It’s no secret that meditation is a powerful practice. Advocates claim that every single person would benefit from the practice, with purported benefits such as increased self-control, stress tolerance, mental flexibility, greater empathy, and compassion towards others.
But, is meditation really all that special? And can it really improve your satisfaction with life?
Benefits of Meditation
The benefits of meditation are well documented. It does seem to have a profound effect on those who practice it.
“Mindfulness” is a state of being, not a trait. A moment-to-moment awareness of your own experience, judgment-free. It’s a state that fosters greater self-compassion and generally increased mental well-being.
If you’re prone to rumination, where you focus on one bad thing - or several - this is a practice that could help you stop spiraling out inside your own mind. Meditation teaches you to take a step back, pause the unending chaos in your mind and just peacefully exist with yourself.
All of this can help ease the symptoms of anxiety and depression and in some individuals a noticeable increase in working memory and attention span.
On top of this, consistent meditation practice can help reduce your overall stress. This practice can help OCD and anxiety sufferers especially, by breaking the pattern of obsessive rumination and worry.
Mindfulness and meditation can cause drastic changes in the brain, not just your thoughts. Meditation practitioners have been shown to have reduced neural reactivity, which means that their ability to regulate their emotions is strengthened. The way they experience emotion is potentially processed entirely differently in the brain than those who don’t practice mindfulness or meditation in general.
Mindfulness and Its Effect on Satisfaction
All of this points to one clear answer: meditation is a powerful practice that can indeed improve your overall happiness and satisfaction with life. When you go through life with less emotional reactivity, lower stress, and greater cognitive flexibility, you’ll be living a life of greater satisfaction.
Meditation teaches you the skill of self-observation. This is highly important to your growth as a person. Self-insight can show you all the things about yourself that you dislike but can change. It can also teach you what about yourself there is to love.
Such a practice brings peace to your everyday life, which may seem small but having that mental peace and clarity from fear and anxiety can be life-changing when you’ve been stuck in that place for so long - like many of us have. With consistent meditative practice, you can begin to unravel the knots of trauma and resentment in your mind and free yourself from your negative conditioning.
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