rate.
- Regular colds or infections.
- Low libido.
- Tinnitus.
- Tremors and sweaty or cold hands.
- Jaw clenching.
- High blood pressure.
- Overweight or eating disorders.
- Menstrual cycle problems.
- Skin problems, such as acne.
- Hair loss.
In addition to physical and mental symptoms, your behavior may also change. For example, you might suddenly start smoking more, drinking more, or even using drugs. Or you might find yourself procrastinating much more.
In addition, you may experience nervous behaviors such as nail-biting or pacing. There are also people who, when they’re under too much stress, suddenly become extremely clumsy. Anything that can slip out of your hands falls to the floor, and if there’s anything you might bump into—like the corner of a table—it will make (forceful) contact with you.
Dealing with stress
The symptoms of stress are such that they can affect your life considerably. This is precisely why it is important to get the tools to deal with stress in a healthy way. There are several things you can do to combat stress, and meditation is one of the techniques that will help you cope with stress.
Meditation against stress
Stress can be reduced using various meditation techniques. A 2014 meta-analysis ( 1) shows that, when all meditation techniques are considered together and the average results are calculated, meditation is effective in reducing stress. In cases of depression and anxiety, it can primarily be used as a supplement to treatment; however, if the stress has already led to depression or anxiety disorders, it cannot replace the entire treatment.
You can well reduce stress that has not yet led to depression and anxiety with the various forms of meditation, such as sitting meditation, mindfulness meditation and yoga meditation.
Unfortunately, this meta research does not yet say much about the exact effectiveness of the various techniques.
Seated meditation against stress
Seated meditation in which you focus on breathing has incredibly good effects on stress. It reduces post-traumatic stress, for example, and in students it can help them stay optimistic.
In addition, it can also reduce anxiety and depression. This is evidenced by studies ( 2) in which people had to self-report whether they suffered less from anxiety and depressive symptoms.
Mindfulness meditation against stress
Mindfulness meditation can be especially helpful if you find that you are really troubled by raging thoughts and can't actually calm down as a result.
Research conducted in 2014 ( 3) shows that 5 weeks of mindfulness meditation practiced daily helps reduce stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms. It improves psychological health and sleep.
Yoga meditation against stress
Illness can cause a lot of stress. Therefore, in 2015 ( 4)we looked at the effect of yoga meditation on the stress levels of people with HIV and who used cocaine. Drug use is a symptom of high stress, hence this somewhat unusual combination.
This study found that doing an hour of yoga meditation twice a week for two months helps improve quality of life and the feeling of reduced stress.
Breathing exercises to combat stress
After all these great results you can get from meditation, it's time to start meditating yourself. The first thing you can do to combat stress are breathing exercises during meditation.
You first sit in a cross-legged chair and make your spine as long as possible. You pretend there is a string attached to your crown that pulls your spine up. You relax your shoulders and put your hands on your knees.
Meditation Exercise 1.
You breathe through your nose and fill your lungs with air. You do this while breathing through your belly. By pushing your navel outward, you inhale.
You let the breath leave through your mouth. If you want to sigh or make a "bleh" sound or something similar while doing so, you can. You push your navel back in to let the air out. This hard sighing can give a nice feeling of relaxation.
Meditation Exercise 2.
If you suffer from stress, you may suffer from irregular breathing. By counting while breathing, you make sure that you breathe in as long as you breathe out.
You breathe through your nose and also let it go through your nose. Each time you count from 1 to 4.
Body scan meditation against tense muscles
Stress can cause your muscles to tense up and clench your jaws. In addition, it is also common to press your tongue against your palate without being aware of it.
Stress can also be amplified by that muscle tension. That's why it's important to make an effort to relax your muscles.
Body scan meditation can be a solution for this. You can already do this during seated meditation, and yoga also has an asana (pose) designed to consciously relax your muscles; you can also perform a mindfulness body scan .
Almost all of these exercises focus on thoroughly controlling/scanning your body. You usually start at the feet you can control how they feel, but you can also consciously tighten and then relax them first.
Through this scan of your body, you will find out that your back may be tense, especially between the shoulder blades and then you can relax them.
You end a body scan meditation with the muscles in your face. During the scan, you may discover that you are indeed clenching your jaws together. But you can also move each muscle and consciously relax it. Sometimes it also helps to run your finger along your muscles. That way you can find out that you have a small unconscious frown between your eyebrows. The finger allows you to consciously relax each part of your face.
Preventing Stress
Prevention is always better than cure. Preventing stress can also be done through meditation. Through meditation, you learn to focus in the here and now. In addition, meditation can prevent your thoughts from racing when you don't feel like it at all.
Knowing meditation before you really suffer from stress will help you avoid all the drawbacks of too much stress.
Would you like to learn more about techniques that can strengthen your mental resilience? Then join the free online masterclass on hypnosis.
Or enroll in one of our training courses.
Also pin this infographic as a handy reminder:
Sources:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jts.21936/full
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10484-015-9293-x
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/acm.2014.0112