16 Nov How Mindfulness Boosts your Health?

Mindfulness has been around for more than a thousand years. There is obviously a reason behind it or otherwise, it would have lost its significance long back. The core reason is that it is good not just for your mental health but for your physical health as well. Whether you are suffering from pain or stress, mindfulness can cure it all.

Mindfulness for your Physical Health

Pain can be bearable but only to some extent. After that it becomes intolerable. Most of the people do not have any control over it which affects their energy level, sleep, concentration and the overall quality of life. This might even lead to depression which people do not ever want to fall prey to. Thus, in order to avoid these situations and fight their pain, people have to take pain killers. Although, these medicines manage to kill your pain but they can cause various side effects as well. But what if I tell you that there is a medicine which will kill your pain without causing any side-effects? Yes, such a medicine does exist and the name of that medicine is mindfulness.

There are various mindful practices that can help people in dealing with their chronic pain and diseases. An 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction program has been found to be very useful in this case. The specialty of mindful meditation is that it does not give you ways to avoid or ignore your pain. It teaches you to acknowledge your pain and teaches you to manage it better. This eventually reduces pain.

Mindful meditation or guided meditation shifts the point of our control from the outside to the inside. In other words, it shifts our attention from ‘I am in pain because and I cannot do anything about it’ to ‘I am certainly going through a lot of pain but I should figure out a way to manage it’. This will help you attend to your pain in a very kind and curious way instead of just fighting it. There are various studies which prove that when you begin to relate to your pain instead of fighting or denying its existence, your quality of life increases. Believe it or not, but mindfulness is found to be as effective as pain killers in many cases.

Mindfulness for your Mental Health

When people are under stress, it takes a toll not just on their physical health but on their mental health as well. There are many reasons which can cause stress but one of the major reasons is not being content with what we have. We work really hard to get the best results for whatever we do. For example, we put in our 100 percent efforts to keep our body in shape, to maintain a happy family, be successful at work, have good relationships with our friends etc. But what happens when we have all of them? We will want more. It is a human tendency to always want more and this becomes the reason for our stress.

Mindfulness helps you get over this habit of unnecessary worrying about anything and everything. It teaches you to focus on the present moment without worrying about what has already happened and will happen. It teaches you to observe your present feelings and thoughts with curiosity. With regular practice of mindfulness, we learn to not get caught up in the thoughts cooked by our brain. We learn to deal with our negative situations in a positive way. When positivity begins to rule our mind, how can a person ever fall prey to depression or other such mental problems?

Thus, it would not be wrong to say that mindfulness is good for your mental as well as physical health. In other words, it is good for your overall well-being. So, if you are not practicing mindful meditation already it is high time you start doing it regardless of whether you suffer from any disease or not.

Purva Jain

Purva is a freelance writer from Udaipur, India. She covers a wide range of topics including health, lifestyle, news, food, and travel. You can reach out to her at [email protected]