How to Relieve Stress And Anxiety with Meditation
How Meditation Calms Our Nervous System
Stress is the body’s natural response to a perceived good or bad environmental change. It can be beneficial in the short term, helping us to adapt to a situation immediately and effectively. Like examination stress, we work hard before exams to perform well in our exams. However, long-term stress can negatively affect our physical and psychological health, such as increasing the risk of depression, anxiety, metabolic disorders and even autoimmune disorders.
We all face stress in our lives, and life skills like problem-solving, critical thinking etc., are essential to managing stress.
Exercise is also essential for stress management as the exercise itself produces natural antidepressants in our brain.
Meditation is a practice that involves focusing the mind on present movement and helps us to declutter negative thoughts to achieve a state of calmness. Meditative practices calm down our sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the “fight or flight” response, and increase the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the “rest and digest” response.By decreasing the activity of the sympathetic nervous system and increasing the movement of the parasympathetic nervous system, meditation can help lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, regulates blood pressure, and promote feelings of relaxation and well-being.
Meditation can also help to increase self-awareness and improve the ability to process thoughts and emotions, which can help cope with stressful situations.Regular meditation can be a valuable tool for managing stress and promoting overall health and well-being. Evidence-based research data shows that Meditation decreases inflammation in our system, which is the central core of all diseases.
So, Meditation is a great tool to manage stress; it indirectly helps balance all hormones. If we can balance our stress hormone that is cortisol hormone, it will prevent early ageing and delay the onset of many diseases, as stress hormones are integral parts of our immune system.
