What is meditation?
Meditation has been practiced for thousands of years. Meditation originally was meant to help deepen understanding of the sacred and mystical forces of life. These days, meditation is commonly used for relaxation and stress reduction.
Meditation is considered a type of mind-body complementary medicine. Meditation can produce a deep state of relaxation and a tranquil mind.
If you’re just starting out, try taking five minutes as soon as you wake up to clear your mind before you face your busy day. Simply close your eyes and focus on the pattern of your breathing without trying to change it. Focus only on your breathing. If your mind wanders–and it probably will at first–simply guide your mind back to your breathing without judgment.
What do you need for meditation?
A quiet location with as few distractions as possible; a specific, comfortable posture (sitting, lying down, walking, or in other positions); a focus of attention (a specially chosen word or set of words, an object, or the sensations of the breath); and an open attitude. During meditation, you focus your attention and eliminate the stream of jumbled thoughts that may be crowding your mind and causing stress.
How does meditation affect health and/or weight loss?
It can align the conscious and unconscious mind to agree on changes we want to apply to our behavior. Those changes could be a number of factors such as cravings for unhealthy food or control of eating behaviors. Meditation can directly reduce the levels of stress hormones. Stress hormones, like cortisol, signal our bodies to store calories as fat. If you have a ton of cortisol pumping through your system, it’s going to be harder to lose weight even if you’re making healthy choices than if you clear all that stress out.
In fact, participants in a 2016 study showed “increased attention, relaxation, calmness, body-mind awareness, and brain activity,” after just a couple short sessions according to Yi-Yuan Tang, the presidential endowed chair in neuroscience and a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Texas Tech University.
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