How Active Meditation Can Boost Your Mental Health

More and more people are starting to engage in some type of meditation. This is due to the numerous benefits meditation can bring.

Also, active meditation has become a huge trend because it can offer even more benefits, and it is perfect for people who like staying active.

So, let’s see what active meditation is and how it can boost your mental health. 

What’s Active Meditation?

Some people don’t like regular meditation because they might find being alone with their thoughts a nightmare.

Also, sitting for long periods and meditating is boring to some people, too.

It is a fact that meditation takes time, work, and practice, and it can take some time for you to get accustomed and familiar with letting the thoughts just flow through your head. 

So, if you are one of those people who don’t like typical mediation practices, you should try active meditation.

This type of meditation is great for those of you who don’t like sitting still.

This alternative to the traditional mediation is focused more on an activity and you should dedicate your brain power to the activity you’ve chosen.

One example of active meditation would be listening to your breath or listening to the sounds around you and noting how they feel.

Active meditation can also be a simple walk while you are focusing on each aspect of that walk.

You simply have to be present, think about the activity you are doing, look at your feet, move as you walk, and raise awareness of your body and environment. 

Benefits of Active Meditation

Just like traditional meditation, an active one can bring you a lot of benefits, both mental and physical.

For example, active meditation can keep you centered, especially when situations and life, in general, gets too overwhelming.

When we encounter too much stress daily, even the most minor things can make us feel overwhelmed within minutes.

However, if you practice active meditation regularly, or as soon as you feel overwhelmed, you can ease your mind, focus on the present and help your thoughts relax. 

Additionally, active meditation can help you relieve stress. Since this type of medication often involves physical activities, it can help you get the best of both worlds.

Exercising promotes the release of “happy hormones” in our bodies, helping us get rid of stress and anxiety.

And when you are mindful about your exercising, you can help your mind relax even more and forget about stress completely.

That is why regular active meditation can help you boost your health, both physically and mentally, since stress hormones can damage both. 

What’s more, you don’t even have to do too much moving and exercising to enjoy active meditation and its benefits.

You can simply buy chakra stones, take them to your walk and hold them in your hands focusing on your walking and stones to help practice mindfulness and relax, remove stress and clear your mind of negative thoughts. 

Active meditation has also been tested as a treatment for clinical depression. The research was done at Rutgers University and they gathered 52 young adults – 22 of them had clinical depression.

The participants spent eight weeks exercising for 30 minutes on a treadmill and meditated for 30 minutes. After each season, researchers examined the emotional state of the participants.

The results were amazing and showed that no matter if you suffer from clinical depression or not, you can severely reduce anxiety and stress through active meditation.

Also, both groups reported having fewer negative thoughts after this research. Plus, participants with clinical depression managed to reduce their symptoms by 40%. 

While physical activity can benefit your mental health by increasing your self-efficacy, control of symptoms of stress and anxiety, and even promoting better sleep when combined with mediation you get even more benefits.

Meditation itself can help with your emotional and mental health, increase your willpower and help have better mental fortitude.

And when you combine these to form active meditation, you can get the best of both worlds, significantly improving your mental health. 

There is no doubt that physical activity and meditation individually bring a lot of health benefits. However, for some traditional meditation is a bit boring, tedious, or simply not their cup of tea.

So, for those of you who can’t sit still there is a solution to be able to practice meditation and reap its benefits – active meditation.