Stress can sneak up on us anywhere: our work, our home, our love life, bills, student loans, or even the kids. Having too much stress is a known health issue that can cause some serious damage to your heart, and affect your day to day life style. Some common side effects of too much stress are headaches, fatigue, problems falling asleep, anxiety, and depression. Stress can also affect your behavior prompting you to eat your stress away, have random bursts of anger, influence you to use drugs or drink, or withdraw from your social life.
Instead of feeling overwhelmed or eating yourself into an angry coma, practicing meditation during particularly stressful periods can help relieve negative side effects that alter your body’s health, your mood, and your behavior. There are tons of different wants to meditate based on your needs or your religion, but for now we’re going to focus on the 3 most common meditations and how meditation practices can help you stress less.
Spiritual Meditation
This type of meditation is especially good for women who believe in a higher power and regularly says their prayers. Practicing spiritual meditation involves connecting yourself to your higher power and giving them full reigns over the hardships in your life. For instance, if your boss has been coming down on you especially hard for the past couple of weeks, take some time aside for yourself in a nice, quiet place (this can be at work or at home). Next, you’ll want to take a deep breath and begin listing the issues that have been causing you to stress out. Once you’ve formed your list, let your higher power take the weight off of your shoulders.
Focused Meditation
Focused meditation is the act of focusing on a single item instead of all of them. This is especially good for proactive women who take on too many tasks at a time, causing them to feel overwhelmed or like they’re drowning. Instead of thinking about the 12 projects you need to get done by Friday and the 10 chores you need to do once you get home, sit down, relax your muscles and begin clearing your mind. Make a list in your head of the tasks you have to do, prioritize them, and then focus on the most important one only. By focusing on this single task you’re eliminating distractions and getting sh!t done at the same time.
Concentration Meditation
Concentration meditation is similar to focused meditation where you’re both focusing on a single thing. In focused meditation that thing happens to be a simple thought or task that blocks out all other thoughts or distractions. Concentration meditation required that you focus on a single thing, but this time it has to be something physical. For example, you can concentrate on focusing on a candle flame and blocking out all other senses. If you don’t want to stare at a flame, you can try concentrating on a single sound, or repeating a single word or mantra. Concentration meditation is also a great way to concentrate at work and help relieve stress from a heavy work load, or if problems from your personal life start to creep into your mind and distract you from doing your work.
The 3 types of meditation we talked about are all about removing the stress from your live, whether that be surrendering yourself to your higher power and believing in them to take the stress from you, or by focusing or concentrating on a single thing and blocking out all other senses, which helps you to feel less overwhelmed.
