Meditation: A Bubble Bath for Your Mind and Body

Written by Dietitians at Diabetes Control for Life

Interest in meditation is growing fast. And meditation is making its way into modern medicine. Many doctors encourage their patients to meditate as a way to manage stress, anxiety, pain, and many chronic diseases.

This Well-being article is about this increasingly popular practice.

• It explains what meditation is — and isn’t.
• It describes how meditation can benefit your health and perhaps help your diabetes control efforts.
• It provides a few basic guidelines on how to meditate, if you’d like to give it a try.

What Meditation Is — and Isn’t

Meditation is a type of relaxation technique. It’s about paying attention to what you’re doing, focusing on the present moment, and promoting a sense of inner calm and self-awareness. Meditation helps you enter a relaxed, restful state of mind, which can help you manage stress and anxiety — conditions that can contribute to a variety of diseases, like heart disease, or make an existing health problem worse. It’s not about crystals and it’s not necessarily about burning incense, looking for the meaning of life, or sitting cross-legged on the floor and chanting “ommmm” for hours on end.

Meditation is an area of mind/body medicine in which the workings of the mind influence the health of the body. It originated as a religious practice in India some 3,000 years ago, and exists in a variety of forms in most religions: prayer, reading scripture or religious writings, or saying the rosary.

Whether it’s transcendental meditation, relaxation-response meditation, or mindfulness-based stress-reduction meditation, the principle is the same: to focus one’s full mental attention on something. The object of attention can be an image, a sound, a word or repeated phrase, or one’s own breath.

Benefits of Meditation

Research is showing that meditation produces many health benefits. Here’s what is known so far:

• Meditation tames the body’s “fight or flight response” to stress by reducing the production of chemicals like adrenaline that raise blood pressure and heart rate and increase blood flow to the muscles. When this response is triggered by day-to-day stress and anxiety, the impact on health can be devastating. Meditation may help prevent some of the resulting health problems, or at least delay their onset.
• Meditation can help lower blood pressure in people with high blood pressure.
• It improves the quality of sleep and quality of life, particularly in people with chronic diseases like diabetes.
• Meditation has been shown to help people manage chronic pain. It may also shorten the time required to treat and heal some skin disorders like psoriasis.

Meditation and Diabetes Control

Meditation can’t take the place of a healthful diet and regular physical activity to manage your diabetes. But it may help you better manage the stresses and strains of day-to-day living, so you can focus on making healthy food choices and exercising regularly.

Some people turn to food as a way to cope with stress. Others retreat to their sofas and remote controls instead of exercise. Meditation is a more healthful alternative. You can use meditation to calm yourself and increase your sense of self-awareness. As the quote at the beginning of this Well-being article says, once you’re aware of what you’re doing, you have the power to change it. Being mindful may help you prevent a lapse into your old ways of dealing with stress, like overeating and becoming sedentary.

Learn to Be Mindful

If the benefits of meditation appeal to you and you’d like to give it a try, here are some basic pointers:

• Pick a time when you won’t be interrupted and a place that’s quiet. Turn off the lights, if it will help you relax.
• Get into a comfortable position. Try sitting in a chair with your feet on the floor, posture straight, and hands in your lap. Or sit cross-legged on a pillow on the floor, or slightly reclining on your bed.
• Decide how long you want to meditate. Keep a clock or watch nearby, if you need one. Stick to your time commitment, even if you get bored and impatient. Start with five minutes and work your way up to 20 minutes.
• Pick something to focus your thoughts on. It could be the sensation of your breathing, or a sound, word, or phrase (a “mantra”) that is meaningful and soothing to you.
• Close your eyes and breathe gently, slowly, and naturally, in and out. Listen to your breath as you inhale and exhale. Feel your stomach rise and fall with each breath. If you prefer to use a mantra instead, repeat it each time you exhale.
• Be nonjudgmental. If your thoughts begin to wander, say “oh well” to yourself and come back to your breathing or listening to your mantra.

Be patient with yourself and don’t expect immediate results. By practicing meditation every day, you’ll discover a greater sense of calm and can let life’s little inconveniences roll off your shoulders. Eventually, your newfound practice of meditating will pay off in a greater sense of lifestyle and perhaps in improved health.

Summary

• Meditation teaches relaxation, self-awareness, and inner calm. It has many health benefits, one of which is stress management. Using meditation to manage stress can help you avoid lapsing into old habits of overeating and underexercising when your stress is high.
• Meditation can’t take the place of modern medicine, but it can reduce stress and may help medical treatments work better.