Daily Medtiation can offer natural relief for depression
– Quick Overview –
What is depression and why is it rising?
Everyone knows, at least to some degree, that depression is an important societal problem.
It’s likely that someone you know is affected by it, whether it’s your college, your friend, your neighbour or a family relative.
Depression is not always easy to spot.
Symptoms can vary and include eating or sleeping too much or too little, pulling away from relatives and friends, not engaging in activities that used to bring joy, having low energy, feeling apathetic or like nothing matters. It is generally defined by having lost interest in essential parts of life.
If you have ever suffered from depression or depressive episodes in your life, you surely have experienced some of the common misconceptions around the illness.
Friends or family members might have advised you to “just go out more” or to “toughen up, cause life is not a picnic”.
Often these misconceptions are also internalised in form of that condemning inner voice that tells you to “pull yourself together” and “not to be so weak”.
This internal battle can become a vicious circle, adding extra stress and suffering and itensifying the symptoms.
According to the projections from the World Health Organization, the amount of disability and life lost due to depression will, by 2030, surpass than that from war, accidents, cancer, stroke, and heart disease.
One paradox in this context is that the personal and economic toll of depression has actually grown just as more research and treatment resources have been poured into combating it.
How can it be that, despite all the efforts aimed at understanding, treating, and educating the public about this condition, the number of sufferers continues to increase?
An answer could be that, by failing to effectively address our stress epidemic and outbalance it’s negative effects, we are failing at addressing one of depression’s main causes.
When we feel stress, the body’s stress hormone axis switches on.
In several steps the hypothalamus, the pituitary glands and adrenal glands release stress hormones such as cortisol.
Normally a high cortisol level slows down the hormone axis, so there is a kind of negative feedback.
But in case of chronic stress this balancing effect doesn’t work anymore.
The brain loses control of the stress hormone axis, it remains constantly active flooding the body with stress hormones. The excess of cortisol in the body also causes problems with all three of the main neurochemicals involved in preventing depressive symptoms – dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin – all of which are essential to feeling happy, healthy and balanced.
Besides inhibiting the body’s natural happiness transmitters, an abundance of stress hormones in the body also leads to other grueling symptoms such as inner restlessness, tightness and sleep problems.
Meditation and depression
Depression is a complex illness and the path to recovery is a very individual one.
The medical approach is often focused on medication, sometimes accompanied by some form of talking therapy.
If you are looking for an alternative or complementary treatment, you should give meditation a try and see for yourself what it can do for you.
Either with us or with someone else.
Daily meditation can offer natural relief for depression. By training the brain it not only reduces the stress in our lives, but also increases our resistance to future stress.
By keeping the stress response in check, meditation can help to restore hormornal balance, leading to greater emotional equilibrium.
As a result we can expierence a new clarity of perception, which expresses itself in more rational and positive outlook on life.
Scientific research has added astonishing numeric values to the effects of meditation on depression.
But here at Daily Meditation Berlin we prefer to rely on over a decade of teaching expierence and the positive feedback from our students.
A large number of which have reported an increase in overall happiness and well-being, which allowed them to enjoy life more and interact with the world in a more meaningful way.
This expierence can set the stone in motion towards a life that is free from the numbing grip of depression.
That is not to say a life without the normal ups and downs, sad and happy times. (Anything else would get boring over time.)
But a life in which the bad days are less bad, and the good days are better.