Top 3 Life-Changing Benefits of Meditation

Committing to a meditation practice is a life-changing experience. It will help get you out of the depressing past and the anxious future and bring you into the peaceful present.

Reason #1 – Meditation helps you be present, which dramatically reduces depression and anxiety.

Learning to be present is so much more powerful than many people realize. Before learning about meditation, we always thought that things like depression and anxiety were just something you had to deal with in life. As we began our journey with meditation, we learned that the primary reason for depression is that we allow our minds to dwell on past events that we no longer can change. On my end, getting caught up worrying about future things I had no control over lead to anxiety. These realizations may seem simple, but it was a big deal for us as Dalila had constantly brooded about things in the past and I knew I was overly worried about the future.

Okay, so it’s great to realize this, but what does that have to do with meditation? Glad you asked! At its simplest level, meditation is about moving past all of these conscious thoughts to a point where you are just fully aware of the present moment—and anybody can reach this point with a practical process in place (see How the Heck do I Meditate episode). In this state of mind you can clearly evaluate why you feel the way you do, let things go, and learn the peaceful power of being in the present moment. One University of Queensland mindfulness study showed that

“It is possible that persons with a highly developed ability to act with awareness may stay in touch with contextual cues and readily available sources of positive reinforcement within their environment, thus, keeping depressive symptoms at bay.”

So this is really powerful stuff! As you continue doing this you will naturally being learning to focus intently on the present moment outside of meditation, which really allows you to be genuinely calm and happy in the present.

What Facets of Mindfulness Contribute to Psychological Well-being and Depressive, Anxious, and Stress-related Symptomatology?

Reason #2 – Meditation teaches you about your true self, and helps you understand what really brings you happiness in your life.

So in reason #1 we talked about reaching a point in meditation where you move past the conscious mind and start becoming more aware of the self and why you are how you are and why you do what you do. Even if your initial reason for starting to meditate is for something different, in our experience you will inevitably begin down a path of increasing levels of self-awareness. You will start confronting and asking yourself questions such as “why am I not feeling happy?, what’s my purpose in life?, or how did I end up in this situation I’m in today?”

For us, this process led us down a long path of deconditioning ourselves from the “I’ll be happy when” mindset that we were raised with. For more on that be sure to check out the Looking Inside for Happiness episode today. We realized that all the money, possessions, and prestige we had worked so hard for were not making us any happier—and that we had sacrificed the most important thing in the process… time. Don’t waste another minute going down the wrong path!

Reason #3 – Meditation give you access to your subconscious mind, where you can essentially program your brain to change.

At this point we’ve mentioned the ability for meditation to help us live in the present moment and help us understand our true selves, but the final reason is the most exciting to us. Once you learn to be more present and come to terms with who you really are and where you want to go in life, meditation unlocks an almost magical power to influence the way your brain thinks. So many people make this sound like something mystical that is hard to believe, but there is truly a scientific reason for this. Through much of our early lives, a ton of information is programmed into our subconscious minds that affects the way we interpret everything in the world, and also affects every decision that we make in our lives. While this is useful for survival, it also makes it very difficult for us to change things since, by definition, we are not aware of our subconscious minds.

This is where meditation comes in! When we reach the point in meditation where we are past our conscious thoughts, we have the ability to say affirmations in order to change who we are at a subconscious level. When you do this enough times, you will truly embed these new thoughts and mindsets into your subconscious, and then your mind will start filtering everything through that new “computer.”

A quick example of this is that when I thought of starting my own business for most of my life, I would say “I want to work for myself.” What’s wrong with this? Well since I was raised in a working class family and had always traded my time for money, I was still stuck dreaming of slaving away at my dream. By practicing meditation and affirmations, I have been able to change my thinking to “I want to own my own company.” Seems like a small difference, but I have learned that have an “owner” mentality is way different than a “being your own boss” mentality. One implies that a team of people execute your idea, while the other implies that you are still the hourly laborer—you just report to yourself.

Conclusion

In the end, we really believe that meditation can have so many positive effects due to helping us live in the present moment, learn more about ourselves, and ultimately allows us to access our subconscious minds in order to change ourselves for the better.

Curious how to meditate? We can help! Make sure to check out the How the Heck do I Meditate episode today!

Check out one of our favorite books on the power of meditation!