Meditation offers many benefits for your mental and emotional health. Regular meditation reduces stress and anxiety, improves your mood and decreases symptoms of depression. Adding meditation to your daily schedule may also help you lower your risk of some health conditions and diseases.

Asthma Attacks May Decrease

Strong odors, smoke, and illnesses often trigger asthma flares, but emotions can play a role too. If you're stressed or upset, you're more likely to experience asthma symptoms. Meditation can help you calm yourself when you begin to feel worried, stressed or anxious. Practicing meditation every day is a simple way to avoid flare-ups and keep your asthma under control.

Your Blood Pressure May Lower

Your emotions can also be a contributing factor if you have high blood pressure. The more stressed or agitated you become, the more your blood pressure soars. Unfortunately, uncontrolled high blood pressure can increase your risk of heart attack, heart disease, kidney disease, stroke, and other health problems. Meditation, along with a healthy diet, regular exercise, and medication, can help you keep your blood pressure at a safe level.

After reviewing 19 clinical studies on the effects of medication on hypertension, researchers concluded that non-transcendental meditation was a promising treatment option for high blood pressure. Their meta-analysis appeared in the April 2017 issue of the Journal of Hypertension.

Tired of Living with Menopausal Symptoms? Try Meditation

Menopause is referred to as "the change of life" for good reason. The end of your menstrual cycle is just one of the many changes you can expect during this time. Hot flashes, irritability, difficulty sleeping, brittle nails and itchy skin are among the symptoms that can accompany menopause. Meditation may improve your moods, decrease insomnia and reduce the number and intensity of hot flashes.

Meditation May Offer a Solution for Chronic Pain

Chronic pain can be very difficult to treat. Medications wear off quickly, can be addictive, and often have side effects. People who have chronic pain may have decreased levels of body awareness, according to a group of researchers who studied the effects of mindfulness on chronic pain and depression.

Body awareness refers to the ability to understand how the parts of your body function together and how your body occupies the space around you. The research, which appeared in Frontiers in Psychology, demonstrated that mindfulness can improve body awareness. Once awareness improves, pain may decrease.

Meditation May Decrease Inflammation Responsible for Multiple Conditions

It's hard to overlook a red, inflamed wound, but inflammation isn't so obvious when it occurs internally. Chronic inflammation may cause or contribute to a variety of diseases and health conditions, including Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, hay fever, cancer, hardening of the arteries, rheumatoid arthritis, and gum disease. A reduction in inflammation just may be one of the most important effects of meditation.

Meditation Offers a Simple Way to Prevent Respiratory Infections

Would you like to avoid colds and the flu? Regular meditation may reduce your risk of developing acute respiratory infections (ARIs), according to research conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ARIs are colds, flu, and flu-like illnesses.

Participants aged 30 to 69 were divided into three groups during the study. One group practiced mindfulness meditation, another participated in an exercise program, while a third group served as the control group. Throughout the four-year study, 120 people in the exercise group and 134 in the control group had ARIs, but only 112 people in the meditation group suffered from respiratory infections.

Practicing meditation, in addition to receiving chiropractic care, can help improve your mental and physical health. Are you ready to take advantage of the many benefits of meditation? Contact us for more information on how meditation may reduce your risk of some health complications.

For many of us, the practice of meditation seems like a totally foreign notion. In an era of full-time, morning-to-night distractions and distractibility, the concept of quietly sitting with nothing else to do seems impossibly ridiculous. Why would anyone do that, we ask, as we text message with one hand and channel surf with the other.

Of course, this lack of ability to pay attention and focus for more than 15 seconds at a time is at the core of many of our health issues. Learning how to meditate directly addresses this problem, providing training in developing concentration skills. But meditation offers an abundance of additional benefits, many of great significance to our overall health and well-being.

Years of research have documented the profound benefits of meditation, including reductions in elevated blood pressure levels, stress reduction, pain management,¹ and even rewiring of neurologic connections in the brain.^2,3 Thus, there are many reasons to begin meditation practice. The key question is how to get started.

Learning how to meditate is actually straightforward. There are many types of meditation practice. Some utilize a mantra, a silently repeated short, meaningless phrase. Others involve specific breathing methods. Others focus on the breath itself without utilizing specific instructions on how to breathe.

This latter method is that employed in Zen meditation. You sit comfortably in a quiet space, ideally facing a blank wall, situated approximately two feet from the wall. (Your specific situation may vary. The important point is to be in a quiet space without distractions of people or technology.) You focus on your breath, seeing your breath go up your spine in the back and then down your spine in the front. After observing one cycle of breathing, you silently count "one." Continue to observe your breathing cycle, adding to your count with each completed cycle. "Two." "Three." When you've completed ten cycles, go back to the numerical beginning and count "one" on the next cycle.

But if your mind wanders (as it inevitably will) and begins to think about whatever, when you eventually notice that you've lost your focus, go back to the beginning and count "one" again.

The "practice" part of meditation relates to practicing paying attention, paying attention to the breath. Your mind wanders, eventually you notice this, and you return to the breath. That's all there is. There is no requirement that you need to stay focused. A person is not a "bad meditator" when they find they are continually thinking of other things. The power is in the practice itself. By actually sitting down to meditate, by actually setting aside that time to be "still", you will derive unexpected benefits. And the more you practice, the more your practice becomes a habit, the more you will gain.

What is a recommended length for meditation sessions? There are no rules. The key is to begin, and then to continue. Starting with a five-minute session, twice a day, is a very good beginning. If you wish, you could build up to two 30-minute sessions per day. Again, your meditation practice is not a contest. What works for you will work for you.