What kind of meditation is best for me

But the key to meditation is discipline, and being kind to yourself. Think of it the same way you would as working out at the gym or going for a run — the more you exercise the parts of your brain that help you focus and concentrate, the stronger it will become.

Some days will be easier than others. Remember that there is no perfect meditator, and there's a reason it's called a meditation practice. To get started, there are a number of guided meditation apps that can help you learn how to meditate. The Insight Timer app is a great place to start to check out all kinds of meditations in a variety of languages for free. It may also be helpful to find an accountability partner. By sharing your progress with them through daily check-ins, you can feel like you have accomplished something for the day.

Finally, pairing meditation with a daily habit — like brushing your teeth or taking a shower — can help you keep up with your practice and incorporate it into your life. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.

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This was medically reviewed by David A. Our stories are reviewed by medical professionals to ensure you get the most accurate and useful information about your health and wellness.

For more information, visit our medical review board. Five of the most common types of meditation are mindfulness, body scan, walking, loving-kindness, and transcendental meditation.

Different types of meditation come with different benefits, but some benefits include reduced anxiety, improved self-control, better self-care, and less pain. If you're a beginner, you may want to consider first trying mindfulness, body scan, or loving-kindness meditation. This story is part of Insider's guide on How to Meditate. Sara Shah is a freelance writer and reporter.

She loves learning about meditation, mental health, food, and travel — she writes about those topics too. To learn more about Sara visit www. Additional comments.

Email optional. Groovy and musical, you're going to love brainwave entertainment meditation. Also known as soundwave meditation or binaural beats, brainwave meditation uses music on five different frequencies - Beta, Alpha, Theta, Delta and Gamma — to access and alter different levels of the subconscious mind. Brainwave meditation is not only relaxing - practitioners believe it can open your mind to new ideas, inspire you and help you to think more creatively.

Choose the benefit you'd like to work on - Alpha for creativity and deep relaxation; Beta for focus and concentration; Theta for meditation, insight and memory; Delta for deep sleep and healing; and Gamma to increase cognition and improve IQ.

Choose a comfortable position — either sitting or laying down — and spend a minute or two relaxing your body. Play some music from the frequency you'd like to work on YouTube is a great place to start , and focus on what you desire, using creative visualization and. What do you do to relax? Listen to music. Go for a walk. Read a book. Clean the house.

Choose a pair of shoes. Who do you turn to for advice? Your long-time mentor. Your boss. Your partner. Your best friend. No one - you'll figure it out alone. Brain plasticity. These different behavioral changes were also reflected in the brain. Typically, gray matter thins over time as people age. But after three months of attention-based Presence training, participants actually showed a higher volume of gray matter in their prefrontal regions, areas related to attention, monitoring, and higher-level awareness.

After three months of compassion-based Affect training, however, other regions became thicker: areas that are involved in empathy and emotion regulation, such as the supramarginal gyrus. Most importantly, this thickening in insular regions of the brain predicted increases in compassionate behavior. Finally, we observed specific thickening in another set of brain regions after the Perspective module. Gray matter in the temporo-parietal junction, an area that supports our perspective-taking abilities, became thicker in people who also improved at theory of mind tests.

This is the first study to show training-related structural changes in the social brains of healthy adults and to reveal that it really matters what you practice—the observed brain changes were specific to different types of training and coincided with improvements in emotional and cognitive skills.

Social stress. To measure social stress, we gave participants a notoriously stressful task: delivering a speech and then performing math calculations to an audience trained to roll their eyes, look bored, and point out errors.

But those who practiced the two social modules, Affect and Perspective, did reduce their cortisol stress response by up to half compared to the control group.

We face potential evaluation by others every day, and learning to listen non-judgmentally and to be less reactive probably allows us to approach those socially stressful situations more calmly. The fact that the mindfulness-based Presence module did not reduce stress at the hormonal level was surprising at first, since previous research has shown that mindful attention training can reduce stress.

But much of this earlier research asks people about their stress levels with questionnaires, rather than measuring biological markers of stress. When using questionnaires, we found the same thing: After three months of Presence practice, people said they felt less stressed, as they did after all the other modules. Even though it certainly matters how stressed people subjectively feel, cortisol is considered the hallmark of a stress response and is linked to important health outcomes.

Given that this was not reduced by mindfulness attention training alone, we should be wary of generalized claims about its stress-reducing effects. Social connection. The partner practices, which were part of the Affect and Perspective modules, helped participants feel closer to each other.

In fact, they felt closer and closer each week of practice, even in the moments just before doing a partner practice and even when they were going to meet a partner for the first time. Thus, their general feelings of interdependence and interconnection with others seemed to increase over time. Not only did people boost their feelings of social closeness, but they also disclosed more and more personal information about themselves.

But after three months, they went much deeper, sometimes sharing about parental conflicts or lifelong personal issues. Body awareness. One of the most common ways to measure how aware people are of their body signals is through a heartbeat perception task. The higher the correlation between such objective and subjective measures, the higher your body awareness.