Like anxiety, stress is caused by our brain’s (and body’s) reaction to events and thoughts that, in the moment, feel overwhelming. This doesn’t mean that stress isn’t real. Big, stressful things happen all the time. So do any number of smaller stressful events, that, when they build up, can overwhelm our capacity to feel we can manage.

Meditation helps you maintain a greater sense of calm during challenging times by allowing you to disengage from the habitual thought-reaction cycle.

Another big way that meditation helps you feel less stressed is by cultivating a deeper sense of overall steadiness and calm. From this state, which continues beyond the actual activity of meditating, events and situations that usually feel stressful may no longer seem as overwhelming.

Meditation also cultivates greater self-awareness, and can help you recognize, for example, when you’re feeling a bit stressed before you get too overwhelmed, allowing you to take self-care measures that can help.

When disrupted sleep is caused by stress, anxiety, or any hyper-aroused state, meditation can help bring both mind and body into a deeper state of relaxation.

From interrupting the stress response to cultivating self-compassion, meditation can be helpful in countering the thoughts and feelings that trigger a depressive episode. By fostering self-awareness, meditation can also help you to see what you might need when feeling vulnerable, whether it’s taking a walk or calling a friend.

By reducing the stress response, meditation supports a healthy heart and cardiovascular system. Research has shown that meditation practice can lower blood pressure, and may reduce risk of cardiovascular disease.

The psychological and physiological mechanisms behind addiction are complex, making both treatment and long-term success challenging. Meditation has shown some promise as an adjunct to substance-abuse treatment, for helping support behavior change, disrupting unhealthy thought patterns, and for increasing self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-compassion.

Numerous studies have found that people who suffer from chronic pain experience some relief, both in their perception of pain and in their outlook, after meditation training. Research subjects have also reported reductions in pain intensity.

In supporting greater outlook and reducing stress and anxiety, meditation may be a useful post-operative recovery tool. Researchers have found that patients need less pain medication following meditation interventions, and they feel less worried and anxious, all of which support better outcomes and shorter recovery periods.

Meditation practices offer a range of benefits that support greater sense of comfort and less anxiety for people who struggle with social anxiety. By cultivating self-acceptance and self-compassion, they can help you to feel less judgmental toward yourself. By disrupting negative thoughts, they support healthier outlook and lower susceptibility to triggers that might normally incite anxiety.

Post-traumatic stress disorder results from experiencing something so stressful that it continues to trigger both psychological and physiological reactions long after the event has passed. Meditation may be a useful adjunct treatment for PTSD sufferers. In helping to disengage from repetitive thought loops and stay focused in the present moment, practitioners can gain some relief from re-triggering thoughts and feelings. People struggling with PTSD may also benefit from meditation’s impact on stress and anxiety, helping them to come down from a state of hyperarousal, which makes it difficult to relax, concentrate, and sleep, among other challenges.

Older people enjoy the same range of health-related benefits of meditation as other people do, and particularly for conditions that can worsen with age, including chronic pain, heart disease, and even irritable bowel syndrome.

Research also indicates that meditation offers some protection against age-related brain deterioration, and may offset some cognitive decline. It might even increase cognitive ability and stave off age-related memory loss.

As important, some of the most promising findings about meditation for older people comes from its ability to foster greater feelings of connection and reduce feelings of loneliness.

There's a good reason that many professional athletes and sports teams use meditation. Its ability to help athletes focus and recover from mental set-backs makes it a powerful performance tool. Athletes also benefit from meditation’s overall ability to:

• manage pain
• improve sleep
• cultivate self-awareness
  

Businesses have embraced meditation training for its proven benefits to employee health and well-being, especially in areas that matter most on the job, including:

• improved focus
• stress reduction
• reduced sick leave
• increased engagement
• increased job satisfaction

Meditation is also a popular management-training tool to support leaders to better handle the demands of their jobs. In particular, it’s been found to help business leaders:

• manage stress
• have greater empathy
• improve listening skills

While meditation has been practiced for thousands of years in contemplative traditions, such as Buddhism, it entered modern mainstream culture by way of support for the mind. In 1979, a researcher named Jon Kabat Zinn, who had studied Zen meditation, started a stress-reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and created the landmark 8-week program Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Originally intended as a complementary and adjunct therapy to counteract the stress that impedes physical healing, MBSR and its offshoot, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which was developed specifically to help manage chronic depression, launched a powerful new therapeutic model that is widely used today.

At the heart of these and other therapies, including Meditation Therapy, is the recognition that mindfulness, which is strengthened through meditation, offers numerous psychological benefits. Among other things, it:

• Reduces stress
• Reduces anxiety
• Can improve sleep
• Reduces reactivity
• Fosters self-awareness
• Fosters self-compassion
• Boosts emotional regulation
• Decreases depressive relapse