Meditation has been around for thousands and
thousands of years. Yet, as cultures continue to grow and science continues to
evolve, this ancient practice is proving more and more valuable and valid as
times become tougher (in an economic sense) and people become “tougher to love”
(once again, an economic effect).
The incredible advantages of daily
meditation are blatantly obvious to those who use and benefit from them, and
slightly less than insane sounding to most “average folk”, who associate people
sitting on the ground with their legs crossed and eyes closed with tripping on
peyote, salvia, LSD, or other number of recreational drugs. The hippie culture
may have stigmatized this activity for some, but I assure you there’s orders of
magnitude more value in cashing in your ego for the benefits provided by this
simple practice.
Here are five reasons you need to start
meditating daily, and what these five things did for me on my personal path of
clarity and self-evolution:
5. Increases Clarity of Thinking
This one seems obvious, but it’s deceptively
excellent. Did you know your brain changes physiologically when you meditate?
This has been studied, tested, experimented, and documented plenty of times now
to be accepted in the scientific community as fact.
Using state of the art EEG (electroencephalography)
equipment, we can measure the electrical activity in the brain during various
states as directed by the user. In states of mindful meditation it has been
discovered that the brain will drop substantially in terms of alpha in theta
waves, while simultaneously increasing in beta waves. What this tells
scientists is that you’re not only consciously choosing to relax – and your
brain and body are responding to this conscious choice – but you’re also
relaxed while being incredibly sharp, focused, and aware.
Your brain is telling scientists that it’s
much more malleable and moldable than previously believed. We’re slowing
proving to the larger scientific community through our habits and results that
our choice of thinking and attitude towards life plays a HUGE part in how
successful we are at accomplishing goals. Daily meditation can help you tighten
up any loose ends on the mental level by regaining control of them. Starting
your day off with a 15-20 minute meditation session is a great way to kick off the
day with a heightened sense of mental clarity.
For me, this one was obvious after just one
session. I became way more aware of the subtle shifts in my own thinking, and I
also became aware of the fact that I don’t have to remain a passive bystander
to the activity taking place in my brain. My thoughts are always a choice:
either I’m choosing to intelligently direct them, or I’m not, and I suffer
because of it. This was a no brainer (see what I did there?) for me, and I was
hooked. Three years later, and meditation is a huge part of my daily personal
success process.
4. Reduces Stress
Not just mental stress, but physical stress
as well! Daily meditation can help lower blood pressure, is anti-inflammatory,
and actually increases your immunity (just like going bare), along with
increased ease of mood and emotional balancing. Again, this is somewhat due in
part to the cascading physiological affects of meditation.
We tell our brains that we’re slowing down,
they respond, and this as a result influences the rest of our bodily systems.
Our central nervous system relaxes, blood pressure naturally drops, tightness
loosens, breathing becomes easier and more full, etc. I want you to notice how
none of this was achieved with an external chemical or stimulus; nothing except
the choice to meditate catalyzed this domino effect. I want you to appreciate
just how friggin’ powerful your ability to simply choose where to direct your
conscious will and intention next truly is.
As someone who’s physically active the
majority of the time, I didn’t expect to see much of a difference in this
category. Boy, was I wrong! After a week of adding daily meditation to my
already busy fitness routine, I noticed myself having much more energy at the
end of the day – despite physically exerting myself more than usual. This was
very odd for me at first, but I quickly got used to it, and even embraced the
“Why am I not getting tired, I’ve been awake for 20 hours” symptoms as a sign
of progress.
Of course this is very, very different than
pounding a pot of black coffee at 8pm, then wondering why you can’t sleep.
You’ll know this for yourself, because you can actually fall asleep rather
quickly if you commit to it. It’s like your brain is trying to tell you that
it’s becoming more and more open to you telling it what you want it to do…
3. Emotional Balance and Control
All this brain-slowing-down is going to give
you the chance to become more conscious and aware of your emotional centers.
You’ll finally become able to sort them apart from the thinking level, as well
as see where thought and emotion do indeed blend and become almost inseparable
at certain points.
The true benefit of this is that you start
to understand your thoughts and emotions because you view them almost from a
third-person perspective. You stop feeling them directly, and start watching
them pass by you like images on a move screen. You start to realize you are not
your thoughts, but the intelligence behind the mind which directs them. Eckhart
Tolle speaks about this perspective quite a bit in his writing.
