If you had to choose just one change in your daily routine that would have profound impact on every aspect of your everyday life, you could choose exercise, or you could quit smoking.
You might give-up caffeine, or you might detoxify.
A regular yoga practice would be good.
Your best choice, however, would be dedicating an hour to guided meditations.
No other health or fitness practice has greater physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual benefits than guided meditations.
"Really?" you demand.
"Who does that? Who has an hour to meditate?" You know you want to do it, but you have no idea where, when, or how.
"I barely have time to floss and brush," you point out.
But who is crazy enough not to set-aside an hour for meditation? Apply a little logic to your busy, stressful, generally over-crowded life: If your sister were in the hospital, would you not find an hour to go and visit her? Why would you not devote an hour to your own good health? Don't you love and care for your own self at least as much as you care about your sister? What if you simply redirected all of your Facebook time to guided meditations? You will find that one hour of deep, relaxing, restorative meditation makes the other twenty-three hours far happier and more productive.
Better than tranquilizers, guided meditations combat stress.
We tend to underestimate our own powers of mind, and we also grossly underestimate the profound, primordial link between our thoughts and our bodies.
In the throes of a new romance, you "get butterflies" in your stomach when you say your lover's name-better still if you can render it iambic and synch it to your heartbeats.
When you think about the big meeting Monday morning with all your bosses and their bosses, you feel your stomach churn and your heartbeat rev-up to the red line.
Psycho-physiologists claim this link between our brains and our adrenal systems is a survival of our days in the wild, one of our oldest congenital habits.
We can, however, control the link between our thoughts and our biochemical reactions.
Guided meditations take you through the process of suspending conscious thought and disconnecting the link between brain and pancreas.
As soon as you suspend thought, your fight-or-flight reflexes go into neutral, so that you stop secreting stress chemicals.
Your blood vessels dilate, carrying away accumulated lactates from your muscles, the metabolic by-products of tension.
All of you feels relaxed.
As effective as opiates, guided meditations reduce pain.
Muscle tension exacerbates pain.
The more you think about your pain, the more your stress responses tighten your muscles and increase your pain.
Opiates flood your brain's dopamine receptors with feel-good chemicals, suspending your stress responses, making you feel contented, and therefore relieving your pain.
Powerfully addictive physically, opiates are even more addictive psychologically, because, naturally, it feels so good to feel so good.
We can, however, enjoy all the same benefits without the nasty side-effects using guided meditations.
When we meditate, our systems secrete endorphins, lots of them.
Our natural feel-good chemicals attach the dopamine receptors just as opiates would, and we feel the same relief, contentment, and peace.