Meditation is becoming more widely known as a method that can help to reduce stress or manage depression. You may choose to practice meditation if you want additional help dealing with feeling sad or afraid.

One of the benefits of regular meditation is that it helps you to put disappointment and fear into perspective; these two difficult emotions, like all thoughts and feelings, are temporary. By observing these temporary mind states, they can provide you with simple keys for paying less attention to what is disturbing you and more attention to the peaceful, calm and quiet thoughts and feelings–emotions that you can generate through mindfulness.

You may already know that when you are dealing with stressful situations, your body prepares you automatically for either “fight or flight”. While necessary for dealing with most emergencies, prolonged exposure to stress can unfortunately continue to trigger this mechanism to the point of causing physical damage to the body. And that is where the value of meditation as a stress management tool comes in: it helps you prevent or recover from that bodily response. Although meditation began thousands of years ago as part of a deeply spiritual practice, and is still regarded as such by many, it is also known as a proven method for helping to balance the body’s functions as well as the emotional and mental states.

Here are some of the physical benefits of meditation as a stress reliever:

1. It helps to regulate the metabolic rate, heart rate and blood pressure.
2. It also helps regulate the two by-products of stress that factor into the aging process and are precursors to disease: cortisol (also called hydrocortisone, a steroid hormone, C₂₁H₃₀O₅, produced by the adrenal cortex, that regulates carbohydrate metabolism and maintains blood pressure), and lactate 2 (a salt or an ester of lactic acid).
3. Meditation can also help to reduce the damage caused by free radicals (a group of atoms that has at least one unpaired electron and is therefore unstable and highly reactive).
4. Meditation improves skin resistance to assist in the management of stress and anxiety. Researchers use the measurement of skin resistance in such investigations as measuring the electrical resistance of the skin during induced emotional stress in normal individuals and in patients with internal diseases. Yoga meditation has been measured as long ago as 1980-1 in studies in Perth Australia using biofeedback showing how it effectively reduces stress. Biofeedback measures the value of skin resistance in the palm of the hand; this can vary in direct proportion to changes in the autonomic nervous system.
5. And meditation helps the body to regulate cholesterol, which is important to cardiovascular health.

Convinced yet? If you haven’t already tried meditation or don’t already practice it regularly, perhaps now is the time to begin enjoying the relaxation it brings as well as its proven health benefits.

I use breathing exercises as a prelude to meditation, to relax the body and prepare the mind to go more deeply into the meditative state. You may wish to enroll in one of my guided meditation teleconference retreats to learn and practice such techniques. Meditating with a group is a great spiritual experience and you can do this from the comfort of your home via telephone, or arrange for private spiritual consultations also by telephone.