Reducing Your Stress: Finding Peace and Relaxation Through Meditation

The magazine Health once reported on a study of stress and meditation in which 77% of highly stressed people managed to bring down their blood pressure using nothing more than meditative practices to calm themselves. A separate study cited by Meditation Loft (2014) looked at women dealing with premenstrual syndrome and found a 58% improvement in their symptoms after five months of daily meditation. So why does meditation get so much attention? The short answer is that it works at lowering stress.

Think about what anxiety and stress actually feel like. The list of symptoms runs long, but fear and a general sense of emotional overdrive sit near the center of it. Stress builds when most of your mental energy goes toward worrying about whatever is wrong in your life, chewing on things that already happened or things that might happen later. Your mind gets stuck on a problem. The worry crowds out everything else and concentration becomes almost impossible. Getting unstuck comes down to pulling your attention back to the present moment, and meditation is one of the more reliable ways to do that. If you have been wondering how to use it to lower your stress, keep reading.

People have been meditating for thousands of years. Early on it was a way to go deeper into questions about life itself: purpose, meaning, the forces people held sacred. The modern use looks a little different. These days it mostly helps with cutting stress, easing pain, and raising quality of life, along with relaxation, focus, and concentration. As a stress management tool it sits comfortably alongside many prescribed treatment plans because it works on reaffirming the connection between mind and body. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (2014) points to meditation's ability to bring you into a deeper, calmer state. While you meditate, your mind lets go of the stream of negative, tangled thoughts that normally fills your head and feeds anxiety and tension. The payoff reaches into physical, emotional, and mental health all at once.

The Mayo Clinic (2014) describes several relaxation and stress management techniques built around meditation. Guided meditation has you form peaceful mental images of places or situations. Mantra meditation involves silently repeating a soothing word or phrase (for instance "happy," "I am stress-free," or "I am strong") to keep intrusive thoughts at bay. Mindfulness meditation asks you to stay aware of your present situation, your thoughts, and your physical sensations rather than drifting into the past. Qi Gong pairs relaxation, movement, and breathing with meditation to restore balance. Tai Chi, a gentle form of martial art, moves you through slow, graceful, self-paced postures while you breathe deeply. Transcendental meditation has you close your eyes and silently repeat a mantra assigned to you until the stress fades. Yoga combines a range of postures with controlled breathing to leave you with a calm mind and a flexible body.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2014) note that meditation supports both physical and emotional well-being by giving you a sense of peace, tranquility, and balance. What makes it useful is that those effects do not vanish the moment you stop. They carry through the rest of your day and help you meet difficult situations with a steadier, more positive frame of mind. Meditating clears out the unhealthy thinking that drives stress upward.

Among the benefits people report: it offers a fresh angle on stressful situations; it sharpens coping and problem-solving skills so stress becomes more manageable; it builds self-awareness; it keeps your focus on the present instead of the past or future; it gives you more control over negative emotions; and it can help with managing health conditions such as anxiety disorders, asthma, cancer, lupus, hypertension, depression, heart disease, chronic pain, and insomnia.

If you want to try it, start by setting the mood. Roll out a yoga mat, light a couple of aromatherapy candles, put on something relaxing (jazz, classical, instrumental, soft R&B), and dim the lights. Then get into position. Sit on the mat with your legs crossed and your back against a wall, keeping your spine as straight as you can. Rest your hands on your knees, palms up, and touch each index finger to its thumb to form an "okay" shape.

Now breathe. Close your eyes and draw air slowly into your lungs, hold it for a second or two, then let it out gradually. Keep repeating that cycle until your body loosens and the stress starts to drain off. Visualizing helps here too. Picture a place, person, or object that makes you feel safe and happy: a butterfly, your mother, a flower, a beach, your kids or pets, your last vacation. Hold that image in your mind. When a stray worry tries to push in, set it aside and come back to the picture. Keep breathing deeply, and imagine the stress physically leaving your body. Stay with it until you feel calmer. (Dr. R. Y. Langham)

One longtime meditator, writing under the name Bergen, added some reflections worth passing along. Over roughly four decades, this person had often found themselves meditating without anyone telling them to, a sense that body, mind, and soul will sometimes steer us toward it on their own for the sake of our health. They see the symptoms of anxiety and stress as signals that something in our lives needs to change, and quickly. Their own trouble was shutting the brain down enough to rest, an inability to put the day's work and worries down even for a little while. That had cost them, bringing on high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, and insomnia among other things.

What they eventually learned is that recovery does not always require sleep. When they reach a point of deep fatigue, they can simply recline somewhere quiet, with no electronic devices pulling at them and no interruptions from family or friends, close their eyes, slow the breathing, and let the mind go blank. That, they found, refreshes the whole person faster and often better than an actual nap.