Can Meditation Help With Your Social Anxiety?
Currently, with the pandemic, it is easy to get weighed down by life’s events. It has led to an increase in the number of mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Most people have turned to meditation as a form of treatment.
We can go through a few ways that meditation can help reduce anxiety in your everyday life.
What is Meditation?
In simple terms, meditation is a practice that increases your social awareness to understand yourself and your surroundings better. This, in turn, helps you deal with emotions like sadness, fear, and grief that often lead to depression and anxiety. Meditation is a practice of different techniques that improve everyday life.
The most common form of meditation is mindfulness or focus attention meditation. Mindful meditation involves focusing on one thing at the present moment. It can be a thought or a thing. It is often on your breathing, which can be tasking if you’re easily distracted to get your mind back to one singular thought. Some instructors encourage focusing on a desire or visualizing your future, depending on your meditation goals.
How To Practice Meditation.
Meditating has a lot of benefits to our brains and overall health. So how do you start meditating? The act of meditating is very simple and can take you between 10 to 30 minutes, depending on how long you want to participate.
All you have to do is find a nice quiet place to sit and close your eyes. Try to focus on your breathing. If your concentration is shifted, acknowledge it and focus back on breathing. Sitting in this state for a few minutes helps you relax and take time away from the noisy world. It might be hard to try at first, but it gets easier with every session. Plus, it is worth it for your mental well being.
Now let us go through how meditation can help reduce anxiety in your everyday life.
Meditating To Reduce Social Anxiety
Anxiety is a mental illness caused by several factors, including stress. It is a constant state of fear whereby you are always on edge or worried about something in your life. It could be your job, family or even future that causes random anxiety attacks.
Most people find it hard to control their anxiety, but with meditation, that might be a problem of the past. This might shock you, but you do not need to become a Buddhist to get into meditating. All you have to do is integrate the techniques into your daily routine to get rid of symptoms like irritability and restlessness.
According to medical research, meditation greatly affects our brain activity. There is a significant decrease in beta waves that are responsible for processing information. The frontal lobe responsible for self-awareness, reasoning, and emotions shuts off. The parietal lobe that processes outside information also slows down. By weakening this brain connection during meditation, you do not react as emotionally to situations as you used to.
This causes a state of mental silence which can be relaxing when practiced daily. A lasting benefit of meditation is a better focus, so instead of worrying, you can focus on the present. Meditation is a great way to improve your overall physical health.
