Mental Health Monday: SNACK

These days as we are all learning to adapt to a new normal of staying indoors, man have been finding it difficult to focus on what is going right with the world instead of what is going wrong. With all the unknowns of what the future holds, it’s easy to get stuck in negative feedback loops which ultimately breed stress in the body. And right now stress is the last thing we need if we want to boost our immune systems and keep a healthy mental state.

Regular practice of mindfulness meditation has benefits for your physical as well as your mental health. Some of these include:

Reducing stress: Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), a standardized therapeutic approach to mindfulness meditation, has been shown to reduce symptoms of stress in healthy individuals.1 The practice has also been found to be beneficial for a number of mental and physical disorders including anxiety, depression, and chronic pain.

Lower heart rate: Heart disease is one of the top causes of death in the United States and research suggests that mindfulness may be beneficial for your heart. In one study, participants either enrolled in an online mindfulness meditation program or were added to a waitlist for traditional treatment for heart disease.2 Those who participated in mindfulness meditation had significantly lower heart rates and performed better on a test of cardiovascular capacity.

Improved immunity: Research also suggests that mindfulness practices may improve your body’s resistance to illness. One study compared the impact of both mindfulness and exercise on immune function.3 They found that people who had taken part in an eight-week mindfulness course had greater gains in immune function than those in the exercise group.

Better sleep: Studies have also shown that practicing mindfulness meditation might improve sleep and even be useful for treating certain sleep disturbances. One 2019 study found that mindfulness meditation significantly improved sleep quality.

#mindfulmonday #mentalhealthmatters

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This post was written by Blackburn Media