How Meditation Can Help You Through a Divorce
Going through a divorce is stressful and emotionally overwhelming. Thankfully, meditation could be just the trick to get you through it. Here’s why…
Financial issues, facing the reality of life without your partner, and the emotional turmoil of a drawn-out divorce process can leave you looking for ways to escape.
New laws, like the pending no fault divorce legislation, are certainly helping to make the process more stress-free for divorcees. That said, one of the best ways to reduce the stress and anxiety associated with the divorce process might just be meditation.
In this post, we’re going to tell you how meditation might help you through your divorce. Take a look…
How Can Meditation Help People Through Divorce?
Meditation and mindfulness are useful tools for the stress of everyday life, but they are most effective in times of emotional strife. The benefits of meditation when going through a divorce are numerous, so here is a list of the most popular ones:
1. Reduces stress
Reducing stress is the most common reason people try meditation. With the divorce process putting untold amounts of stress on both parties, it’s easy to see why it has been touted as a solution.
Mental and physical stress are caused by increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This, in turn, can disrupt sleep, promote anxiety, increase blood pressure and give you cloudy thinking.
If you recognise any of these symptoms in yourself, you should know that in an 8-week study in the journal Brain, Behaviour, and Immunity, it was shown that ‘mindfulness meditation’ can reduce the inflammatory response caused by stress.
2. Helps control anxiety
You might have had a lot of anxiety since you started your divorce proceedings and haven’t found a way to shake it. Thankfully, reduced stress levels give you more control over your anxiety, so meditation could help with this too.
Not only that, a meta-analysis of nearly 1,300 adults found that meditation not only decreased their anxiety, but had a stronger effect on those with the highest levels. This suggests that its potency is stronger when stress levels are higher.
I’m sure you’d agree that divorce ranks as a cause of severe anxiety, meaning meditation could be more useful for you than the average person at this given moment in your life.
3. Improves your sleep
With the endless swarm of issues playing on your mind, it’s common for someone going through a divorce to toss and turn at night and suffer from lack of sleep.
One of the primary benefits of meditation is control over your own thoughts and feelings. Meditation gets you to focus on your breath and detach from the negative thoughts that enter your mind without your permission.
Perhaps you’re tossing and turning at night thinking about money or what your future will look like without your partner. Well, practising recognising those thoughts and returning to your breath could be the only non-medicated way to get you to sleep.
4. Can make you more kind
A lengthy divorce, especially if it’s not amicable or the marriage ended on bad terms, can leave you and your ex bitter towards each other and looking for revenge.
One type of meditation, known as Metta, has you focus on creating positive feelings towards others and letting go of your hatred towards them. It starts with you building kind feelings towards yourself and slowly expanding them out to others.
A meta-analysis of 22 different studies on Metta meditation showed that it was able to increase the participants’ compassion towards themselves and others. If you really want to get over your ex and move on with your life, compassion is a good place to start.
5. Improves your self-awareness
In our fast-paced lives of jumping from one distraction to another, we rarely find time to sit down and just be. Some of us are even scared to do it because it means facing our own thoughts and being alone with our true selves.
One thing meditation can provide, above all else, is time to sit and reflect on who you are as a person. You become aware of the destructive thoughts that enter your mind and realise that you’re being too hard on yourself.
You think about all the issues that led up to your divorce and come to terms with the fact that it couldn’t have been avoided no matter what you did and it’s time to let go of the negative feelings.
The more you learn about yourself the easier it will be to come to terms with who you are, how you’ve been acting, and how you can change to make your life better in the future.
6. You can do it anywhere
Other techniques such as yoga and exercise are also useful for reducing stress and anxiety, but they require space, time and sometimes equipment. So, this final benefit of meditation for divorce is quite simple: you can do meditation anywhere.
Meditation can be done on the train, in a traffic jam, on a park bench, or even on the loo! This means the moment you feel stressed or anxious you can just close your eyes, block out the world, and focus on your breath.
There’s no faster acting technique than meditation when you’re going through something as tricky as a divorce. You never know when your brain might need a quick reboot.
Is Meditation all You Need to Get Through a Divorce?
In this post, we’ve managed to cover six of the most common benefits of meditation during a divorce. Sometimes meditation won’t be enough, and it does take practice to get it right. So, you might need to tandem it with other remedies until you’re able to control your emotions with meditation alone.
Also, if you’re in a situation where you have severe anxiety or stress that needs to be controlled immediately, you should consult with your doctor to see if they have a fast-acting remedy.
However, the more natural approach is to tackle your stress with your own mind and meditation gives you the ability to do that. Why not give it a try before you choose to go the route of prescription medication