Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation
Meditation has been the single most powerful practice in transforming my own life from stress, struggle and reactivity to one of calm, ease, and responsiveness. It has greatly increased my capacity for healthy inter- and intrapersonal relationship, navigating difficulty, managing stress, finding clarity, and tapping into joy, compassion, gratitude and equanimity.
Cited in numerous studies, including the American Psychological Association, the Journal of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Annals of Family Medicine, mindfulness practices have been shown to provide many benefits, some of which are listed below:
- Reduces psychological and physiological stress – with heavy schedules, challenging workloads, and busy lives, we all accumulate stress. Mindfulness can bring ease and offer practices to deal with this life and work-related stress.
- Reduces emotional reactivity – Mindfulness brings awareness to our emotions, and practice gives space for an appropriate response, resulting in skillful decisions and improved relationships, professional, relational, and intra-personal.
- Reduces compassion fatigue and emotional exhaustion – Being compassionate all the time can take it’s toll. Without practice, engaging people with an open heart can be challenging. Self-care and compassion practices can be utilized daily to develop your cultivation of compassion and empathy.
- Reduces self-criticism, anxiety, depression – With an awareness of thoughts and emotions, we are able to shift our emotional regulation strategies to better respond to situations. In practice, we are able to experience and process emotions differently- less anxiety, less depression, less self-criticism.
- Reduces rumination – being mindful of our thoughts, as they appear and reappear gives us more choice in how much we pay attention to these “re-runs.” Practice can help us reduce or give less importance to undesired mental traffic, allowing us to focus on what is really important.
- Reduces professional burnout syndrome – with long hours, and stressful situations, many professionals experience burnout at some point in their careers. Mindfulness practices can offer ways to develop improved coping skills and increase job satisfaction.
- Improves focus and working memory – resulting in greater awareness and less distraction. In a both life and work settings, this can improve assessment skills, accuracy and decision-making, as well improve performance in everything from work, to sport, to regular life.
- Increases cognitive flexibility – mindful meditation can lead to rewiring the brain to move from habitual reactions to intentional responses, resulting in improved behavior patterns in all of life.
- Improves communication – mindful listening and speaking practices can improve communication with everyone we engage. This improves effective/successful communication and often results in better outcomes, especially during high-stress situations.
- Improves job and relationship satisfaction – lovingkindness, compassion, gratitude, and equanimity practices can redirect focus on the good, and reset our “happiness” set point.
- Improves sleep and capacity to down-regulate our Nervous Systems – With regular mindfulness practices, we have the capacity to calm ourselves down, soothe our nervous systems, and find a sense of peace that is always within us. This in turn can help relieve sleep issues and allow us to access healing on a deeper level.