Why Meditate? 4 Types of Meditation Benefits
Earlier we defined meditation as the practice of directing attention.
How can the simple practice of directing attention have so many benefits?
Table of Contents:
Intro
1) Less Negativity
2) More Positivity
3) Mental State & Enhanced Experience
4) Change the Brain
Summary & Conclusion
Additional Resource
Where you direct your attention and what you focus on defines your life.
Being able to direct your attention where you want and focus exactly on what you want has huge benefits.
What is the main benefit of meditation?
It depends on your situation and your goals.
Personally, meditation improves my life quality immensely and enhances my daily life experience. This may sound vague to you but I will explain this more in detail in this post. Meditation is a lifestyle for me, that simply put, improves everything in my life.
I won't go into the details of how meditation works because it would take a long time and that is not the focus of this post. I will explain that in other posts.
The goal of this post is to give you a comprehensive overview of the main benefits of meditation and how it can benefit you. The goal of this post is to lay out the possible reasons and motivations behind having meditation a part of your life.
In this post, you will discover 4 types of meditation benefits: 1) Less Negativity, 2) More Positivity, 3) Mental State & Enhanced Experience, and 4) Change the Brain.
These 4 categories are not exclusive but combine into one as you can get every single benefit of every category when you practice meditation.
As a reminder, meditation is not the formal act of sitting down and following some guidelines. I define meditation as the practice of directing attention. We, human beings direct our attention all the time but not always voluntarily. Meditation is to improve the awareness of where you direct your attention to and to practice directing your attention wherever you want it to be.
So the question is: how can you benefit from controlling where your attention is?
1) Less Negativity
If you focus less on the negative, you get less negativity.
You also avoid negative feedback loops that would keep intensifying your negative thoughts. (When you think about something negative over and over again, you reinforce that negative thought. Meditation can help you to avoid reinforcing negative thoughts.)
Meditation can help you be more creative, think about the negative situations in a different way to help you accept and be fine with the negative situations. When you accept more, negativity lessens.
Meditation also improves your awareness of negativity and that lessens the power that negativity has on you. You become more clear of what is happening and that makes it easier to accept.
You may have understood that meditation can help you cope with negative emotions and lessen negativity in your life.
Scientific studies show that meditation can indeed reduce stress, anxiety, depression, ...
Meditation can help you lessen any negativity and lessen any pain you may have.
2) More Positivity
As you may understand from the previous section, if you focus more on the positive, you get more positivity.
As you practice meditation, you let less space for negativity and it leaves you with more space for positivity, presence/awareness, and creative thinking.
When was the last time you walked in nature and that you appreciated the sounds of the birds singing, the warm feeling of the sunshine, the beautiful colors of the trees, the touch of your feet walking, the peaceful silence, and your relaxed body with your calm breath?
Meditation can help you appreciate anything at anytime. While there are more things to appreciate and less distractions in nature, you can have a similar appreciative experience in a busy street in a big city.
After practicing meditation for some time, you will also perceive more things and connect with your senses and feelings. You will be able to deepen and widen your experience, and enjoy more of what life has to offer.
As you connect with your sense of sight, you will see things you never saw before and you will see the beauty in everything.
As you connect with your sense of hearing, you will hear sounds you never pay attention to and you will be able to enjoy them.
As you connect with your sense of smell, you will be able to have new experiences.
As you connect with your sense of taste, you will love food that you hated before.
As you connect with your sense of touch, your body will feel good and touching things will feel good.
You will also be able to appreciate your positive feelings and emotions more because you will be more aware of them.
You can make your whole experience of life more positive.
You can appreciate and enjoy whatever happens at all times.
3) Mental State & Enhanced Experience
Most people's default mental state is a distracted, negative, and reactive state. Most people get lost in the same trains of thoughts again and again then repeat their past mistakes again and again. They don't control their life. Life happens to them. They are reactive. They are distracted.
Meditation can make you proactive instead of reactive. You take control of your actions and don't just react to things. You can be alert and aware, and catch yourself before you react to something.
Meditation can help you disidentify from your ego and make you aware that you are more than just an object, more than just a person, more than what you describe yourself.
Meditation can help you take distance from things. As an analogy, you can see yourself from a bird's eye view, from a third person view. You can observe yourself with more clarity. You can have a different perspective on things.
Meditation can help you develop your intuition and make you more in tune with your intuition. You can develop your sense for things.
