Meditation Benefits
While in recovery, being aware of your thoughts and feelings is essential to monitoring your mental and emotional wellbeing. In detox and rehab, there will be a lot of change and shifts in your environment, people, and situations—in addition to adjusting to being clean and sober. Meditation is key to remaining honest with yourself about your inner dialogue and deep emotional state throughout rehab and recovery.
Not only does rehab focus on the physical aspect of drug addiction, but also focuses largely on the psychological and emotional. While there medications that can help with withdrawals and with returning to equilibrium, keeping your mind and emotions in check will prove incredibly helpful while on the road to recovery. In meditation, you will learn to develop deeper awareness and self-control while identifying why you feel or think the way you do.
So what exactly is meditation? Though this practice began in eastern religions such as Buddhism and Taoism, it has come to mean the practice of mindfulness, or the process of awareness. This simply means that you take time out of your day to turn your attention inward in order to notice what your thought life is, and where your emotions are. The next essential step after noticing these things is to ask the question, why? Why am I thinking these things? Where did this thought cycle come from? Why am I agitated, stressed, anxious, etc.? Then identify which external factors caused you to think and feel the way you do. Taking inventory of these factors—whether negative or positive—will allow you to set yourself up for success in the future. You will be able to cut out things that cause you to be anxious or stressed and do more of the things that make you feel relaxed and at ease.
Some other benefits of meditation include:
- Decreased anxiety
- Greater emotional stability
- Gain clarity and peace of mind
- Lowers high blood pressure
- Increases focus
Know that meditation takes time and consistent practice in order to learn to center yourself and become still and focused. Meditation will not be easy right away, but the long-term benefits of sticking with it will be worth it. Do not be discouraged if you are easily distracted and have a hard time focusing for too long at first. Like anything, it will become more natural the more you do it.
If you want to learn more about meditation and other practices to help with recovery, call (888) 507-1355 today to speak with a trained treatment specialist. Perhaps practicing meditation is one of the keys to your success in recovery!
