9 Reasons to Meditate in 2019

Meditation has become pretty mainstream. Still, most of us don’t have a regular meditation practice yet.

Meditation has improved my life so much that I now want to inspire people to start a daily meditation practice, even if they start with 3 min a day.

So here are 9 reasons to start meditation in 2019. I regroup them under 3 categories: Performance, Health & Mood.

A- Performance

1- Improve your focus

Our ability to focus has decreased a lot. We have a lot of things to worry about and we get constantly distracted by our phone, our emails, social media, our colleagues… People with the ability to focus have become pretty rare and they are now very valuable.

When you meditate, your train your mind to refocus, which will drastically improve your productivity.

“I could not have survived these last few years without meditation, without the peace of mind meditation brings. I couldn’t have written Sapiens without meditation.” — Yuval Noah Harari

2- Improve your time management

Meditation is not a placebo and we have countless studies to prove it. Still, the mere fact of allowing yourself to do nothing during a certain time every day will give you ownership of your time. You realise that you are not overwhelmed and that what you dedicate your time to is a matter of priority.

3- Increase your clarity of mind

Productivity is one thing, but working on the right thing is even more important. You can be very fast at climbing a ladder, but if it was leaning against the wrong wall, it’s of little use.

Meditation allows you to have a better clarity of mind, a better overall view of where you’re at and what really matters.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln

B- Health

4- Rewire your brain

As mentioned, we know have countless serious studies that show the impact of meditation. Especially the recent progress in neuroscience allowed us to track the changes in the brain.

In a nutshell, meditation allows you to increase the size and activities of relevant parts of your pre-frontal cortex while reducing the activity in the reptilian brain, which is the more “animal” part of you. The one that makes you eat that cookie when you know it’s not good for you.

It also reduces the activity of your default mode network, meaning you’re able to create new pathways more easily, which improves your ability to solve new problems.

5- Release less cortisol

Meditation reduces stress. It allows you to stop living in a constant fight-or-flight mode. Hormonally speaking, it reduces the amount of cortisol you will release. Cortisol is useful in certain scenarios, like when our hunter-gatherer ancestors needed to escape a tiger. But when used too much, it creates disease.

6- Slow down ageing

Probably mainly due to the reduction in stress, meditation slows down ageing. Biologically speaking, meditation helps to maintain the size of your telomeres. Telomeres are little caps at the end of your chromosomes that reduce over time and are a great indication of your biological age.

C- Mood

7- Be happier

On top of being more relaxed, meditation allows you to take some distance with how you feel. Instead of being in the washing machine, you look at it from outside. That allows you to have more sustainable and unconditional happiness.

As a happy person, you also become someone nicer to be around, so expect to have more friends

8- Have more perspective

Meditation helps you to get out of your head and to see things from a wider perspective. On top of helping with problem-solving and happiness, it also allows you to see things from other people’s perspective and to be more open-minded

9- Control & discipline

Meditation is also a discipline and it gives you the feeling of being in the driver’s seat of your life. Having this little habit and sticking to it makes you feel like you are in control of your life.

While people often worry that it may make them lose their drive, this feeling of control actually allows me to focus on what it within my control and to achieve way more.

Now do it!

There are so many ways you can get started, I don’t want to expand here. One of the most popular ways in through apps like Headspace, Calm and Insight Timer

Now it’s often not that simple so I also created a 22-day program that tackles 1 by 1 all the hurdles to starting a regular meditation practice.

I know you will get so much out of it so I’m excited for you. I also think the world will be an even better place if most people meditate regularly.

Peace ❤
A️lex

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