How Meditation Helps Reduce Psychological Stress

Before undertaking any task, people first look for the purpose behind it and are eager to form an advance picture of the results. This prompts someone to ask why they should practice a particular sport that requires a full hour of activity. The question leads them to imagine an answer involving weight loss, a stronger body, or greater endurance.

This is what prompts anyone considering practicing meditation to ask what they will gain in return for the time and energy they spend on this activity. Why devote 20 minutes of your hard-earned free time each day to counting your breaths or repeating the same phrase over and over when you could go running or browse the internet? From here, you begin forming an idea of the answer. Whatever that answer may be, it will necessarily center on the areas of weakness in your life that you want to address. Tatmeen therefore presents this article, which explores the meaning of meditation in life, the foundations of meditation, and how meditation can become your path to reducing stress and psychological strain..

The meaning of meditation:

Meditation means recognizing that life does not always follow our expectations. This means we continually experience mixed and shifting emotions, including tension, disappointment, fear, anger, happiness, hope, hurt, and many others. Here lies the role of meditation: it helps you learn to manage your emotions, however difficult they may be, with balance and compassion, and teaches you that the idea of a perfect life is a myth.

Many people’s suffering can be traced to comparing their lives with an idealized picture of how life is supposed to be. These images accumulate from childhood, the media, and personal whims. The problem is that this ideal picture of life becomes the standard by which you measure your success or failure.

Your ideal picture of happiness in life may involve having a family and children or achieving the perfect body shape or level of fitness. The problem arises when your inability to achieve these things makes you view yourself as a failure. Diets, for example, may not be fully effective, and you may be unable to follow an exercise routine. Every time you look in the mirror, you feel as though you might faint. Or perhaps your idea of peace is a perfect relationship, yet you are approaching forty without finding the right partner.

Whatever your conception of a perfect life, perfect achievements, perfect sex, perfect health, or even complete peace of mind, you must recognize that you are paying a steep price from your life to pursue such high expectations. When you inevitably fail to meet them, you end up suffering and blaming yourself. You should therefore understand that even if you had the family you wanted, the perfect body, and the perfect romantic relationship, these would not measure your success or failure. The problem is that you may ultimately become bored and want more, or spend every free moment struggling to protect or control what you have.

What are the foundations of meditation?

1. Recognize that the perfect life is only a myth.

Meditation encourages you to recognize that ideal standards for achieving anything are a myth. The reason is very simple: as human beings, we do not possess absolute control over every course and area of our lives. Once you accept this, you will not be burdened by guilt, anxiety, or tension about failing to achieve the perfect life. Your role is to strive and try to control what lies within your control, and it is all right if you ultimately achieve only a small amount of the success you expect. You must learn, however, that this small amount of success is cumulative and bears fruit over the long term.

You may find this difficult to accept, but you need to believe what meditation teachings tell you and accept the truth that every person has only limited control over the events in their life. You simply need to decide to step beyond the pursuit of a perfect life and do what you need to do. That, and nothing more, is the purpose of life.

2. Follow your dreams and live your truth.

You need to follow your dreams and live your truth; this is an important part of the meditation equation. But the question remains: how can you do that when life, with all its harsh circumstances, decides to strike us? When you completely lose your balance and are deprived of everything you have gained—including your hard-won self-confidence and self-respect—where do you turn for help and support? How do you deal with the pain and confusion? What inner resources do you rely on to guide you through this frightening, unfamiliar terrain?

Meditation teaches you that life is full of unavoidable certainties, such as illness and death. Yet alongside these certainties, life offers us abundant love, beauty, and joy, and all things change and are impermanent. Only when you face life’s hardships with this conviction have you attained the enlightenment that meditation seeks.

3. Cultivate acceptance by learning to withhold judgment and remain open.

Life is a constant interaction between light and darkness, success and failure, youth and old age, pleasure and pain, and life and death. Circumstances constantly change, seeming to fall apart in one moment only to come together in the next. Everything is continually losing its balance, so you need to understand that the key to peace of mind lies not in your circumstances, but in how you respond to them. As Buddhists say, "Suffering is wanting what you do not have and not wanting what you have," while happiness is exactly the opposite: enjoying what you have and not longing for what you lack. This does not mean abandoning your values, dreams, and aspirations. It simply means balancing them with the ability to accept things as they are. Meditation gives you an opportunity to cultivate acceptance by teaching you to withhold judgment and remain open to every experience without trying to change or eliminate it.

