How Stress Meditation Can Help You Manage Anxiety and Stress

We can’t eliminate stress, but we can learn how to reframe its role in our lives so we manage it better. With an increasing number of studies exploring the benefits of meditation for stress and anxiety, research is pointing to it as an effective stress-management tool.

Stress meditation can induce a sense of peace and calm that benefits both your emotional and general wellbeing. It may also help you to manage symptoms of certain medical conditions. In fact, when stress meditation is a daily practice, individuals may be able to counter the effects of stress hormones like cortisol and reduce systemic inflammation in as little as eight weeks. 

What is Meditation?

Meditation is a set of techniques designed to offer a number of integrative benefits to the body and mind, including producing a deep state of relaxation and a more tranquil mind.

Practiced for thousands of years across many different cultures, meditation was originally designed to help deepen our spiritual understanding. Today, individuals more commonly use meditation for stress and anxiety reduction, managing insomnia and pain, and other chronic conditions.

Regular meditation can help enhance attention and focus, mental clarity, emotional awareness, kindness and compassion, calmness, and overall physical and emotional wellbeing. 

Benefits of Stress Meditation

Regularly practicing meditation for stress and anxiety offers a variety of well-documented benefits. Even a short, simple stress meditation, when undertaken routinely, can enhance physical and emotional wellbeing in the following ways:

Improving Emotional Wellbeing

Stress meditation can help you to maintain a positive outlook during stressful situations, become more self-aware and live in the present moment. It may also help to minimize negative emotions and improve your coping skills, while increasing imagination, creativity, patience and tolerance.

Regulating Neurotransmitters

Some of the positive emotional benefits of stress meditation are due to its ability to regulate neurotransmitters in the brain. Meditation for stress and anxiety has been found to increase serotonin levels – associated with reduced symptoms of depression – and decrease norepinephrine, where high levels have been linked to anxiety. Stress meditation can also increase the “happy” hormone oxytocin.

Offering Physiological Benefits

Stress meditation may help to lower your resting heart rate and blood pressure, improve sleep quality and reduce insomnia, and support immune function too.

Preventing and Managing Stress-Related Diseases

A regular stress meditation practice has been found to reduce cortisol levels. This can make it a beneficial tool in preventing or managing stress-related conditions such as weight gain and diabetes, plus autoimmune and cardiovascular issues too.

Types of Meditation

There are many different varieties and forms of meditative practices. Most types of stress meditation will include elements such as focused attention, relaxed breathing, a quiet setting, a comfortable position, and an open, non-judgmental mind-set.

Breath Focused Meditation

This form focuses mostly on the breath, calling on you to regulate your breathing with techniques such as boxed breathing, alternate nostril breathing, or pairing body tension with an inhale and body release with an exhale.

Movement Meditation

Movement in the body may help to focus the mind better than stillness. A moving stress meditation could include simply walking, or structured practices such as qi gong, tai chi, or yoga, which combine meditation, relaxation, a sequence of physical postures, and synchronized breathing together.

Body Scan Meditation

These types of meditation involve focusing attention on to different parts of the body, simultaneously increasing self-awareness, learning to observe rather than identify with negative sensations in the body, increasing focus, and promoting relaxation.

Mantra Meditation

A mantra meditation uses a repeated calming word, thought or phrase (e.g. “Relax” or “I am strong”) that is either thought or said aloud to support focus and prevent distracting thoughts.

Guided Meditation

A guided meditation involves visualization – creating mental pictures to calm and relax you. The meditative narrative may call on you to imagine smells, sights, sounds and textures associated with the visualization, training the body to recruit its own imagination and promote relaxation from within.

If you are regularly feeling anxious, stressed or worried, consider trying stress meditation. Even a few minutes at a time can support a more calm and relaxed state. Meditation is not only available to everyone, inexpensive, and equipment-free, it has been proven to offer an array of emotional and physical benefits that may help you to better manage and reduce your stress.