How Mindfulness, Meditation And Self-Compassion Can Help You Live A More Fulfilling Life
Do you spend countless hours worrying and stressing out? You are not alone!
Worry and stress can have a huge impact on your wellbeing and how you live your life.
An individuals’ wellbeing includes their mental, physical, and emotional health; ability to socialise; and how they feel about themselves and their experiences. Research indicates that wellbeing is also linked to one's life satisfaction and happiness.
Meditation
A wellbeing practice that is widely known is meditation. Meditation is the practice of training your awareness and building a healthy perspective on you and your life, by observing your thoughts and feelings without judgment, which in turn can help you understand them more.
My interest in meditation started when I was young. I used to have difficulty falling asleep, so my mum, introduced me to Louise Hay’s evening meditation, which improved my sleep for the years after.
However, during the stressful years of school, I refrained from meditation when I could have benefitted from it greatly!
As meditation has been shown to help improve aspects of one's psychological wellbeing, including levels of stress.
Mindfulness
Luckily, I was reintroduced to meditation when at university studying psychology, where stress levels were at an all-time high! Here I learnt about mindfulness and mindfulness meditation.
For those of you who do not have the foggiest idea about mindfulness (very much like me a couple of years ago!), it’s a tool we can develop to help reduce feelings of overwhelm. Present moment awareness and acceptance of our mind’s thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and of the environment around us, encompass mindfulness. Basically, being present with yourself!
Mindfulness meditation
So, mindfulness meditation is meditation combined with mindfulness, involving deep breathing as well as body and mind awareness.
Personally, I found mindfulness difficult to grasp, but after learning about it and trying out meditations on a daily basis, the concept became easier to use in normal day-to-day situations.
A technique I like to use involves saying a word that describes the information your senses are receiving in that moment. So, for example, if a bird chirps, I say to myself ‘sound’. You can do this while walking, meditating, or anyway you wish. The point of this exercise is to train your mind to stay aware of the present moment, and to create distance between you and your thoughts.
You are probably wondering, “why have you even mentioned mindfulness?”. Well... it turns out it also has a great impact on our wellbeing.
Research reveals to us that mindfulness:
- reduces worry through the slowing of the breath
- increases our ability to understand ourselves
- Helps increase positive self-talk
- Reduces anxiety
- Reduces stress
Stress is a feeling that causes disharmony in our mood, bodies and behaviours too! Examples on how stress affects an individual is shown in the table below:
Table from: Mayo Clinic https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress-symptoms/art-20050987