So I've been really stressed (as I think a lot of people can relate to) and I had a wake-up moment when I started realizing that it was affecting both my mental and physical health in multiple ways. I was having some chronic health issues flare up repeatedly and was finding the medical system useless for helping me with them.
My diet is good, I already get regular exercise, but I realized that a weak point in my life was that my mind was scattered and rushing and I was in fight-or-flight mode. The one thing I wasn't doing, which I know from the past can really help me, was meditation.
So I decided to seek out an online meditation program. I did some research to figure out which one would be most effective at helping heal and prevent chronic health issues, depression, and anxiety, and I came across this one:
This online Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course is 100% free, created by a fully certified MBSR instructor, and based on Jon Kabat-Zin
This is a free, online version of a program called MBSR which has been rigorously studied and established to be effective for a variety of conditions.
I'm in the second week of it and I already feel a lot better. I have better emotional regulation when stuff goes wrong, and a lot of things have been going wrong in my life lately, just a lot of small unpredictable things, some big, most small, but causing me stress.
I'm handling things better in the moment. My digestion has improved, in part because I've been eating more mindfully, which means eating when I want, the amount I want, and what I want, and listening more to my body. My sleep has also improved.
It's crazy, taking 30 minutes out of the day to meditate has freed up much more than 30 minutes in each day. I went from feeling like I have no free time to having a few hours of wiggle room in each day in which I've been able to get more of the looming tasks that had been backing up in my life, completed.
Also, most remarkably, much of my chronic pain went from debilitating, to a zero. I'm not exaggerating. Sometimes it still flares up but I'd say 80% of the time, I am pain free in the ways that were most bothering me. Which is amazing. I think it was because the pain / injury was being caused or flaring up due to muscle tension, like I would have the pain, then it would get tense and the injury (mostly in tendons and joints) would get worse. Being able to stay relaxed helped the injury to heal and in a remarkably short time-scale.
I highly recommend this course. The best thing about it, besides it being free and science-backed, is that it's self-paced and you can do it as slowly as you want. I prioritized doing it at full speed, but it is designed in such a way that there are things you can do even if you only have a shorter amount of time each day to meditate, or even if you skip days and only do it sporadically. It has lots of optional material and you can go at whatever pace you want but it can still help you even if you just dabble in it.
If you are feeling stressed, struggling with pain or chronic illness, anxiety, depression, or just feeling overwhelmed with life like there aren't enough hours in the day, this might really help you.
Also if anyone wants to do this course together with me, I only just started, I would love to talk about it with others and would love to encourage each other and get some social support and bounce ideas off each other. So feel free to DM me if you want to talk about this stuff, or offer or receive this kind of encouragement!
