Meditation isn’t just a mindful practice — it can improve your entire being. The health benefits of meditating are many, and backed by science. Here’s a guide to what meditation actually is and how it can boost your mental and physical health.
Once reserved for practitioners of Eastern religions as a path to finding inner peace, meditation is now a mainstream practice, with proponents including business leaders, celebrities, athletes, and even the current mayor of New York, Eric Adams.
The many health benefits of mindfulness meditation are backed by science, but if you’ve resisted a meditation practice because you aren’t sure if you’ll be able to be still for an extended period of time, or you’re skeptical it’s as great as proponents say it is (spoiler: it is), stop right there. To reap the physical and mental benefits of meditation, you aren’t required to sit and breathe silently for hours. You just need to show up for yourself.
Here’s a guide to what meditation actually is and how practicing it can improve your health in a number of key ways, from helping with stress reduction and chronic pain to controlling your blood pressure.
What Is Meditation?
While most of us likely think of meditation as sitting silently on a cushion, our legs folded into a Lotus pose, there are a number of practices that fall under the larger umbrella term of meditation. Some of the more common types of meditation are mindfulness meditation (being aware of your thoughts as they come and go), focused meditation (counting breaths), and moving meditation (tai chi and walking meditation), just to name a few.
However, meditation is more broad than these categories. According to yoga instructor Meera Watts, founder of Siddhi Yoga, any activity that brings peace of mind and can be done mindfully can be considered meditation.
“For instance, meditation can be practiced while dancing in the rain, cooking, petting your dog, or taking a shower,” she tells DailyOM. What differentiates these from simply being activities is focusing in on the present moment: Noticing the feeling of rain on your skin and the smell of the air, for instance, or the sensation of your dog’s fur on your skin and the two of you breathing in sync, can make these seemingly mundane practices meditative.
Interested in learning more? Check out Guided Relaxation With Ocean Sounds
What Type of Meditation Is Right for You?
If you’ve never meditated before, you may not know where to start. Yoga and pilates teacher Tabitha Wright, whom DailyOM spoke with for this story, suggests finding the best way for you to make meditation a regular habit, like attending a yoga class or meditation class, or using an online video or mindfulness meditation app that offers meditation training.
“This guidance will help you feel confident in your meditation and help it become a firm and enjoyable habit,” she says. It’s more important, she adds, to find a meditation practice you can stick with rather than try to meditate for a certain amount of time or a specific time of day.
“Meditation is about finding what works for you to enable you to clear away the clutter of modern life and focus in on the present moment,” she says. “It’s up to the individual to find out what works for them.”
The Mind as a Tool for Better Health
Meditation bridges the connection between your mind and your body, making it a useful tool for bettering your overall health and wellness, particularly when it comes to chronic pain, depression, and anxiety.
“The way you feel about yourself and the number of healthy steps you will take to improve your physical health are intimately related,” Watts says. “By meditating, we may access the most powerful elements of our minds. If you firmly believe in the art of meditation, you will observe its effects.”
10 Proven Health Benefits of Meditation
“Meditation is a positive way to improve overall health and it absolutely has the ability to change the way that we view ourselves and our world,” Lindsey Schafer, LMSW, a New York-based psychotherapist, tells DailyOM.
Meditation is now even prescribed by some doctors to help people with a variety of medical conditions, from chronic pain management to mental health treatment for anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and more. A study done at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center showed mindful meditation was more effective than the placebo control group in reducing pain of the participants.
Meditation gives people an opportunity — and even sometimes an excuse — to just be in the moment.
This incorporation of mindfulness training into mainstream medicine is important, mindset and meditation coach Meg Burton Tudman tells DailyOM, because it’s a simple, free, and noninvasive tool for better health. “This integration is also important because it gives meditation even more credibility,” Tudman says.
Here are 10 of the proven mental and physical health benefits of a meditative practice, backed by research and experts.
1. Meditation Eases Anxiety and Depression
Research suggests that mindfulness practices can be effective for easing anxiety and other mood disorders. Engaging in mindfulness-based therapy, which combines mindfulness-based cognitive therapy with mindfulness practices, has been shown to reduce cytokines, which are inflammatory stress chemicals that can lead to depression. In her practice, Schafer has observed how mindfulness meditation helps people curb negative thinking and keeps anxiety from taking over. “Meditation has the ability to help individuals cope with symptoms of anxiety and depression, including negative racing thoughts or even body tension and discomfort through self awareness alone,” she says.
