This post is a guest submission. Please see our Disclaimer, Disclosures, & Affiliate Notice for details.
Some activities and habits have the quality of giving all around benefits, especially when done at the right time and at the right place. Practicing meditation in the morning is one such activity.
Meditation is a powerful tool that helps you get focused, align with your goals, and calm your mind. I think we can all agree on that, whether or not you practice meditation.
First thing in the morning that you should be doing is exercising. There is nothing better than working out to start a day the right way.
Mary Hunter, professional researcher & academic writer from How to Stay Motivated When You Work By Yourself
It is common for researchers and writers to write about the advantages and most effective styles of regular exercise. The benefits of exercising in the morning are multiplied to a great extent if your exercise regime is combined with meditation.
Meditation makes exercise more effective.
Julia Dellitt, professional writer
This tells us that practicing meditation in the morning can give us two-fold benefits – first as the constructive act that meditation is in and of itself, and second for doing it at the most effective time of the day. So what are these benefits that make this habit so valuable?
Meditation Lets You Start the Day with a Fresh Mind
We all have our tensions, frustrations, and hassles in life. Whether you’re a white-collar worker with a project deadline to catch, a businessman trying to close a very important deal, or a stay-at home mom busy with your children all the time, your mind would be occupied with too many things when you go to bed at night.
Most often all the stress stays in your mind even during your sleep. When you wake up in the morning to begin another day, you need a boost to clear your thoughts before you start with the chores of the day.
If your job particularly involves creativity, it would be even more crucial for your mind to be clear before you start your day at work. This is where a quick 15-minute session of meditation can come into place.
Spending few minutes in seclusion and peace gives a chance to your mind to rejuvenate itself and gather the zeal to continue with life. People who are able to take out the time meditate every morning are far less irritable, more efficient in their work, and understanding towards others. As their mind is fresh, they are able to come up with solutions to problems faster than others.
Good Time to Plan out the Day in Peace
Planning out your day in advance increases efficiency in daily routines, and there’s no better time to do this than when your mind is meditating in peace. Even small freelancing jobs require careful thinking and planning out the tasks before implementing them.
Meditation unleashes the subconscious mind power, pushing the entire brain into a central state. This means during meditation, our subconscious mind moves to the forefront, giving us more access to it and increasing the ability to focus on details and remember events. In other words, it gives us the ability to harness the full power of our brain.
Thus when you’re meditating, tasks such as planning, listing and scheduling can easily take place in your head without the need to jot down all the points you come across. This kind of planning is important as it helps us avoid forgetting important chores, or wasting time throughout the day thinking what to do first. It also makes you feel at ease as no matter how busy you are the whole day, you know in your mind since morning that everything that needs to be done is achievable within the day.
Instills a Positive Mindset
There is not only peace but also a certain kind of joy in morning meditation. In psychological terms, this joy is known as brainwave entertainment, which is a pleasurable state of mind achieved when the frequency of brain waves gets automatically synchronized with the surrounding environment and external stimuli. This state tends to bring about positive thoughts in your head and eradicate any negative feelings, destructive thoughts, or undesirable emotions.
When you have positive thoughts in your mind, you emit a pleasant vibe that spreads your optimism to others. You develop an improved self-image and a more positive outlook on life, driving others towards you to share the joy and energy.
Hence, by just spending 10 or 15 minutes meditating every morning, you might be able to eliminate quarrels, conflicts and misunderstandings with the people involved in your daily life; and create a productive and pleasant environment in your household and among your colleagues.
A Fantastic Technique to Lose Weight
Even though meditation is more like a mind’s activity rather than the body’s, its benefits include being able to lose weight, especially if practiced on an empty stomach like before having breakfast in the morning.
Morning meditation contributes to weight loss by stabilizing your metabolism, easing out digestion, reducing muscle tension and regulating hormone levels. This is the reason why it is a doctor-recommended habit to develop.
In meditation, you get to the truth of why you consistently skip your morning workout or grab fast food each night on the way home. You can explore your motivations for weight loss and why you haven’t accomplished your goals.
Dina Kaplan, Forbes contributor
This means meditation can make you realize why all your past diet and exercise programs have failed, and how you can adopt a more personalized approach in your journey towards a healthier and slimmer body.
When you meditate first thing in the morning, you are doing it on an empty stomach, which is super effective for burning fat by optimizing your liver function to utilize all the nutrients that go into your stomach during the rest of the day in the healthiest way.
Helps to Keep Stress Levels Low
Morning meditation has the potential to reduce stress by regulating blood pressure and blood sugar level. Psychologists have also revealed that people who have a habit of meditating every morning are better at coping with stress-triggered medical conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, irritable bowel syndrome and fibromyalgia.
Reduced stress further translates to a drop in anxiety, which means you’ll be able to perform better at work or in any other activity that you’re up to, without panicking or worrying too much about it. It is a highly productive habit for those who suffer from job-related anxiety due to high-pressure working environments in the organization where they are employed.
The more regular you are in your morning meditation routine, the longer these biological benefits would last.
May Help Fight Addictions
Along with curing the usual psychological and biological problems one may have, morning meditation can also help you come out from severe addictions. Those who have enough practice to meditate to be able to dig into their subconscious minds develop a mental discipline that gives them increased self-control and awareness of things that trigger addictive behaviors. By making your mind focus on the productivity of life, you can break your dependencies and redirect all your unwanted habits. This in turn increases your willpower and enables you to keep your emotions under control, even when you quit what you were previously addicted to.
The habit of morning meditation is a fantastic replacement for any unhealthy habits that you know are spoiling you but you are not able to get rid of in the fast-paced life. Whether it’s severe alcoholic addiction or simply strong cravings of a particular junk food, it is possible to slowly eradicate it by developing a routine of meditating in the morning.
Improves Sleep Patterns
As strange as it may sound, meditating in the morning will ensure that you have a peaceful sleep on the night to come. Since meditation helps to clear your mind from unconstructive thoughts that often interfere with sleep, it will shorten the time that you usually take to fall asleep at night. The peaceful state that you’ll achieve in the morning will maintain itself all the way till the night, if you are regular in your meditation regime. It would rid you of any nightmares and let you have a continuous 6-8 hours sleep at night.
So many people in the world suffer from insomnia nowadays. They try all sorts of cures from sleeping pills to drugs to even life-threatening solutions, but just end up getting addicted to some pills, adding another problem rather than fixing the original one. If only these people could be advised to develop the habit of starting their day with a brief session of morning meditation, they would begin to feel the benefits within just a few days.
Regardless of your age, morning meditation will help in regulating your sleep patterns by letting you go into a peaceful deep-sleep state faster than any pill could ever do.
Final Thoughts
There are so many fantastic benefits that you can gain from meditation. And a morning meditation practice will only add to those benefits. Once you are able to develop a consistent habit, may it be for only 10 minutes every morning, you will begin to ripe the fruits sooner than you expect.
Sharon is a marketing specialist and blogger from Manchester, UK. Whenever she has a minute, she loves to share a few of her thoughts about marketing, writing and blogging with you. Currently, she is working as a marketer at Edugeeksclub Writing Services and Rush My Essay.