Meditation and its role in stress management

Meditation has done a lot more than becoming a mainstream trend and a traditional practice from the past; it’s become something people use to overcome stress.

Many people have a reason for practicing meditation: some use it to help reflect on the past, the present and the future. However, many of us, including myself, use it to cope with trauma or other life disturbances. But ultimately, people who have found help through meditation experience a sigh of relief because it truly helps overcome life’s difficulties.

When you become so busy with daily routines, you don’t always notice the small things that bother you. Whether they are small or big problems, the issues we do not notice pile up. Once it piles up, you become overwhelmed unless you figure out what’s really bothering you. For some, this may be very difficult because some stress is not easy to overcome.

Meditation may sound like a very simple fix by noticing what’s stressing you. But depending on how stressed you are and how well you can manage your stress, meditation may be too difficult of a practice for you.

Imagine how it feels to have a lack of time. You have an upcoming deadline for school, your boss may need you to come into work, everything is out of your control and you don’t know what’ll make this any easier.

Meditation helps eliminate this cycle of stress by helping you reflect on the problems that are bothering you, put you in a state of tranquility and help you develop a solution towards these stressors. Instead of feeling lost in your thoughts and uneasy in your head, you’re trading it for deep breathing and focusing on your breath. This naturally relaxes you and allows you to enter a state of reflection.

NBC News states that students from Visitacion Valley School in San Francisco found a lot of help from meditation. Despite seeing guns on a daily basis and multiple fights each week, meditation has helped these students become more focused and calm.

Although it can be very beneficial, it can also trigger anxiety, depression or delusional ideas. Not many people know how meditation works. In a nutshell, this tool helps you convince yourself that you can do anything that you put your mind to. The only thing that is holding you back is yourself. For some, when they entertain this idea too often without having a firm grasp as to how things work in the real world, they may start to come up with far-fetched ideas.

It’s not that meditation causes this, but when you’re in a deep meditative trance, things come up from the back of your mind. Claire Hoffman, a contributor to the Rolling Stone, writes that meditation was an escape from reality for herself. It was a door she could go into and not notice whatever else is going on.

Even though this is a very beneficial tool for people to use in their everyday lives, an issue starts to develop when the practice is overused by becoming an escape from stressors.