Does Meditation Help us Deal with the Hardships of Life?

If you’ve been looking for a way to live a more peaceful and stress-free life, where you are in a better control of your inner world, then you have most certainly come across the advice to practice meditation. Indeed, many people vouch for its effectiveness and its many benefits, going as far as to claim that practicing meditation has granted them unprecedented levels of peacefulness and harmony. However, at the same time, if you actually search for hard scientific and research-based proof of the effects of meditation, at best, you’d find contradictory results. Some of the available research concludes that the actual benefits of meditation are relatively small on a physiological level, while others outright disclaim the existence of any such meaningful benefits. 

So, this brings us to the current question of whether meditation is nothing but a hogwash that’s become trendy in current pop-culture or if there’s still some actual point in practicing it. As you’ve probably already guessed, the answer here won’t be as simple as saying “yes” or “no’, and instead it will largely depend on each individual's goals and expectations. If, for instance, your goal is to gain superhuman focus and willpower, all the while reaching a state of absolute inner peace that cannot be disturbed by anything, I’ll disappoint you by saying that meditating, no matter how rigorously and diligently, will probably not achieve this for you. However, if you want to explore a potential method of finding respite and shelter from the many stresses of everyday life, as well as an effective way of rebooting your mind and balancing your emotions, then meditation may be beneficial to you.

If you are into computers and technology in general, you’ve probably heard about the common troubleshooting practice that involves clearing an application’s cached files if there’s some kind of problem with that app. While those cache files are generally helpful, as they help the app provide you with what you want from it more quickly, once they become too many, they could cause instability, sluggishness, and other issues, which is why clearing the cache is recommended in such situations. I like to think of meditation as a way for you to “clear your mind’s cache”. In other words, it is the practice of letting go of all the various thoughts and emotions that have piled up inside your mind and are overloading your mental and emotional capacity. This is especially true during high-stress periods, when you have a lot on your plate, and you constantly feel mentally fatigued because of that. While meditating won’t allow you to forget about your problems and won’t fully get rid of your negative emotions, it will give your mind some breathing room and allow you to view things from a more fresh perspective. And the beauty of it is that this is a benefit of meditation you don’t need to measure to confirm its existence because, quite literally, this is the practice of clearing your mind from all those thoughts and emotions that are bringing you stress. Now, it must be said that filtering out such thoughts and emotions isn’t easy even while meditating, but with consistency and diligence, you’ll soon start to make progress in the desired direction.

Yes, I know that I earlier said meditation won’t give you superhuman focus and that is still true. However, it will help you reclaim your regular-human ability to focus on a single thing for an extended period of time. You see a big problem in today’s world is that staying focused is becoming more and more difficult for an increasing number of people. It’s just that we get bombarded with information from all sides, which causes our focus to constantly shift from one thing to the next, ultimately conditioning us to never really stop our attention on anything for more than a couple of minutes. Now, this may not seem like a huge deal, but the truth is that, in order to achieve or create anything worthwhile, you need to be able to dial in on that thing for much longer than what your monkey brain is comfortable with. This is exactly where practicing meditation can help, as it teaches you exactly this - to stay focused on a single thing (for instance, your breath) for a set amount of time. It sounds simple, but trust me, it’s deceivingly difficult, and it takes a lot of practice before you start becoming proficient at it. Then again, that is exactly why you should be doing it if you want to become more capable of sticking to the task at hand and ignore any distractions, both internal and external, until that task is finished.

Finally, the third benefit of meditation I want to mention in this short post is that it lets you spend time with yourself and learn about how your own mind works. Most people today are so focused on what’s happening out there, in the world around them, that they end up knowing very little about the things that are going on in their own inner worlds. Meditation is a great way to spend some time with yourself and simply observe how your mind functions, what thoughts are most persistent in trying to disturb your peace, and what thoughts and emotions turn out to be trivial and unimportant to you. This grants you the unique opportunity to learn more about your own self and reflect upon your newly-gained knowledge. After all, knowing yourself is both one of the most important and also most ignored aspects of self-improvement.