2. Meditation Bolsters Self-Confidence
Mindfulness meditation has the power to allow people to connect with their true selves, raising self-awareness, confidence, and self-inquiry, Watts says. “By giving us a sense that we are in control of every situation, meditation assists in boosting one's sense of self-worth,” she explains.
Research also shows that meditation can create what’s called nonjudgmental awareness of the self, which heightens resilience.
3. Meditation Reduces Stress
Reviews of multiple studies have shown the power of meditation to reduce stress and lessen the effects of chronic stress on the entire body.
Reducing stress can also lessen reactivity to stressful situations. “One of my favorite health benefits from meditation is being able to recognize the space between stimulus and response,” Tudman says. “I’ll never forget standing in my kitchen and feeling like I was about to freak out. While I can’t remember the stimulus, I can still clearly remember my typical response, including feeling angry, breathing shallowly, and crying. Then, I realized I could pause and make a conscious choice in how I responded.” Her meditation practice enabled her to take a few deep, cleansing breaths to calm and reset.
4. Meditation Reduces Inflammation
Stress can also lead to neurogenic inflammation, which has been linked to physical diseases like arthritis, colitis, bladder inflammation, and asthma. (The same cytokines that are linked to depression can cause this neurogenic inflammation.) People who meditate have a smaller inflammatory response compared to those who don’t.
5. Meditation Improves Sleep
By quieting the mind, meditation can be a relaxing and restorative practice, allowing for better sleep. Research shows that, even for people with chronic insomnia, meditation can improve sleep quality, particularly when they consistently engage in mindfulness-based therapy specifically designed for insomnia. (For this particular study, insomnia improved over the course of eight weeks.)
6. Meditation Improves Brain Health
Meditation has been shown to be a potentially valuable tool in the prevention of Alzheimer's disease, as well as improving both memory loss and attention span in general.
Other research shows the impact of meditation on the gray matter portions of the brain, which are responsible for receiving information and regulating outgoing information. People who meditate over the long term have less age-related gray matter atrophy and tissue decline, meaning that meditation potentially has the power to slow the overall effects of aging on the brain.
7. Meditation Can Help Curb Addiction
The mind-body connection that meditation offers can even help people suffering from addiction. Over the past decade of research, mindfulness-based treatments appear to reduce substance abuse by helping people self-regulate and break harmful habits, as well as create new reward-seeking behaviors to replace destructive ones.
8. Meditation Eases Pain
A consistent meditation practice enables people to be aware of sensations throughout the body, Tudman says, including framing pain as a sensation that can be managed, rather than something that is happening to them.
“From a more technical standpoint, peer-reviewed research explains that pain is characterized by numerous factors including sensation, thought, and mood,” she explains. “Mindfulness meditation has been found to significantly reduce [chronic] pain by impacting multiple chemical and physiological aspects of the brain.”
9. Meditation Controls Food Cravings
Meditation has also been used in treating binge eating and emotional eating, with research showing that mindful eating can lead to more control over food cravings. In one study, participants underwent specific mindfulness-eating training, which helped them learn to better tap into their fullness and hunger cues, as well as tune into emotional triggers for eating.
10. Meditation Decreases Blood Pressure
While more clinical research is needed, there have been promising results in the link between engaging in meditation or mindfulness-based stress reduction strategies and lowering blood pressure. Meditation can relax the nerve signals that contribute to blood vessel tension and the “fight-or-flight” response.
The Bottom Line
According to Wright, meditation has the power to change — and even save — lives. (And the myriad scientific studies about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness certainly back this up.) However, sometimes the route to exploring meditation can be blocked by our own biases and preconceptions. “Meditation, although simple, is not easy,” she says. And that’s actually the point.
Our lives are often so busy and chaotic that meditating feels inconvenient, or even impossible. That’s how you know you really need to do it.
“Meditation gives people an opportunity — and even sometimes an excuse — to just be in the moment,” Wright says. “We quiet the mind and, in that moment, it is like stepping into a waterfall that washes the stress away. Our bodies and minds can suddenly take a long, deep breath. And we feel better.”
