Meditation is a relaxation technique which can help with every area of life. By bringing meditation into your daily routine, you can reduce headaches as well as stress.

First, what is meditation? To simplify a great deal, meditation is training your brain to release outside chaos. It learns to focus on whatever you want it to focus on. So the act of meditating helps you release stress and focus on a single thought. But more than that - by practicing the art of meditating daily, it means that during the rest of your day your brain is more able to avoid stress and remain calm. It knows that technique.

Many headaches in life are caused by stress. We get a headache because our kids are screaming at the top of their lungs. We get a headache because our boss has added yet more work onto our desk. We get a headache because our partner is yelling at us for something that is not our fault. Our brain gets overloaded and reacts with a headache. Which, of course, just makes things even worse, because now we can't focus fully on the issue at hand.

By bringing meditation into our routine, we get two separate benefits.

First, during the time of meditation, we relax into a stress-free zone. Certainly this will be a challenge at first - everything is when you're beginning! Learning to ride a bike involves a few falls. Still, over time, we get better and better. We are more easily able to release stress when we sit down to meditate, and to create a temporary oasis of rest and relaxation.

The second benefit is more long term. By training our mind every day to learn how to release stress, the brain becomes more able to do that all 24 hours a day. When we encounter a stressful situation, our brain is more resilient and able to let that stress slide off of it.

So let's say you set aside ten minutes each morning to meditate before you get out of bed. You use that quiet time to train your brain how to focus on whatever it is you choose. Then, later in the afternoon, you hit a stressful situation. Because of your training, your brain is able to pause, take a virtual deep breath, and work through to a healthy solution. It is that pause that keeps you in control and allows the brain to move forward without a headache.

Find ways to build meditation into your daily life - and be sure to use our meditation site as a valuable reference!