Why Meditate? Benefits of Meditation for a Busy Lifestyle, According to Experts and Psychology Research
You have probably already heard that meditation, even in its casual form, has very significant health benefits. That’s not news, and we are not about to challenge that idea.
Shauna L. Shapiro, Ph.D., is one of few psychology researchers on meditation who uses a random assignment method (generally, a better study design). In her 2008 study on college students, she and her fellow researchers found that meditation-based programs have reduced stress by 40-45%, increased forgiveness and decreased tendency towards rumination by 34%.
(Oman, Shapiro, Thoresen, Plante, and Flinders, 2008.)
Though, if it’s so wonderfully helpful, why don’t you do it more often?
Why don’t you meditate when you wake up feeling melancholy and overwhelmed?
Well, because you gave yourself 30 minutes to shower, both make and have a quick breakfast (staring at the eggs as they fry as to not burn them again), brush teeth, and run out of the door.
Why don’t you meditate when you repeatedly fail to focus on a difficult but essential task?
Might be you are too busy distracting yourself with YouTube videos, a game, or virtually any easier task from your to-do list. Or, maybe you are busy having something close to an anxiety attack.
Why don’t you meditate in the evening, when your remaining energy is stripped away by a pointless search for happiness and gratitude in your life?
Honestly, if you can’t find energy to deal with dishes or finally return your mother’s call, you probably can’t be bothered to dedicate time to re-evaluate your entire day. Well, with the exception of berating yourself for forgetting to do groceries again.
Yes, meditation might be an efficient method to help focus and emotional self-control. It might be one of the few research-proven methods to deal with returning negative emotions.
That doesn’t change the fact that your life is a boiling mess that affords no time for inefficient breaks (even though you still have them somehow).
So,
Why should you bother finding time for meditation?
Here is a helpful way to think about it:
You want to invest your precious time into meditation because meditation will give you even more of your time back.
In the world of successful people this is called “a positive return on investment”.
The more you give, the more you get back.
Here are some ways in which it happens:
De-Stressing Benefits of Meditation
What does meditation focus on, in its essence?
Well, literally, it focuses on a single thing. It might be your breathing, bodily sensations, an image, or a word.
Something simple, something that disengages your brain from a chaos of multiple strings of analysis that come with a rolling snowball of emotions.
This development probably sounds familiar: worrying about a task, then worrying about not completing that task, then worrying about worrying about not completing that task while worrying about never being able to complete the task, and-…
That’s a lot of worrying.
Meditation invites us to focus on something simple, only on one thing at a time. Focusing on the present, not our past mistakes. On the current and not on the frightening “what-ifs” of the future.
It slows our heartbeat and our mind, giving us a feeling of more certainty and peace.
Mandy D. Bamber, Ph.D., and Joanne Kraenzle Schneider, Ph.D., did a review of studies that focused on the effect of mindfulness meditation on stress and anxiety in college students. Cross-examining 40 studies, Bamber and Schneider found that mindfulness meditation significantly decreased anxiety in 77% and stress in 78% of the reported cases.
(Bamber, Schneider, 2015.)
It is no surprise that meditation became one of the accepted methods of treating anxiety and depression in clinical patients.
Meditation, Health, and Efficiency
Andy Puddicombe, a former Buddhist monk and the co-founder of the popular meditation app Headspace, explains meditation this way:
Meditation isn’t about stopping thoughts and getting rid of emotions, it’s more about “stepping back, sort of seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going, emotions coming and going without judgement, but with a relaxed, focused mind.”
(See his official TED Talk video to learn more.)
If you use meditation to acknowledge the emotions swirling inside of you, if give them space to exist as an object, you might eventually notice a kind of a detachment from them.
Emotions often deny us clarity in assessing our mind, finding right words, and making decisions. It involves a lot of cortisol (stress hormone) and adrenaline, a state where the body focuses on survival and does not function properly as a result. It disrupts sleep, digestion, metabolism, and brain function.
When you achieve that calmer state you can transition into an efficient task of evaluating and planning your current and future actions. Maintaining it means better physical health and better mental performance.
Meditation and the Habit of Happiness
A good number of guided meditation exercises encourage their listeners to recount positive achievements and feel appreciation towards what they have: to remember objects, people, and places that make then feel proud, calm, needed, and safe. This practice is not dissimilar from that of gratitude.
Feeling of gratitude activate regions of our brain responsible for dopamine, the “reward” neurotransmitter – it reinforces itself. Alex Korb, Ph.D., writes in his 2012 article for Psychology Today: “once you start seeing things to be grateful for, your brain starts looking for more things to be grateful for.” This cycle is the reason why gratitude is a major component of the feeling of happiness.
Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D., and Michael McCullough, Ph.D., studied the effect of gratitude on an individual’s perceived happiness in their 2003 study series. The group that was given a task of writing down five things they were grateful for from the past week for a 10-week period showed a significant increase in reported happiness.
(Emmons and McCullough, 2003 – available to the public).
Still, meditation is even more so about positive images in general. Majority of guided meditations borrow the power of images and sounds that we associate with positive feelings, such as fresh air, vast spaces, flourishing plant life, and sea waves.
Guided meditation often invites us to imagine growth within ourselves, grounding beneath our body, and reinvigorating energy entering our body with every breath.
Whether we seek to relax, to feel happy, to forgive, or to find focus, these images can lead to affective priming. When our mind is given positive concepts and images they can affect our subconscious reactions to the world around us.
Researches like John A. Bargh, Ph.D., and Russell H. Fazio, Ph.D., conducted series of well-acclaimed experiments on cognitive priming. One such study by John Bargh involved unscrambling and constructing sentences that were either polite or rude in nature. This difference significantly affected their patience when returning their completed work back to the experimenter distracted by a conversation. The negative group tended to interrupt the conversation, while positive group usually chose to wait calmly for about ten minutes.
(Bargh, Chen, and Burrows, 1996).
So, what do these effects mean for us in the long-term? Meditation cultivates a stronger resilience to negativity and a reinforced ability to focus on and appreciate the present moment. Our brain truly does appreciate the act of detaching it from chaos of events and emotions to focus on simpler ideas and images in a calming, reinvigorating manner.
Over time, it builds an impressive habit of converting our negative emotions (such as stress and anxiety) into those that are positive (such as confidence and forgiveness).
Jonathan Haidt, Ph.D., describes the effects of meditation in his The Happiness Hypothesis, when he describes it as “a pill you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase you contentment” and experience “increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory.”
(Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (2006).)
In the end it all boils down to this: the practice of meditation, of taking a mindful break to ground yourself in the current moment, helps us move forward more happily and efficiently.
It slows down our time, it helps us enjoy our time better, it helps us achieve more over shorter periods of time, and it preserves our health so that we essentially get more of it.
Still, it would be silly to expect that you didn’t know this general conclusion, even if some details presented in this article brought you a sense of discovery.
Yet, if knowledge is power, why do we often feel so hopelessly powerless sometimes?
Well, if knowledge is power, then acting upon it must be a superpower.
Use the superpower of meditation regularly to be truly present in your own life, to cherish it one moment at a time. To find a point of focus, to unwind your emotions, to release the tension.
Find a dedicated time to meditate today.
