Why is Meditation so Important? (With 5 Examples)

You might think that meditation is only important to some people, that it’s not for you. But I think I can make a good case for the universal value of meditation. If you would like to be calmer, more confident, happier, or more in touch with yourself and your surroundings, you might agree with me by the end.

Meditation is more than simply calming the mind for a little rest and recuperation (though who doesn’t frequently need and deserve that?). Meditation can teach you profound resilience to negative thoughts and feelings. It can teach you to find more joy within yourself and your life. It can also give us the gift of improved sleep and physical wellbeing. Not to mention that feeling of connection and vibrancy, which is nice.

This is not all hot air. I’ve learned from personal experience, despite past skepticism, how valuable meditation could be to anyone. If you don’t want to take my word for it, there are also countless studies evidencing this. Whether you’re a skeptic or a fan looking to reaffirm, here are 5 reminders of how valuable/important meditation is.

What is meditation?

Meditation is the practice of training your focus and awareness of the present. That might be of your breath, your thoughts, your senses, or your bodily movements.

These are things we might do sometimes anyway, but practicing them actively teaches us to do so intentionally and mindfully. The benefits of this are numerous. You can:

• Distance yourself from your thoughts and feelings, when they might otherwise overwhelm and consume you.
• Create space to live in the present and relax, as opposed to worrying over future or past problems.
• Build a deeper connection with yourself and your values, improving self-esteem and decision making.
• Drift to sleep more easily at night.
• Set yourself up with more vibrancy and resilience for the day.

Meditation can simply be focusing on your breath or physical sensations. These things ground us, bring us to the here and now, and away from overthinking (the cause of a lot of mental distress). 

But meditation can also bring that awareness and focus back on the mind itself.

When you do this with the same level of calm and control, you can become much more self-aware, experiencing negative thoughts and feelings much less acutely and often. When you don’t over engage with thoughts and feelings, which can otherwise be a default inclination, you don’t feed and perpetuate them.

This is why it can be beneficial for so many reasons, not just for mental health.

This type of mindful fortitude and resilience can teach you to withstand pain, emotional upheaval, and all manner of other negative stressors. The upshot of this is a far greater lease of life, with less turmoil, more balance, and more joy.

Reasons why meditation is so important

If you’re not convinced yet, here are 5 reasons why meditation is important. I assure you that these reasons will make you more open-minded about the benefits of meditation. 

1. Meditation can improve your physiology

Many stress-reducing practices have been shown to also improve physical problems. Particularly with stress, for example, reducing it often reduces blood pressure and chances of things like heart disease.

It’s no new knowledge that the mind and body are inextricably linked. When agitated by imagined concerns – what will happen in the future, what has happened in the past – you may find your heart racing, your brows sweating, or stomach-churning.

It’s not hard to conceive, then, that prolonged mental distress may affect us long term.

Meditation is a great way to calm nerves and reduce blood pressure. This study showed that it reduced the level of grey matter atrophy in long-term meditators. This atrophy is the deterioration of brain matter which causes functional impairments and neurodegenerative diseases.

2. Meditation is a growing treatment for mental health issues

Anything that helps you to relax could be good for your mental health at times. The practice of meditation though has profound and lasting effects. 

When you learn to control your focus and awareness of thoughts and separate yourself from them, it’s easy to feel like you could conquer any mental health issues that come your way.

Meditation and mindfulness are fast becoming among the top treatments for various mental health disorders. It’s effective, safe, and free. Something that can’t be said for talking therapies and medication.

Meditation has been found to be an effective treatment for sufferers of major depressive disorder (MDD) with an inadequate response to antidepressants. Antidepressants and psychotherapy are frontline treatments for MDD, but supposedly only 50-60% of patients respond well to the initial course.

Though study into meditation as a treatment for suicide prevention is in its early days, the potential is promising. Meditation is becoming ever more explored and regarded by the scientific community as a means for treating various mental health issues, and indeed in the army as a preventative measure for suicide. It has exhibited positive results in the reduction of suicidal symptoms.

I myself have found meditation deeply soothing and affirming most of the time, but counterintuitive and counterproductive during some instances of high stress.

3. Meditation can help you understand yourself and build confidence

Due to meditation’s introspective awareness, the practice also teaches us how to monitor ourselves. Many thought processes and emotions often sail us by without acknowledgment.

When we stop to experience and observe them, we can learn our truths and build our understanding of them.

For instance, you might give an answer to something without really pausing to consider your emotional response. I myself am guilty of this. A friend might ask something of me and my knee-jerk reaction is to say yes.

It’s hard to be confident, assertive, and get what you want and need when not considering yourself for even a moment. In a way, mediation helps to slow down and pull apart threads of thought and emotion. When you do this you recognize underlying feelings and needs that might otherwise be squashed by day-to-day activity and unconscious tides of thought.

Becoming more in tune with everything going on inside enables you to make better judgments and decisions based on your genuine needs and desires.

In effect, it enables you to make better choices for yourself and to more confidently pursue what you need and want.

4. Meditation can help you find joy

Through the process of becoming more in tune with yourself, you can also discover the constantly changing and layered emotions and feelings within. Even when feeling a total absence of joy, you can find it through meditation by exploring a deeper level where joy still resides.

Greater resilience and reduced inclination for negative spirals automatically allow more room for joy. But meditation can also help you to mine beneath the clouds of sadness and stress and find unexpected pools of joy and love. You might find more tolerance and compassion for others in your life as well.

Meditation is not about shunning negative emotions and thoughts but about accepting and moving past them.

Negativity feeds well of itself, and can quickly seem like it is the only feeling present. Through meditation and a deeper understanding of thought impermanence, you can easily discover just how false this is.

5. Meditation can help you relax but also bring you more energy

Many people meditate before bed. 

In sleep, your conscious mind switches off and you rest physically as a result. Meditation is almost like a halfway house between conscious thought and unconscious sleep. While practicing simple awareness but moving away from active, conscious thought, you can allow the mind to wander more freely as it does in sleep.

For some (like me) lying in bed in darkness can allow maximum energy to go into thinking. If you move away from this and observe thoughts instead, they drift in and out and you can almost count them like sheep.

In the morning, many people find that meditation is most beneficial, for similar reasons. In the morning, your mind has not had time to collect a day’s worth of thoughts that you would otherwise have to ease out of. Instead of jolting out of bed and into your phone and future worries, it can be a good wake-up routine to instead ease into your waking awareness.

This can ease us into the day in a healthier, less abrupt way. I often find that after a meditation session I feel lighter and with a stronger mental fortitude. Like a good breakfast, it can set you up for what’s to come.

💡 By the way: If you want to start feeling better and more productive, I’ve condensed the information of 100’s of our articles into a 10-step mental health cheat sheet here. 👇

Wrapping up

Meditation is safe and free. It can swell your confidence, improve your health, sharpen your mind, bring you greater joy and improve your relationship with yourself. Who doesn’t want to be happier, calmer, more confident, and better attuned with themself and their surroundings?

What’s your favorite form of meditation? How has meditation helped you live a better life? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!