Heart beating fast, palms sweating, a hundred thoughts on your head. You could probably think I’m writing the symptoms of falling in love, but, if you’ve have already suffered from anxiety, you might as well have recognized it as those undesired feelings we try to push away many times a day.
Anxiety seems to be a harmless word: basically everyone has already felt nervous before a test or insecure after sending a risky text. These are normal situations that make us feel unease and they don’t necessarily have to be anxiety – but are frequently mistaken as it.
Feeling as something bad is going to happen all the time or not sleeping at night because of your useless thoughts about the future are not normal things. Anxiety is a mental disease that should be treated as soon as possible and, for that, you can do something that might seem silly or ineffective at first, but is actually very helpful.
Meditation can be done in many different ways. In Transcendental Meditation, for example, you sit comfortably for 20 minutes reciting a mantra on your head; two times a day. There are also meditations where you simply stay quiet for some minutes and try not to think of nothing, just feeling your heart beat and your respiration flow. Nowadays, some apps are also innovating in the meditation world: in Headspace or Quiet, you have a “voice guide” that talks to in you calmly and help you ease your stress.
The interesting fact about meditation is that you can do it anywhere, anytime you want – and the only thing you need is yourself. Even if you’re used to meditating with apps like the ones mentioned before, there’s always the possibility of taking some apart time from you phone and meditating only with the rhythm of your breathing.
There are several studies that prove how meditating can boost your health and even cure you from diseases. The Official Journal of the American Psychological Society, for example, published an article that showa how meditating can increase immune function, make you stronger and less susceptible to everyday risks. In the matter of health, meditation can also relieve stress and depression symptoms, besides decreasing pain and inflammations.
Researches have also found out that meditating can help you increase social connection (as proven by an American Psychological Association study) and even make you more compassionate (as shown by this Stanford Medicine research). Taking some minutes of your time to meditate can also boost your self-control, make you more able to make decisions and improve your productivity, to name a few benefits.
If you are tired of wasting time thinking about useless future scenarios or having anxiety attacks, those few minutes you’ll take to meditate will make you gain a lot of time. Once you start meditating, you might not see the changes in your head or body right away, but they’ll definitely come. And you’ll see how less scary life gets.