When you “come back to reality” and go about
your day, don’t be surprised when you suddenly notice yourself being less
reactive in general. You’re becoming quite grounded, young grasshopper.
This is what pulled me out of my stretch of
frequent panic attacks from 2009-2011ish. Back then, I was very reactive to my
environment and prone to blowing up over very trivial matters. I’ve never had a
temper, but I’ve also never been shy about letting other people know I didn’t
approve of what they were doing. All of this occurring in a social or public
setting was a nightmare for me, and I knew I had to regain control of my
emotional states or I would forever be at the mercy of the seas.
Thankfully, (as with almost any problem) a
little self-education solved all that for me. After months of reading books by
authors I highly admired in the field, I began taking meditation far more
seriously. I’d previously dismissed things like meditation, goal setting, and
list making as extremely stupid and time-wasting activities reserved for
newbies who don’t actually know what they were doing. I was very humbled to
find out that I myself had no idea what I was doing, and that that was a huge
part of my problem.
Humility and self-study eventually gave way
to mastering my emotions, and I haven’t had a single panic attack in over three
years .
2. Improves Emotional Intelligence
You might be thinking this is the same thing
as what’s presented above. It’s not. Not even close. The only thing they have
in common is they share the term “emotional” in the title. Plenty of people can
be emotionally balanced (temporarily), but few enable themselves to become
intelligent through their emotions.
To be emotionally balanced is to regain
control over self-sabotaging emotional states that tend to run on autopilot.
To be emotionally intelligent is to
consciously choose to move to new emotional states on the fly all together
(without a the need for arbitrary self-talk fueled by social conditioning),
with the understanding that our attitude plays a massive part in how successful
we are at any activity or endeavor we seek to undertake.
Balancing emotions is definitely the first
step, but it shouldn’t be where you stop and get off the bus entirely. When
your emotions are balanced, it’s because on some level of consciousness, you’re
aware to their negative effects and you’re choosing to stay within a particular
threshold of your own emotional pallete.
Building off of my experience in the prior
step, it wasn’t until I started becoming conscious of the fact that I could
choose any emotion to match any external situation that I was able to really
step up my game. It’s like I became immune to bullshit and perceived
uncertainty. This job sucks? Ok, leave it for something more congruent.
“Aren’t you concerned about money?” No,
because I know as long as I stay focused, I will perceive opportunity and make
it work to my greatest advantage, because I choose to do so. “But…” Stop
choosing to instantly default to the worst case scenario and start assuming the
best things imaginable are going to occur, then watch what happens. I’ll let
the mystery factor entice you into discovering the ending to that book for
yourself .
1. Immensely Improved and Ease of Neuroplasticity
The big one. So big, it supersedes
everything else on this list, because it’s the root cause of everything else on
this list. Throughout the entire meditation process, you’re actively engaged in
neuroplasticity, or the active and intentional increase in certain
physiological responses to certain thoughts, with a decrease in physiological
response to others.
Simply put: You’re rewiring your brain to
respond more positively to life, pick up on more sensitive cues for positive
opportunity for growth, become calibrated to only noticing things which are
congruent with its thinking, and thus putting yourself in a highly-advantageous
position to set and achieve goals.
Simply put, neurplasticity is ultimately
what’s responsible for changing my life. It’s enabled me to overcome the
majority of my irrational fears (failure, insecurity, scarcity/going
broke/homeless, opposite sex, etc) while at the same time enabling me to
harness and store more information. It’s like my brain has received multiple
RAM upgrades; I swear I’m processing, accessing, and storing more information
than before. I also experience periods of what I like to call “sideways
thinking”, where it definitely feels like I’m thinking about two separate
things, often unrelated, simultaneously and without any weakening in the
clarity of focus.
I truly hope this list has inspired you to
look into daily meditation a bit more. Neuroplasticity plays a massive role in
my upcoming book. I truly believe it’s a life-changing activity that more
people need to be aware of. The ability to quit bad habits, start positive
habits, intelligently layout goals, and approach them as optimally as possible
are all waiting right behind the door of neuroplasticity. All we have to do is
open, step inside, and read the user manual.
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