5 Ways Meditation May Improve Your Heart Health
Looking after your heart does not have to be confined to lots of exercise or restrictive dieting. Sometimes, taking care of your heart can be as simple as sitting quietly and breathing deeply. Meditation’s benefits go far beyond relaxation, as the practice can significantly improve cardiovascular health. Let’s understand how such a calm practice can be so effective for our heart.
Top 5 Effective Ways of Meditation for Heart Health
1. Eases Anxiety and Cortisol Levels
Stress can be damaging to your overall well-being and will impact your cardiovascular health. Stressors that surface in your day-to-day life can cause your heart rate and blood pressure to increase. Devoting a few minutes during your day to meditation can help turn your nervous system down a notch and keep your heart rate stable.
2. Regulates Blood Pressure
While breathing deeply, have you experienced your entire body relaxing? That’s your parasympathetic nervous system kicking in. Meditation can stimulate this system, which can widen blood vessels and lead to lower blood pressure. Lowered blood pressure is less strenuous on the heart.
3. Improves Your Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
HRV refers to the difference in the time intervals between your heartbeats. Higher HRV typically signifies good cardiovascular health. Meditation helps with syncing your movements, which is beneficial for tuning up HRV and allows you to improve heart adaptability and resiliency.
4. Reduces The Body's Inflammation
Joint inflammation is not the only kind of inflammation. Chronic inflammation has also been associated with cardiovascular diseases. But there is a positive side: Meditation has been proven to decrease the body’s inflammatory markers, which relieves some cardiovascular stress and increases longevity.
5. Increases Chances of Better Lifestyle Choices
Increased self-awareness is a result of persistent meditation. That awareness leads, most of the time, to better lifestyle choices, like opting for a salad instead of snacks or walking instead of browsing social media. Those little decisions, when integrated into daily routines over a period of time, greatly benefit heart health.
Mindfulness Meditation in India
Mindfulness Meditation in India stems from ancient practices like Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Vipassana, with its focus on pranayama breathing that centres on being and living in the moment. In India, nowadays, the spiritual past is integrated into modern wellness by bringing mindfulness into schools, retreats, and even offices.