One of my most essential items in my ‘Calm Toolkit’ is -you’ve guessed it Meditation. We can meditate while walking, sitting, and lying down, at home with people around us or alone with no one around us. There is just one pre-requisite of meditation this is: ‘to be fully present in the now’, which is easier said than done! The ‘Chitta Vritti’ a Sanskrit term for “Mind Chatter” or “monkey mind” are a constant struggle to overcome and quieten within us and our busy lives. What is interesting is that over the years a lot of study has been done on Meditation and the benefits of consciously stilling your mind. Clara Moisello, PhD, a neuroscience researcher at the City College of New York, says that “Studies on meditation and mindfulness have reported long term positive effects in long term meditators ranging from structural changes (increase in cortical thickness in frontal areas, increased gray matter density, etc.) to functional changes” –that is , positive changes in the functioning of the brain.

Moisello says that the regions like the (DMN) default mode network in our brains which are responsible for “self-referential processing” among other things, these are the “me” thoughts that bombard us throughout our day which cause anxiety and low self-esteem.  Meditation can reduce activity in this network at will and this gives the person a great tool to quiet their own minds at cue!

While meditating, we centre ourselves allowing all of these anxiety provoking thoughts wash over us. We acknowledge them and understand that they are there, but we do our best to bring our mind to stillness, emptying our mind of all of these negative thoughts.