The prevalence of meditation is growing as more people discover its advantages.

Meditation is a continual process of training your brain to focus and redirect your thoughts.

You can use it to increase awareness of your environment. Lots of individuals think of it as a means to decrease stress and develop concentration.

People also use the method to create new valuable habits and feelings, like a positive mood and outlook, self-discipline, wholesome sleep patterns as well as increased pain tolerance.

Stress reduction is among the most frequent reasons people try meditation.

One study involving over 3,500 adults revealed that it lives up to its reputation for anxiety reduction.

Usually, psychological and physical stress causes elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This produces lots of the damaging effects of stress, like the release of inflammation-promoting compounds called cytokines.

These effects can disrupt sleep, encourage depression and anxiety, raise blood pressure and contribute to fatigue and cloudy thinking.

Less anxiety translates to less stress.

For example, an eight-week analysis of mindfulness meditation helped participants lower their anxiety.

Additionally, it reduced symptoms of anxiety disorders, like phobias, social anxiety, paranoid thoughts, obsessive-compulsive behaviours and anxiety attacks.

Most volunteers had lasting results by practising their routine meditation. They also had lower stress levels over the long term.

An extensive study with 2,466 participants also revealed a wide variety of different meditation approaches might decrease stress levels.