Meditation is one of the easiest and most common ways to push back against stress and anxiety. When it comes to natural stress relief, meditation is the go-to method for many people, and has been for literally thousands of years! If you’ve never tried meditating before, however, these facts might feel a bit daunting. Maybe there’s pressure to do it “right”—but there doesn’t have to be. Natural stress relief, after all, should be stress-free! Let’s talk about the basics of meditation together.

Meditation has a long history, tied to religious and spiritual practices. Over time, this has led to many, many different forms of meditation. In nearly all forms, however, the principal aim of it is self-awareness. By “filtering out” your distractions and deliberately managing your focus and thoughts, you can reduce your stress with relative ease.

A meta-analysis covering 47 trials with 3,515 participants found that, as a source of natural stress relief, meditation is consistently helpful in improving “negative dimensions of psychological stress.”¹

^{1. Goyal, M., Singh, S., Sibinga, E. M., Gould, N. F., Rowland-Seymour, A., Sharma, R., Berger, Z., Sleicher, D., Maron, D. D., Shihab, H. M., Ranasinghe, P. D., Linn, S., Saha, S., Bass, E. B., & Haythornthwaite, J. A. (2014). Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA internal medicine, 174(3), 357–368. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13018}

Getting Started: Concentrative Meditation

Remember: the whole point of concentrative meditation is to keep up your focus and calm your mind. Wearing an eSmartr smart compression sleeve makes it easier to do both of things in a 100% natural way.

Concentrative meditation is an easy and straightforward way to learn stress-reducing practices. Your goal is simple: choose one thing—your breathing is easiest, but it can also be a physical object—and focus on it to the exclusion of everything else. Everything! Be sure to set a timer. Ten or fifteen minutes is usually plenty to begin with, and you can adjust as you go. After all, this isn’t easy, and eventually your thoughts will wander—that’s okay! Once you catch yourself becoming distracted, just take a deep breath and return your focus to your breathing.

The reason meditation works so well as a means of natural stress relief is because taking the time to relax and clear your head makes it difficult to focus on things that stress you out. Because cognitive stress can lead to so many physical and mental problems, meditation can have a lot of positive effects by subverting them.

How Can Smart Compression Help?

Finding your focus isn’t always easy. In terms of natural stress relief, meditation offers a lot of easy solutions, but when you’re starting out especially, it can be hard to bring your head fully into that space of clear thoughts and easy breathing. Smart compression uses touch-based technologies (which means no apps, batteries, or drugs!) to send signals to the brain through mechanoreceptors that help it to “declutter,” opening the way for better focus and reduced stress as you sit down and prepare to clear your thoughts.

There are a lot of great benefits to meditation, and making it easier to get into is an amazing benefit of our smart compression technology. Even if you don’t need the stress relief, meditation is an amazing way to clear your head and is an all-around great practice to get into. Give it a shot! Start with five-to-ten-minute bouts of concentration on your breathing. You might find it’s the habit of a lifetime.