Hot Mess Mamma and Meditator.

Two of my biggest struggles are anxiety and stress. I had long heard of mediation being a great approach to combat these struggles and there is moderate evidence showing that meditation works to improve anxiety and depression. Meditation can reduce emotional reactivity which I was able to notice almost immediately, despite not being able to meditate for a long period of time. Research has shown that mindfulness mediation helps us to disengage from emotionally stressful situations so that we can focus better on cognitive tasks. Instead of walking in my home and focusing on the mess, I was able to sit down and focus on playing a game with my children. This decrease in reactivity is very important to me. I don’t want to be as reactive as I have allowed myself to be before. In my readings I found:

“Moore and Malinowski (2009) compared a group of experienced mindfulness meditators with a control group who had no meditation experience on measures assessing their ability to focus attention and suppress distracting information. The meditation group had significantly better performance on all measures of attention and had higher self-reported mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation practice and self-reported mindfulness were correlated directly with cognitive flexibility and attentional functioning.” (Davis & Hayes, 2012)

This is exactly what happened when I was able to suppress the distractions of my surroundings in order to focus on spending time and being present with my children.

One result that I did not experience in my short time meditating was a reduction in careless eating. I struggle with emotional eating, and I have struggled my entire life. In the past five years I have been able to lose over one hundred pounds and have worked diligently to keep it off. However, after the death of Enzo’s father, I saw my old ways sneaking back in. I look forward to continuing my meditation practices so that it can help reduce my emotional eating urges. Even though studies have shown that mindfulness training alone will not aid in weight loss, I know that it will help me to continue to be more aware of when I am emotionally eating.

I also noticed that I did not need to step outside for a cigarette immediately after I put my children to bed. While I still found myself smoking before I went to bed, the typical craving that I caved into seemed to have been minimal on nights that I meditated. I hope that by continuing meditation, it will help to reduce my cravings as it has proved to help others in different studies.

I was surprised and appreciative that I found, on numerous websites, that meditation alone cannot help everyone and every ailment. I know that I will need to continue to see my therapist while I process my grief, I know that my body depends on my medications to keep my moods corralled. I also now know that I have this additional tool to use to help me. It was another layer of self-help to self-health that gave my body an overall sense of peace, even if it was just for those twenty minutes after practice. I will definitely be continuing the hot mess mamma meditation, and maybe, eventually, I will be less of a hot mess.