Download the Tatmeen mental-health app for specialized meditation exercises and programs.

How does meditation help reduce psychological stress?

Below are some symptoms associated with psychological stress that meditation can help you overcome:

1. Anxiety and tension:Whenever you take a new step, you may quickly feel anxious and tense about it. This is your first reaction as you attempt to regain your stability. It is an instinctive response embedded in our genes through millions of years of living. In this fast-paced age, you are compelled every day to make decisions that move you forward. This inevitably allows small fears to accumulate and turn into continual tension and pressure. Your body may feel constantly prepared for the next onslaught of difficulties and responsibilities, making it impossible to relax and enjoy life fully. Meditation can provide a much-needed antidote by encouraging you to relax your body and reduce tension.
2. Distraction:The many demands of life require us to perform more than one task at the same time. We now find ourselves taking our children to school or daycare and traveling long distances to work while checking messages on our mobile phones. On the way home, we may stop at the shopping center, and we may spend our evenings browsing the internet. We change jobs and partners more frequently than ever. Although we may be unable to keep pace with this wave of fragmentation, we can use meditation to connect with a deeper wholeness that external circumstances cannot disturb.
3. Alienation:As we noted earlier when discussing distraction, people now live as if their lives were puzzle pieces that do not fit together. It is therefore no wonder that we end up feeling constantly stressed. Because of difficult circumstances, many people work in low-income jobs that are just enough to pay the bills, but they fail to connect this work with a sense of value or purpose. They believe this is the natural state of affairs and see no need to step beyond what is familiar and ordinary. Human beings seem never to have felt more alienated—not only from their work and government, but also from other people, themselves, and their fundamental selves. Meditation can help heal our alienation from others and the entire world by giving us the skills to reconnect with society, bridging the gap that separates us from ourselves.
4. Loneliness and isolation:The demands of life and the continual, repetitive, and distracting busyness they impose make regular contact with the people you know and love less likely. Even when you do see them, you may be too busy to connect consistently in a way that satisfies both you and them. You may be unable to rein in the busyness that separates you from those close to you, but you can use meditation to turn every moment with them into enjoyable time.
5. Depression:When people feel lonely, alienated, stressed, and disconnected from a source of meaning and purpose, it is no wonder that some end up developing depression. It has become very common today for millions of people to take chemical medications each day to change their mood and avoid feeling pain. Meditation can connect you with your inner source of contentment and joy, which naturally disperses the clouds of depression.
6. Stress-related illnesses:From tension headaches and acid indigestion to heart disease and cancer, the steady rise in stress-related illnesses reflects our collective inability to cope with the instability and fragmentation of our age. Current health-care programs merely conceal the underlying problems of fear, tension, and confusion. Many scientific studies have shown that regular meditation practice can actually address numerous stress-related illnesses.

The only certainty here is that circumstances continually change, but the question is whether this change is rapid and has a profound effect on our lives. When we watch the news or read newspapers, we are affected by statistics and images of violence, famine, illness, environmental pollution, and economic instability. Together, they depict a world that appears increasingly torn apart.

On a personal level, you experience change almost every day. You may have lost your job because your company reduced its workforce, ended a relationship because someone you love moved to another country, become the victim of a violent crime, or suffered losses in the stock market. You may spend your free time trying to determine how to move forward in a competitive workplace, or lie awake every night worrying about when the wave of change will reach you and sweep you away.

What meditation seeks to show you through all of this is that, when continual change becomes a way of life and values and truths are rapidly dismantled, you need to understand how to walk through life knowing what is real—and even how to discover it. It is true that there are now many ways to search for answers, including the web and media channels and sources. Yet despite the undeniable advantages of these indispensable research tools, they remain tools that help you communicate faster, not more richly or meaningfully. Such communication carries a high emotional and spiritual price that we have long tended to deny in our collective effort to emphasize the positive and reject the negative.