A 5 minute meditation should be a must in your daily routine if you have a proactive lifestyle or a high-demanding career. It's an optimal way for some quick mental rejuvenation. Nowadays, life is fast-paced and this leads to neglect of something very important, our beautiful selves.
This neglect can lead to a variety of mental health detriments. The most common ones being anxiety, depression, lethargy, and general discontentedness with life. If you follow any lifestyle influencer, a health blog, or a self-improvement podcast, then chances are you’ve heard the significance of meditation for a healthy life.
See, positive mental health is an integral part of an accomplished career, healthy relationships, high self-esteem, and a robust immune system. But again, our on-the-go lifestyles leave little time to focus on ourselves. It's true that we spend a lot of time working on our outward self, be it the long hours in the gym or investing in a quality diet.
However, the journey of holistic well-being is incomplete without dedicating time and energy to the mind. Meditation is the easiest solution. It’s simple to learn, requires little to no monetary investment, and the science-backed benefits are astounding. Even a 5 minute meditation can leave lasting positive effects on your body. These benefits range from reduced anxiety, clarity of thoughts, better sleep, lower levels of stress, increase in focus, mindfulness, and also increase in immunity.
So, whether you have writer's block and are struggling to finish your piece of content or stressed out about the presentation you have to give to a room full of experts, a quick 5 minute meditation can help you rewire and refocus yourself.
This guide will cover how to do a 5 minute meditation, the benefits of it, and tips to get the most out of your states of tranquility.
How To Do A 5 Minute Meditation
Before we dive into how to do a 5 minute meditation. It's important to know that this is just the tip of the iceberg. As are the benefits. Consider 5-minute meditations just the start of incorporating a healthy habit in your life.
So, how long should you meditate for? This is a debatable question because there are different types of meditation. A study found that U.S marines who mediated for 15 minutes a day saw significant cognitive improvements.
Another study stated that students who did 10 minutes of meditation a day had increased GRE scores. Meaning you don’t have to unleash the guru inside daily and meditate for an hour. Meditating as little as 10 to 20 minutes a day is enough, especially when you are short on time. Also, it’s a habit that should be done daily.
Doing meditation for 60 minutes a day and then slacking for the rest of the week is not helpful. Just like with all habits, consistency is key to reaping the fruits. Therefore, 5 minute meditations are optimal for when you are crunched on time and building a healthy habit.
Steps For A 5 Minute Meditation
Meditation is all about controlling your thoughts. The essence of your actions, traits, and character is thoughts. Hence, the importance. We live in an age of information overload. Whether it's scrolling through our feeds, communicating with people, reading articles, or watching videos on YouTube.
This information then seamlessly flows through our heads. So, the purpose of meditation is to quiet the noise by controlling the flow of your thoughts. Getting into a state of meditation requires you to be focused on the moment.
It’s hard to focus on the moment with so many distractions around us, the main one being our phones. Before starting, put your phone on airplane mode to ensure that even the slightest vibration doesn’t mess with your flow.
Dedicate 5 Minutes
Start by taking out 5 minutes. The best time is when you are alone, the start of your day is ideal. However, if you need a quick boost during your day then find a place where you can be undisturbed for 5 minutes.
Set a timer for yourself on your phone. Do make sure that your phone is on airplane mode. Setting a timer for your 5 minute meditation can decrease the anxiety of not knowing how much time has passed.
Relax Yourself
The next step is to close your eyes. If there is noise around you, use headphones and listen to brown noise on YouTube. With your eyes closed, focus on your breath. This will be your anchor to focus on.
The point of mindful meditation is not to delve into a thought. Having an anchor to focus on helps from wandering off into thoughts. Take deep breaths during the first 30 seconds to get yourself into a state of meditation. Focus on the breath coming inside and filling your lungs. Then feel the air slowly leaving your nostrils.
A five-count breath is a good place to start from. Visualize the breath entering your diaphragm and filling up every cavity from your belly all the way up to your chest. Feel the oxygen flowing through your veins and penetrating the crown of your head. With every exhale, imagine all of your stress leaving your body.
Visualizing stress flowing out and relaxation flowing in isn’t just imagination, what your mind believes your body achieves.
Focus Your Thoughts
Being mindful is actually trying to be empty-minded. This means that you are NOT reflecting, pondering, or contemplating anything. Instead, whenever a thought comes, just let it come and go.
Imagine you are at a train station and every thought is a train. Your purpose is not to hop on to every train that comes rather watch every thought come and go. Your focus needs to be on the present moment.
