Beyond Exercise: How Meditation Boosts Anxiety Relieving Endorphins
How Meditation Elevates Anti-Anxiety, Feel-Good Endorphins
Why Endorphins Are A Natural Anxiety Reliever
A fresh diagnosis for General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) will typically have you walking out of your doctor’s office with a prescription for one of the usual medication suspects.
While most folks don’t want to be forever pill addicted, physical exercise, on the other hand, is a great long term solution for permanent chronic anxiety relief.
Whether it’s yoga, jogging, weightlifting, swimming, or the like, a good doctor will strongly advise you to get on some kind of physical exercise regimen in addition to the pharma-kickback, toe-the-line prescription.
Then, why is exercise so effective at curing what is ultimately a mental disorder?
Exercise dominates anxiety for a variety of reasons, with "endorphins" sitting right atop the list.
How Meditation Is Such A Powerful Endorphin Booster
Manufactured mostly in your brain and spinal cord, endorphins are a type of neurotransmitter best known for improving brain function, reducing stress, elevating mood, relieving pain, and helping you sleep.
Endorphins' wide spectrum of benefits, in essence, creates a worry-free and fear-free mental utopia where anxiety cannot, will not, and does not exist.
Is there a better natural endorphin booster than physical exercise? Yes!
A 1995 study (Harte et al) published in the Biological Psychology Journal, tested the neuro-chemical release of two groups — 11 elite runners and 12 highly trained meditators — after running and meditation, respectively. What did they find?
As the scientists suspected, both groups had boosted their endorphin levels. No surprises there.
How Meditation Smothers Anxiety: Endorphins
The tectonic plate shifter, however, was that meditation scored higher than exercise on just about every "great mood" test marker. In effect, the researchers found that meditation was in a cool, calm, and happy "league of its own."
Joggers have coined the term "runners high" to describe how wonderful they feel after a nice, long run. This euphoric, happy, and zen-like state of bliss goes a long way to explain why many of them are so addicted to the pavement.
Maybe it’s time for meditators to invent a cool, catchy phrase for how amazing they feel after each of their sessions?
Luckily, meditation gives you access to these powerful anxiety melting, mood elevating endorphins whenever you wish.