As meditation is the practice of directing attention, it is the logical consequence that meditation improves focus and attention. And this has great further consequences.
We are in the information era where we are distracted all the time and our attention span became very short. Meditation can increase your attention span and you will be able to focus for longer periods of time.
To perform at the highest level, most tasks require intense focus and concentration. Meditation can help you improve your focus and concentration a lot.
You learned previously that meditation can help you lessen your negative emotions. As you lessen your negativity, at the same time, meditation can also make you relaxed, calm and peaceful.
Quick fact: you can't feel any negative emotion when your body is completely relaxed.
Quick trick: you can take deep breaths and relax your body. This will make you feel relaxed, calm, and peaceful while at the same time lessen your negative emotions.
Meditation can help you stop thinking.
I categorize thinking into 2 types of thinking: distractive/repetitive thinking and creative/problem solving thinking. I consider the first useless and the second useful.
Meditation can help you solve problems and be more creative. Problem solving comes from creativity. Your creativity comes from your subconscious when you are not distracted. Meditation can make you less distracted and make you connect with your subconscious.
You can have a very clear mind all the time if you practice meditation because you can have way less distracting thoughts.
You can increase your awareness with meditation. Knowledge is power. To increase your awareness is to increase your knowledge of the present moment. This gives you more power and more control. This will also help you make better decisions.
The benefits of awareness don't stop here.
Being aware of your negative emotions is what allows you to accept them and lessen their power over you. You can't change something you are not aware of.
In the same way, being aware of your positive emotions allows you to appreciate and enjoy them more. Being aware of the inner beauty of everything everywhere allows you to experience and enjoy a whole new world.
As you direct your attention to what is unfamiliar or unknown to you, you will be aware of new things to experience and enjoy. You can be in a constant state of exploration, adventure, and excitement.
Awareness can make you realize the connectedness of things and the harmony of the universe. You can see that you are not an isolated entity but that you are part of a bigger whole. You can feel unconditional love towards everything.
When you are present, aware, and not distracted, thanks to practicing meditation, you are in a state of love, joy, and inner peace. And you can be in that state all the time if you want to. That's the normal state of someone who practices meditation.
You can experience more, enjoy more, feel better, and have a great mental state as your normal mental state. You can feel great and be in a great state of mind most of the time.
4) Change the Brain
Yes, meditation changes your brain. In a very positive way!
As you practice directing attention with meditation, you also activate (and/or not activate and/or deactivate) different parts of the brain. You basically control and teach your brain what to do.
There is a concept called neuroplasticity. Your brain is not fixed but changing as time goes on.
There are different types of brain waves. Meditation can change which brain waves you use and make you use the most beneficial ones like the gamma waves. This can have very positive effects for your brain.
I'll talk about 2 networks we have in the brain. I simply define brain network as a network with different regions of the brain that interact with each other.
We have the narrative focus network, a widely studied network sometimes called the default mode network. This is the network responsible for mind wandering/daydreaming. For example, you are in a math class but you are not focused on the teacher and your mind starts to wander, you start daydreaming and having random thoughts.
We also have the experiential focus network. This network activates when you are focusing on the experience of the present moment. When you feel your body or you focus on your senses, this network is more active.
As you might know by now, meditation can help you direct your attention to your experience instead of daydreaming. Your brain adapts to your meditation practice and it will be easier and easier for you to activate your experiential focus network instead of your narrative focus network.
Is it bad to daydream? Absolutely not!
But don't you want to have more control over yourself and be able to experience and enjoy life more?
Summary & Conclusion:
As you practice meditation, it changes your brain and your experience of life gets better and better.
You can reduce pain, lessen negative feelings or make these completely disappear.
You can discover new things every second and see the inner beauty in everything. You can enjoy things you never enjoyed before. You can be grateful and appreciate. You can be more aware of your positive feelings and experience them a lot more.
You can increase the duration and intensity of your focus and attention. You can have less distracting thoughts, more creative thoughts, and more periods without any thoughts. You can be more creative and make better decisions. You can be more aware and have more control over your life.
You can feel good all the time and have your normal mental state as a positive state of joy, love, and inner peace with a clear mind.
As an additional resource on the benefits of meditation, you can check out this great video from Improvement Pill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvJLmVYVvVM
Shout out to Improvement Pill for this great video.
