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Meditation is an effective stress-relieving technique, one that employs certain breathing techniques. It is a stress-relieving technique that will help to calm the mind, while creating a sense of relaxation and peacefulness all over.

Meditation takes many forms, and a number of these practices are associated with religions around the world or other spiritual beliefs. Hinduism, for example, has many methods of meditation, including the well-known practice of yoga. As well, Buddhists reach enlightenment through meditation, and Jewish prayers have a meditative quality. Even many streams of Christianity employ meditation to an extent, such as the Catholic use of rosary beads.

That doesn't mean, however, that meditation has to be a religious or spiritual experience. It can also act as a natural, and effective, cure for anxiety and stress that helps restore the balance and harmony of mind and body.

People using meditation to relieve stress need to find a quiet place to meditate. There aren't any hard and fast rules about how to position oneself, but many people using meditation for its stress relieving qualities choose the traditional lotus position. This is a seated position that has the legs crossed, back straight, and shoulders level. Some others are more comfortable without crossed legs.

Whatever the position used when meditating, it's important to keep the spine straight. That way circulation is improved and the slow, deep breathing that is needed can be done properly.

Find a quiet place for meditation, assume a comfortable position, and get ready to begin your natural stress relief. Some prefer to stay silent while meditating. Others keep their eyes shut and hum or make repetitive noises. This helps clear the mind and allows people to block out distracting thoughts and outside sounds.

A lot of people use a specific breathing technique and certain thoughts to get into the swing of things and enter the relaxed, meditative zone. A popular way to do this it to focus on individual body parts. Let yourself relax until your whole body becomes relaxed. This method uses deep breathing as well. These are known as cleansing breaths, as they bring more oxygen to the blood and help clear the mind. After these deep, cleansing breaths, breathing should change to inhaling for a count of four, and then exhaling for a count of eight. These counts help focus the breathing and clear the mind of other thoughts.

Meditation isn't restrictive like medication is: there's no limit on the number of times you can use it. Use it as often as needed and for as long as required, without worrying about the problems with medication, like negative side-effects. In fact, it can even be possible to get results from meditation with only a one-minute session, though it's more common to use 20 to 30 minutes.

Many studies have looked into the use of meditation for stress relief. These studies demonstrate that meditation lowers the chemical byproducts of stress. Meditation also reduces blood pressure and heart rate, it's been shown. This is an advantage to stress-relieving medications, which can temporarily take away feelings of stress, yet may cause harm to the body long-term.

In fact, it's possible to see meditation being used in hospitals by patients suffering from serious chronic or terminal illnesses as a means of stress relief. It is important for them to do so because stress itself contributes to poor health. A report by University of Colorado neurophysiologist Dr. James Austin contended that meditation is able to reprogram the circuitry of the brain. Later on, imaging techniques used to look at brain electrical activity confirmed what he had found.

At the Mind-Body Medical Institute, affiliated with Harvard University and a few Boston hospitals, it was discovered that meditation led to biochemical as well as physical changes tied in with relaxation, such as blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, metabolism, and brain chemistry.

With all this encouraging research showing the benefits of meditation and breathing techniques for relaxation, it's not hard to see why thousands use them for daily stress relief and to improve their lives.

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