Do you feel like you have a lot on your plate? With everything going on in and outside of school, there might not be time for you to unwind or relax. It may feel as though your mind is on overdrive 24/7. A committed meditation practice can help you slow down and relieve some of that stress. Even if you are not that stressed, meditation can still help amplify your healthy lifestyle. The benefits you receive from this practice are plentiful.

So, what are the benefits of meditation? Well, way too many to count! But, there are some main benefits of meditation that are not usually recognized and deserve some credit. In this article, you will learn 15 benefits of meditation for students.

1. Improves Mind-Body Connection

The relationship between mind and body can influence your overall well-being and life satisfaction. Meditation helps you become mindful of how your thoughts and feelings affect your body. Remaining conscious of your inner thoughts is an effective way to maintain control over them.

The mind and body have to work together in harmony to keep everything organized on the inside. A strong mind-body connection can reshape self-destructive thinking patterns.

Healthy thoughts lead to healthy actions. Healthy actions lead to a healthy lifestyle.

2. Reduces Stress Levels

Students face constant pressure from stress-inducing events, such as demanding classes, new jobs, peer pressure, and other life experiences. Meditation is a powerful stress reliever because it gets to the root cause of your current stress. You can keep stress low and regulated with a safe meditative space.

A study from the National Library of Medicine reveals that meditation encourages your brain to respond healthier to stressful situations. This promotes positive psychology and decreases the negativity that feeds into stressful thinking.

3. Relieves Test Anxiety

Are you feeling anxious about an upcoming test? Meditation practice can help calm your nerves. Through meditation, you can reflect on your anxious thoughts and why they occur. The more you learn about your thoughts, the more you realize that they do not define you.

Meditation allows you to sit with negative feelings and slowly let them go. After some practice, you will be able to change your existing relationship with anxiety by forming new perspectives.

4. Keeps Emotions in Check

Meditation can keep your emotions in check because it supports your emotional stability. Maintaining emotional stability as a student can improve self-control. Usually, people reject negative emotions and try to suppress them. Suppressing emotions only makes them more likely to arise later on in life.

Using meditation, you can learn to acknowledge and accept those negative emotions to lower their influential power. Always remember that you are strong and do not have to act on negative emotions. If you can accept your emotions as they are, it can lower self-deprecation and increase emotional control.

It may be difficult to meditate while your emotions flare up. It is best to give yourself a safe space with no distractions to explore these emotions. If needed, ask a roommate or close friend to sit with you. Meditation does not have to be done alone, nor do you have to deal with stressful situations alone.

5. Increases Mindfulness

Mindfulness is important because it can help you make the most of each moment. You may often spend time thinking about your past or your future, which is not a bad thing - it is important to remember past lessons that you have learned and build plans for what is to come. However, spending too much time away from the present can cause worry and fear.

Meditation helps you stay centered and pay attention to what is happening in the present. You cannot build plans for tomorrow without understanding how to approach today. Practicing meditation can increase mindfulness by encouraging you to appreciate life as it is. Studies from ScienceDirect, PositivePsychology, and the NCBI, show that gratitude can lead to more life satisfaction and happiness.

6. Helps Lower Depression

Challenges and hardships are sometimes hard to handle and may lead to depression. Even though events cannot be changed, your feelings about them can. Meditation can help redirect negative perspectives into constructive and healthier ones.

Research from Harvard Medical School suggests that meditation can change the parts of the brain associated with depression. Parts like the amygdala, a brain region responsible for emotions, get altered by meditation in a way that helps you brush off negative sensations that can trigger depression.

7. Boosts Awareness and Concentration

Two useful benefits of meditation for students are increased awareness and concentration. As a student, it is important to strengthen your awareness and concentration to prepare yourself for everything on your plate.

According to the National Library of Medicine, meditation can lengthen your attention span, increase your brain power, and decrease the likeliness of mind-wandering. Distractions are prominent in the life of a student. With meditation, you can clear your mind of distractions and concentrate on what is important to you. When your mind is clear, you can put more effort into assignments or tests.

Research from Healthline suggests that meditation also aids in self-inquiry, which is essential to the development and growth of an individual. High awareness can also help you realize what is beneficial or harmful to you. Acknowledging these concepts can guide you toward making more conscientious life decisions.

8. Improves Grades

This may be surprising, but meditation can help you get better grades. Science conducted by the EOC Institute has found that meditation can affect the brain in positive ways - including increased intelligence and memory, brain expansion, and more use of brain power. Like your muscles, your brain can be trained to improve its performance. Meditation is a good training exercise because it stimulates the brain.

Now, you will not be a super genius from one meditation session. This is a process and it takes time to reap the benefits of meditation, but it is definitely worth a try!

