Meditation helps reduce stress because of its innate quality of calming the mind and body, protecting us from overwhelm & burnout through awareness and equipping us with better emotional & physical resource management skills. Read on to understand how meditation helps stress in a very concrete way.
The world around us has trained us to be stressed. We feel as if we have so little time and so much to do. My teacher once said, the current state of humanity keeps oscillating between frantic activity and fitful rest. This is an unbalanced way of living and it’s the main cause of stress.
Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich
The demand on us is to do more, from outside and from within. This is one of the basic functions of how a “self” works. All activity is based on desire & aversion. Meditation helps with this by calming the mind, which in turn produces less & less desire and aversion. It becomes one with reality and the internal fight slows down, even stops for long term meditators.
Let’s explore some of the elements of stress. How it manifests and how it affects our life.
How stress manifests:
Here are some important pointers to describe the process. We always explore the process on this platform and this enables us to find the answers. I invite you to notice that as we are busy on any given day, our mind is constantly producing thoughts about the upcoming stuff that we need to do. This leads to two important things.
Fluctuation of attention & burnout:
Number one is, fluctuation of our attention. Instead of being focused on the task, our mind keeps going to thoughts of future tasks. This reduces our efficiency to a great extent, increasing time required to finish the task and reducing the quality of whatever experience we are having.
Yes, work or any other thing like watching a movie. This alone leads to unsatisfactoriness after completing any activity, reducing the overall quality of our lives. Not only that, because of this unsatisfactoriness, we are driven to do more with a hope to get some satisfaction.
Second one is the consequence of unsatisfactoriness. It leads to over working, over eating, over sleeping, i mean everything in “over” quantity. This over activity leads to wastage of energy and time.
Take the example of eating food. We are eating but not in a focused way. We are missing out on the experience because our attention is absorbed in future thoughts and before we know it, there is no more food on the plate. We immediately want to eat more to get some satisfaction but we keep missing the basic point.
Eventually we are pushed into a state where we don’t have any energy left to do any more. This is called burnout. Notice that we still want to do more but we just can’t. This builds up a ton of psychological pressure & we start judging ourselves for not doing enough and even in some cases, the thoughts of other people judging us start to well up.
How meditation helps stress:
Meditation is the antidote of stress. It has some built in qualities that lead to permanent changes in the way our mind works. Let’s see these qualities in correlation to stress.
Meditation improves focus drastically:
Meditation enables us to keep our attention on what’s important and for a longer period of time. We have to do some effort to practice attention during a meditation session but soon, it becomes a habit of the mind to stay focused. It gradually becomes effortless.
It’s a good practice to occasionally observe how focused we are in our daily lives in a non judgemental way, just to understand how much more hours of meditation we need for this
When focus becomes strong, it improves the overall quality of our lives. You will notice that as we are focused, the body becomes relaxed, breathing slows down and even heart rate slows down.
This creates a relaxation state which is hard to explain but beautiful to experience. Once you start experiencing it, it creates a positive feedback loop. Body signals the mind to create more of these states, the mind in turn becomes more focused and this is what people often refer to as flow state.
Meditation helps us become more satisfied:
Because of the ability to focus, we start noticing so many aspects of any experience which we were missing. Let’s continue with our example of eating food.
You have become highly focused, you are having dinner. As food touches your tongue, you feel the flavor creating a mesmerizing effect. You can feel the jaws move to observe the chewing activity. You continue with this until you feel the signal of fullness in your stomach. You stop eating and you are highly satisfied.
Meditation helps with burnout:
This satisfactoriness which is a byproduct of focus helps us become much more fulfilled with a lot less effort and activity. Small things in life start to make us happy & relaxed.
One more thing is that because of being with the experience, we naturally start noticing our body. Our detection ability of early symptoms of physical tiredness improves and this leads to better energy & time management.
We do only as much as our body allows and we are much satisfied, happier and relaxed.
Meditation helps with sleep:
Notice how our minds start going crazy as we get into the bed. We can literally hear thousands of voices in our heads to the point where we can’t take it any more. These are remnants of incomplete experiences.
According to my teacher, and I completely agree with him, the ability to focus helps us experience each moment fully. There can be 6 aspects to every experience. We see, hear and feel externally and we see (relevant mental images), hear (internal dialogue) and feel (relevant emotions) internally. This is the complete experience of any moment and it happens naturally as meditation progresses.
It leaves no remnants behind and slowly, the train of thoughts slows down as we intend to sleep. Body relaxes and we fall asleep quite easily. The sleeping hours reduce because the quality of sleep increases. This leaves us with more awake time on our hands.
Meditation breaks the desire & aversion habit:
There is a complete article on how meditation works which you can read here to get more details. Here is a basic overview.
As the focus becomes strong, the mind produces only relevant thoughts according to the moment. As we know, every thought signals the body to produce emotion. Without focus, the whole system is in crazy making mode.
Thoughts and emotions keep coming in cycles, making the body irritated, tired and drained. But as we become more focused, the need to produce extra emotions goes away and the body becomes relaxed. As it relaxes, the mind produces even less thoughts, breaking the habit of overthinking.
We also understand that all thoughts are of two types mainly. We either want something or we want something to go away. Desire and aversion. Meditation gradually breaks the habit of desire and aversion, which in itself makes life incredibly peaceful and you really feel the joy of just being alive.
Conclusions:
Meditation is a simple process of focusing on the present moment. To simplify it, we often choose an object, like breath. Breath is always in the present moment. We gently keep attention on the object and with a little time, we start getting immense results. Think of it as a base building block of our lives. All other blocks sit on it in perfect balance. Without it, there is no balance and just chaos.
I encourage you to practice 5 minutes a day for a couple of weeks, but everyday and see the results for yourself. It will dramatically reduce your stress and once this happens, the process will become self motivating.
One important thing is to not fall in the trap of wanting to achieve all the above mentioned benefits. It all becomes counterproductive. Those are all the fruits, just focus on the seed. Plant it and nurture it everyday.
I wish you all the best and I wish you to become free of suffering. Thank you for your time. Talk soon.
Leave any questions or comments. I will try to answer all of them to the best of my ability.
