Meditation for Stress Relief
One of the reasons why meditation is becoming so popular now is because of its ability to help alleviate stress. Many people who are looking to improve their lifestyle turn to meditation for its healing properties and with the pandemic ravaging the world right now, meditation for stress relief is only going to become more popular in the coming days.
You might be stressed because of work or college and you might have tried other things to manage the stress, but they might not have worked for you. Meditation requires some time and effort, but with enough practice, you can easily transform your life and learn how to control stress.
There are many different techniques of meditation for stress relief. Let’s look at them and see what benefits they have.
Practicing Meditation for Stress Relief
1. Deep breathing – This is a powerful technique that you can use anywhere. It’s an easy method that can help keep your stress levels under control. If you have trouble learning how to do this, you can use apps and audio recordings to help guide you through the process.
Here’s how you can do it:
Sit in a quiet place with your back straight. Take your left hand and put it on your chest and your right hand on your stomach.
Take a deep breath through your nose. Can you feel the hand on your stomach rising? If not, you might be breathing through your chest, which is common among people who are constantly under a lot of stress.
Breathe out through your mouth. Again, the hand on your stomach should move as you breathe out.
Do this a few times until you start to feel relaxed and less stressed.
2. Progressive Muscle Relaxation – With this technique, you purposefully tense different muscle groups and then relax them. It helps you become familiar with what tension in the body feels like. Once you master it, you can quickly recognize tension in the body when you’re stressed.
Start by taking some deep breaths so you can feel relaxed. Start by focusing on your right foot. How does it feel?
Tense the muscles in the right foot and count to 10. After 10 seconds, you can relax it. You should be able to feel the tension moving away from your right foot.
After a few seconds, repeat this process on your left foot. Tense your muscles and then relax them.
Do this on different muscle groups in the body. After practicing Progressive Muscle Relaxation for a couple of days, you’ll feel more relaxed and you’ll be able to reduce stress when your body becomes tense because of it.
3. Visualization – Visualization involves imagining a positive scene in which you feel happy and at peace. The only thing you have to do is imagine whatever makes you happy. What’s your happy place? Maybe it’s something from your childhood, or maybe you want to imagine yourself relaxing at a beach.
You can either do this on your own or you can use audio recordings that will create peaceful imagery for you. You can also listen to music while doing this if you think it’ll help you feel more at ease. For example, if you decide to imagine something from your childhood, you can listen to a song that reminds you of those days. Not only will that make it easier to imagine the setting, but it’ll also help you incorporate sensory details in the imagery.
Sensory details are important in visualization. Just imagining your happy place isn’t enough. You also have to be able to hear things in your imagination, smell objects, feel, and taste them. Think of it as an opportunity to explore your mind. Once you become immersed in it, you’ll forget about your worries and the stress will melt away.
4. Mindfulness – Mindfulness enables you to focus on the present, instead of worrying about the past or the future, which is what stress causes you to do. Mindfulness techniques have been used to cope with stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental problems for many years.
There are lots of different types of mindfulness meditation practices. Some of them focus on a single action, like your breathing, and some of them help you let go of anxious and stressful thoughts.
It’s common for your thoughts to drift back to ones that cause you to feel stressed, but every time that happens, you have to shift your attention back to the present. This helps you form a mental habit of letting go of stressful thoughts.
Here’s how you can practice the most basic mindfulness meditation:
Find a quiet place where you can sit without anyone or anything disturbing you.
Close your eyes and focus on your breathing. Notice how it feels when you inhale and focus on the calming sensation you feel when you exhale. You can also chant something instead of focusing on your breathing, but it’s usually easier for beginners to do the latter.
If any distracting thought enters your mind, just redirect your attention towards your breathing. After a while, you won’t even have to resist the thoughts!
Benefits of Meditation for Stress Relief
If you regularly practice meditation to get rid of stress, you’ll be able to become more comfortable with yourself and your levels of stress will significantly go down. It’ll also improve your concentration and boost your self-esteem. You’ll feel happier and you’ll also learn to be kind and compassionate towards yourself and others.
Feeling stressed is common among children and adults alike. Meditation for stress relief is a great way to lower stress levels and feel more positive and hopeful. There are several techniques that you can use to reduce stress in your life. Some of them include visualization, progressive muscle relaxation, mindfulness, and deep breathing.
Once you master these techniques, you’ll be able to recognize signs of stress in your body and quickly get rid of them. You’ll develop a more positive outlook on life and you’ll learn to focus on the present, instead of feeling stressed over the past and the future.