9. Helps Establish Healthy Routines

Being able to make meditation a part of your daily routine takes discipline. The discipline you grow can encourage you to branch out and create other healthy habits, which can amplify the positive effects of meditation. Some examples of habits you can adopt are learning new skills, exercising, good hygiene, limiting screen time, and eating right. Having these and other positive habits as a student can help keep you robust.

Not only does meditation practice foster healthy habits, it also helps you recognize unhealthy habits. Just spending time with yourself will make you think deeply about your daily activities and how they affect you. Mental toughness will start to accrue with the dedication you place into your meditation practice. That strong mentality you form can help you manage unwanted impulses and addictive desires, and keep you set on your healthy routines.

10. Helps You Get Some Sleep

This benefit of meditation is a subset of the healthy routines that you can build. Students should not underestimate the value of a good night's sleep. Insomnia and sleep deprivation can cause many problems for students, such as chronic tiredness, lethargy, stress, and more. Meditation gives you the opportunity to release tension and relax, and it is much easier to fall asleep once you are in a calm state of mind.

11. Builds Stronger Relationships

You learn a lot about yourself during meditation. So much so, that it can inspire you to want to learn more about other people. Building a great relationship with yourself through meditation can better your relationship skills with others. Meditation can promote positive emotions like kindness and empathy, which we can use to connect with others. Students can develop lifelong friendships, build confidence, and even earn career opportunities by having strong social skills.

Do you deal with social anxiety? Meditation can help you relinquish fearful and negative thoughts that make social anxiety so hard to handle. It is not uncommon to feel social anxiety in different contexts. By meditating, you can connect with yourself on a deep level to understand why you avoid social interaction and learn how to overcome that.

12. Increases Self-Confidence

A confidence boost is a helpful benefit of meditation for students. Many confidence problems stem from comparing yourself or your abilities to others. Students are often faced with comparisons because of the high levels of competitiveness in academia.

Meditation practice helps diminish limiting beliefs that you might have due to constant comparison. When meditating, you spend a lot of time with yourself. During that time, you have nobody else to compare yourself to, so you learn to appreciate your natural being. The way that you are right now is how you are supposed to be, even with your limits. Remember, with limitations comes greatness and strengths that you can use to be the best version of yourself.

13. Gives Your Mind a Break

Your meditative space is also a place to take a well-deserved break. Everyone needs downtime, even students. Meditation lets you close your laptop, put the pencil down, and give your mind a rest from strenuous schoolwork. If you push yourself beyond your mental limit, it eventually turns counterintuitive. Overworking yourself can lead to loss of sleep, increased grogginess and fatigue, a decrease in cognitive ability and focus, and all sorts of negative outcomes. Meditation gives the mind the healthy break that it needs to function properly.

14. Improves Your Physical Health

Did you know that meditation can improve your physical health? Studies from the American Journal of Hypertension have found that meditation can help lower blood pressure, while other studies show its effectiveness in helping maintain a healthy body weight and manage pain.

With meditation, students can de-clutter their minds and create lifelong transformations that can improve their overall well-being.

15. Guides You Towards Your Passion and Purpose

One important thing that you should consider is your passion. Everyone has something that they love to do. If you have not found yours yet, that is perfectly fine – students often face tons of pressure with this topic due to a lack of direction or clarity. Meditation can be an exceptional starting point for your self-discovery.

As explained earlier, meditation allows you to go deep within yourself. Let your curiosity roam free during meditation. This practice can give you the time and space to venture into limitless possibilities. Meditation can be an opportunity for you to discover your true potential.

Everyone has a purpose; you just need to find yours.

Meditation can even help you visualize the life path that you want. Seeing yourself accomplish your goals can motivate you to follow through on them.

“When your life is on course with purpose, you are your most powerful.” - Oprah Winfrey

Want to Learn Meditation?

Want to learn how to meditate after reading all of these benefits? An important thing to remember is to find a groove that works for YOU.

With everything said, meditation is easier than you think. If you’d like to know more about meditation and how to start, there are plenty of resources and communities out there for you - like Samavira.

Samavira is a global meditation community full of like-minded meditators that welcome everyone interested in meditation. Samavira has beginner-friendly resources along with in-depth training that helps you design your own meditation style. You don't have to force yourself into any specific method or technique to reap the benefits of meditation. We value the personal experience that meditation offers and want to share its traditions with the modern world.

If you’d like to get started right away, you can download our free Meditation Toolkit to help you start or deepen your meditation practice. You can also follow us on Instagram @samavira.meditation for daily inspiration.

About the Author

Avion Howard is a content writer who specializes in content related to self-help, psychology, digital marketing, and spirituality. He is a young college student with a passion for mental health. Avion’s goal with his articles is to provide a new perspective that is different from the conventional mainstream concepts.

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