Meditation (PowerPoint Presentation Sample)

Stress and Coping Project [Your name] Psychology [Name of university] [Professor's name] Stress and Coping Project In the last 14 days, I meditated for 15 minutes every day, and recorded my overall mood and stress before and after each session. I want to share my observations because meditation helped me cope with stress for 14 days and will continue doing it. Kuchinskas (2014) said that "Meditation is often thought of a hippy-dippy practice at transcendence, meditation is coming on its own as a stress-reduction technique for even the most type-A kind of people (WebMD).” I will use meditation to handle stress because of the benefits it can bring to a person. As I start my meditation session each day, there are distractions that I need to shut down, and one of the benefits of meditation is it makes you more focused. Research shows that it increases memory and improves attention (Seppala, Ph.D, 2014). There are days when I feel more anxious than others and this makes it more challenging for me to concentrate because I desire to be around more people, but of course, while meditating, a person needs silence. This brings me to my next point because on the first 3 days of meditation, I found it significantly hard to concentrate because of high levels of agitation. It is because the capacity to think is an essential element of our lives (Brown, 2007). I am always contemplating about the decisions I need to make, the errands I have to do for the rest of the day, and other factors that cause stress. This is where my agitation comes from and it makes me feel anxious. However, at the end of each session, I feel calmer and more relaxed. According to Emma Seppala, Ph.D (2014), meditation decreases anxiety, stress, and depression. Meditation helps me clear my thoughts, but it is not the same every day. Depending on my experiences each day and what I need to go through, the thoughts in my mind vary for each day and this can affect my mood while meditating. According to Maddux (2016), there is a disappointment that "good experiences" are not always there. On the other hand, when I get crestfallen, I just re-visit the good feelings I had in some parts of the meditation session. It reminds me that when someone meditates, the person is in a place of vastness, calmness, and joy (The Art of Living n.d.). I will be using meditation for stress-reduction in the future because in a day there are 1,440 minutes and it will not be hard for me to allow at least 15 minutes for meditation. With the benefits it has, the wonderful feelings I get, and how it lifts my mind from distractions are enough reasons why I should go on with the practice. The challenges that I face during meditation are all manageable and since my mind is always thinking, I will eventually learn how to silence my mind as I master meditation in the long run. These thoughts only bring me anxiety and if I do not allocate 15 minutes of my day to meditation to so I can feel calm and relaxed, then that will only lead to bigger worries in the future because stress can be the culprit for serious health problems (Segal, Ph.D, Smith, M.A. et al., 2016). Another thing that I like about meditation is it does not cost much because it only needs an open space, a peaceful atmosphere, and proper concentration. I can do it anywhere because it does not have to be at one place. Meditation gave me serenity and calmness in the last 14 days and I will definitely use the technique to cope with stress because feeling anxious is not something I want to go through every day for the rest of my life. There is no age limit to meditation and stress is not only experienced by adults. Research shows that there are stressors in childhood and teen years (Segal, Ph.D, Smith, M.A. et al., 2016). During my younger years, I remember being taught relaxation skills like exercises for better breathing, activities to relax the muscles, and meditating. The people around me already knew the benefits of meditating even for a child going through stress. I also did meditation in my teen years, and that is why I still do it today. It is a soothing practice that anyone can learn to help fight stress and live a better life. I have provided a table below to show you how I felt during pre-relaxation and post-relaxation in the last 14 days of meditation. On a scale of 1 to 7, I was asked to rate the level of agitation and negativi...