Meditation to Handle Stress

Oftentimes when we talk about health we talk about bodily health; we talk about the foods we eat, the amount of sleep we need, and how many minutes we need of exercise every week. What isn’t always discussed is mental health, and oftentimes there’s a certain stigma attached to the discussion.
However, the mental health we need to discuss is the everyday-type stuff, the weight of our busy lives—our workload, the kids, money, mortgage, etc.—that we carry around with us. There are ways to combat the stresses that these everyday things can cause. Anxiety, tension, and worry are very common human emotions that we must all deal with occasionally.
The practice of meditating helps to calm your anxious mind, find solutions for problems that at one time seemed unsolvable. The best part? anyone whose willing can do it. And there are other benefits: meditation has even been proved to be effective at handling more severe health conditions such as depression, anxiety, bad sleep, headaches, even high blood pressure and heart disease.
How do I do it?
Well, meditation is easy. To start, you just need to find a quiet place to do it, somewhere where you can focus on the meditation and only that. And there are different types of meditation, different methods others have found; here’s a few.
Guided Mediation, which is meditation where you try and imagine places you find relaxing. There’s also Mindful Meditation, which is a common practice, and a good-practice for self-centering during an overly stressful day. During mindful meditation, you try and have an increased awareness as to your surroundings, your thoughts, everything, and you observe it all, while allowing it all to pass through your mind without judgement.
This practice can take many forms with many people, but, basically, it’s a way of being more mindful of yourself, mindful of how you’re feeling, and, in theory, by confronting your thoughts and emotions, you are finding the mental space and peace to deal with them—a one-way conversation becomes a two-way, so to speak.