If you do happen to get lost in thought, acknowledge it and return to focusing on your breath. When starting off your journey of meditation, you’ll notice more than half of your 5 minute meditations will all be about bringing your focus back on the present moment. However, don’t let this be a means of frustration.
Even focusing your thoughts is a muscle and just like all muscles, it needs to be trained.
Open Your Eyes
End your 5 minute meditation slowly and not abruptly. As soon as the timer goes off, don’t rush into opening your eyes. Instead, feel the positive energy flowing through you, your heightened senses, and your relaxed body.
Regather your thoughts before returning to your responsibilities. Remember, consistency is key. Doing a 5 minute meditation daily will let you get the hang of it and then you’ll be reaping benefits from every session.
Benefits Of A 5 Minute Meditation
So, what can you expect these transcendental 5 minutes to do?
Lower Levels Of Stress
Life and stress go hand in hand. The majority of what we experience is beyond the realms of our control. The outcomes aren’t always in our favor. Demanding careers place expectations that take a lot to meet as well as our relationships. So, experiencing stress is natural. How we cope with stress results in either a positive or negative outcome. Usually, when faced with a stressful situation, our body goes into flight or fight mode.
With meditation, your body goes into relaxation mode. Hence, meditation is effective in canceling out stress. When you quiet the mind and control your thoughts, you are minimizing the effect of stress-inducing thoughts. These are the same thoughts that pile up and negatively influence your mindset and behavior.
Release Happiness
Science says that the amount of happiness we have within us is passed on by our genetics. It’s called the happiness set-point theory. The theory states that some people are born with more activity in the front parts of the brain. So even if these people are faced with adverse and trying situations, their front part lights up and boom, happiness comes back sooner rather than later.
Turns out, meditation can help reset your happiness set point. Meditation can help rewire your brain. Four days of meditation is enough to lower your cortisol levels. Cortisol is the hormone that controls stress. All in all, whether it's resetting your happiness set point, lowering cortisol levels, improving self-esteem, or lowering stress, meditation is a great way to unleash happiness.
Increase In Cognition
We all know the importance of cognition in today’s world. Whether you’re a writer, a programmer, a marketer, or an influencer, cognition is essential to producing quality work.
Numerous research shows that meditation can enhance mental functions like attention span, memory, self-control, and other executive functions. Meditation can also help with age-related cognitive decline and even help increase cognitive functions.
Tips For 5 Minute Meditation
If you’re new to this whole meditation thing, the first few tries might seem overwhelming. We are taught many things growing up, like how to do our taxes, how to drive a car, how to cook, and even the famous Pythagoreans theorem which still many of us still haven’t used. Jokes on you Ms. Nash from fourth grade.
But at the same time, how many of us are taught how to control our thoughts? Such a crucial life skill is never given importance during our education. No wonder meditation is a challenging task now.
Guided Meditation
When closing our eyes and venturing into the darkness of our minds, it's easy to become confused. “Am I doing this right?” or “Okay, so now what?” or being lost in thought without even realizing it is a common mistake when starting out. Guided meditations can help.
YouTube is full of amazing guided meditations that can help you kick start your meditation journey. The calming voice coupled with easy directions guide you to a powerful experience. Check out this 5 minute meditation if you’re struggling to focus.
Practice makes perfect! Learning a skill requires dedication. Committing time out of your busy schedule will help with consistency and motivation. It won’t seem like an uphill task once it's programmed into your daily routine.
Whether it's a quick 5 minutes at the beginning of your day, right after lunch, or after work, committing a time helps to cement a habit. Also, the benefits of meditation don’t just come overnight. You don’t do a blazing session of a leg workout and expect calves like Ronaldo either. Therefore, you need a dose of meditation daily to reap the mental health benefits.
Focus On Your Breathing
It's easy to get lost in your thoughts. Controlled breathwork does wonders to calm the mind down. Whether its guided meditations or advice from a guru, you’ll always hear them emphasizing the importance of breathing.
Apart from acting as an anchor, slow and controlled breathing can also help reduce anxiety.
Key Takeaway
A 5 minute meditation has a plethora of mental health benefits. Since the dawn of Covid-19, we have seen the importance of mental health in our lives.
These 5 minutes are enough to help calm your mind, instill a sense of peace, and help you refocus your thoughts on what’s important. The process isn’t hard either. Sure, you are bound to face a little resistance in the beginning, but good things don’t come easy.
All in all, meditation is an important tool every hardworking individual should incorporate into their lives.
