Daily Dose: Meditation And Mindfulness

Meditation and mindfulness can go a long way when it comes to mental and emotional health.

In today's Daily Dose, Dr. Lacy Anderson explained how meditation can be helpful in your journey.

How can meditation help me?

Meditation is an act of practicing mindful awareness of the present. It can strengthen the areas of your brain responsible for memory, learning, attention, and self-awareness.

The practice of meditation can also help calm down your sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for your fight or flight response. When the sympathetic nervous system is activated, your body releases stress hormones which raise your blood pressure. By deactivating this system, your body relaxes and your stress levels return back to normal.

Over time, meditation will help reduce pain, depression, stress, and anxiety. It also helps decrease emotional reactivity.

For those of you that have difficulty going to sleep at night, doing a sleep meditation at bedtime can help reset your sleep cycle and possibly get you off sleeping pills.

There are several free apps for this you can download to your phone.

It will take some practice to actually slow your brain down if you’ve never done meditation before but don’t get discouraged. Over time, it will be easier for you to focus on the present and let go of the stresses of the day.

Try it 5-10 minutes a day for 2 weeks and see how you feel! Good luck and take care!