3 Things Scientifically Hurting Your Meditation Practice

When I tell people how life-changing a daily meditation practice is, I’m often met with the phrase, “I can’t meditate.”

The number one thing getting in people’s way is this idea or belief that they can’t meditate. The first step in doing anything new is BELIEVING you can do it.

When you started to walk and you fell flat on your face, did you just give up and say that you can’t walk?

Of course not! With encouragement from loved ones around you, you got back up and kept trying.

Over time, your ability to walk flourished and you even began to run.

Starting and getting into the groove of a meditation practice holds gifts and benefits that far exceed anything you can think of because you likely have not fully EXPERIENCED them yet.

Here are 3 things I have recently noticed that are likely hurting your meditation practice and ability to feel the full peace and joy that comes from it.

1.     You’re Not Getting Enough Sleep

Sleep deprivation has been linked to reduced cortical responsiveness and neural activity. It impairs the human central and peripheral nervous systems.

In short, when you are not getting enough sleep, your nervous system is fried. It’s running at suboptimal levels and is unable to fully relax.

This has a direct effect on your meditation practice. When you are falling asleep, drifting off into thought land, and unable to be present because of a dysregulated nervous system, you are unable to reap the true benefits of meditation (and making a beginner meditation practice far more difficult than it needs to be).

Recently, there was a few weeks-long period where I was regularly getting 6-7 hours of sleep. While this may seem fine for some, in the past few years I have come to understand that my body usually needs ~8.5 hours of sleep to feel fully rested and naturally awaken itself. During this time, I was struggling to go deep into calmness during my meditations and achieve states of bliss and stillness I had been able to in the past.

One day, after feeling particularly exhausted by the sleep debt, I decided to not set an alarm heading into the weekend. My body slept for a staggering 11 hours straight! A clear sign that it needed the rest.

The next morning, I had the deepest meditation I had in weeks; dropping in incredibly quickly with a profound feeling of joy and stillness in my body. When nothing else notable changed, I attribute this experience to much-needed sleep.

Moreover, science has shown that lack of sleep leads to neurological damage in the hippocampus – the part of the brain responsible for memory, learning, and emotion.

Outside of meditation, by not getting enough sleep you are actively causing yourself brain damage.

2.     You’re Not Stretching Your Body Enough

Stretching is super quick and simple, yet I would venture to guess not many people do it regularly.

A recent Harvard University study found that doing easy stretches improves blood flow throughout the body by making arteries more flexible and able to dilate.

When there is a greater blood flow in your body, your red blood cells have an easier time delivering oxygen to all parts of your body.

This directly relates to meditation, because the presence of carbon dioxide in the body is typically what leads to the restless fidgeting some experience when trying to meditate.

It is important to release the tension in your muscles and body before meditating in order to have your body be still. This allows you to withdraw the energy from your externally-driven senses and channel it up into the spine and pineal gland.

A simple answer to a deeper meditation is regular stretching. It can be as simple as sitting on the ground with your legs straight and reaching to touch your toes a few times!

Additionally, stretching greatly improves heart health and can even lower your risk of heart attacks or strokes!

3.     You Don’t Have a Clear Intention

An intention is a directed thought to perform a determined action.

Intention is believed to produce its effect through the emission of light particles known as biophotons. All living organisms emit a constant current of photons as a means to send signals within the body and to the outside world. Researchers note that intentions operate as highly coherent frequencies capable of changing the molecular structure of matter.

These intentions can organize otherwise entropic frequencies to remotely heal ill patients, bring peace to areas in conflict, and manifest into physical form specific outcomes or situations.

Similarly, intention and invocation when sitting down to meditate allows greater coherency to form in and around your energy field. By focusing on the reason why you are meditating before you begin to do it, you are sending out a signal of biophotons for the desired result you are seeking from your action.

It can be as simple as to feel deep peace, calmness, love, clarity, energy, or Oneness.

Intention is another quick fix to allowing you to go deep into meditation.

If you want to improve your meditation practice with three easy-to-implement changes, give these a try!

If you want to go deeper into meditation still, download my free 22-page Beginner’s Guide to Meditation!

Sending you all the inner peace you seek and more.