What is Mindfulness Meditation?
Mindfulness has shown to have a lot of health benefits. It can help lower your blood pressure, strengthen your immune system, and it can help us manage stress and actually reduce the impact stress has on us over time. Mindfulness techniques have been shown to have a range of benefits, including aiding with weight management by reducing overeating. Additionally, meditation can help improve your mood and reduce anxiety.
Mindfulness is simply a moment to moment awareness that comes from paying attention to whatever it is that’s going on around you, without judging it or criticizing it. This awareness helps us pay attention to our triggers and our habits and choose how we want to respond to stress instead of acting automatically or out of habit.
Mindfulness Meditation is simply about noticing and accepting whatever you’re thinking or feeling in the present moment. Whether that’s an intense emotion or a certain sensation in your body or just some negative thoughts. Simple mindfulness meditation exercises can help you feel less stressed and less overwhelmed. The good news is it doesn’t have to be complicated. When we keep things simple, we’re much more likely to spend the time and energy to actually do them, especially when life just seems so busy. With practice, anybody can do it.
How Mindfulness Helps Improve Sleep and Negative Thoughts
Stress happens to be one of the main causes of insomnia. Stress makes it hard to mentally shut down and physically relax so that you can get a good night’s sleep. Not getting enough quality sleep makes stress worse and can affect our physical and or mental health. Our natural response is to push away those negative thoughts. Unfortunately, this usually doesn’t make us feel any better, or help us eliminate the stress or anxiety that we’re feeling at that moment. Mindfulness helps us make space for negative thoughts or emotions and accept them whenever they show up.
Practice Mindfulness with your Whole Body
Being grounded in our bodies is important because stress and anxiety can come from a lack of being present in the here and now. We spend a lot of time worrying about the past or thinking about the future, right? So being grounded simply means to bring ourselves back in contact with the present moment. Being grounded in your body means feeling stable, at ease, and present.
It means you can accept and let go of challenging events and experiences throughout the day and not be easily influenced by other people’s behaviors, or comments. This is the opposite of letting ourselves get too caught up in our head with negative talk and self worrying. Mindfulness makes it easier to listen to and make sense out of the signals our bodies are sending us like telling us the difference between physical and emotional hunger, and it can help us regulate our stress response by helping us learn to acknowledge stress, without letting it become overwhelming.
Techniques You Can Try
Here are three mindfulness meditation techniques that are simple and easy to do. (Find even more in the Fresh Tri app!)
Get comfortable and take a few deep breaths. Slowly bring awareness to each part of your body, from your toes to your head. Notice any areas with tension; breathe into the tension, and then breathe it out.
First, look around and notice 5 things you can see. Second, shift your focus to 4 things you can feel. Third, listen for 3 distinct sounds you can hear. Fourth, focus on 2 things you can smell. Lastly, find 1 thing you can taste.
Find a location where you won’t be disturbed for a few minutes. Choose any object near you, and begin to focus and concentrate on that single point. Your mind will wander. Practice stopping your mind from wandering by focusing on that single point for a little while at a time. With practice, you’ll be able to block out the thoughts and emotions that are causing you stress while concentrating on your one point.
Mindfulness Meditation Techniques for Better Sleep and Reduced Stress
By bringing awareness to the present moment and accepting our thoughts and emotions, we can learn to respond to stress in a healthier way and live a more fulfilling life. So why not give these simple mindfulness meditation techniques a try and see how they can positively impact your well-being? With practice, anyone can cultivate mindfulness and enjoy its many benefits.
