If you are like me, you just do not believe that something as simple as deliberate daydreaming can reduce stress. And yet, meditation greatly reduces stress.

After just a few times meditating, I found that I was more aware and in control of my stress. By setting aside just a few minutes each day to take a mental vacation, you get back a lot of benefits.

And, it gets easier. After two weeks of using the technique, all I had to do was think about the exercise throughout the day. Then I felt my stress and anxiety ease off greatly.

This stress relieving technique along with walking and a progressive muscle relaxation exercise can save you from burnout and help to promote your good mental health.

As a result I now felt in control. I felt much more optimistic and confident that I could trust in my abilities to handle tasks and deadlines. My main stress often came with handling difficult people, either customers or bosses.

Of the two, bosses are the worst and need to learn how to cope with stress the most.

High levels of stress over long periods of time can lead to mental illness and chronic depression. If you have few emotional management techniques, that is to say if your attitude is not optimistic and you are often entertaining negative thoughts, your mental health can become seriously impaired.

The real secret of meditation is the benefits to your mental health.

Self-Guided Meditation

The easiest technique is what I call a self-guided meditation.

Always start breathing deeply and slowly. Take three slow deep breaths in and out.

When you are stressed you tend to take very shallow breaths. This increases the oxygen to your brain and is necessary for the "fight or flight" type of stress, but, not longer necessary for our less aggressive living style. Slow, deep breathing relaxes you and reduces the tension in your muscle.

Find a quiet spot, put on some soft music and just let your imagination roam over that peaceful, quiet scene in your mind.

You create or remember a particularly relaxing time and basically live through it again. This is a mind movie, a way of thinking about a time when you felt relaxed and peaceful. In as sense you are a director creating a movie in which you are the main star.

You see, hear and feel everything that is happing to you

If your mind wanders back to your daily problems, just gently acknowledge them and return to your relaxing daydream.

Make this a thirty minute break. After tow or three weeks of using the technique, even a fifteen minute break can be helpful.

Writing Meditation

One easy method is to write down an actual script for your mind movie. Just writing it down requires you to think about all the scenery, the peaceful moments, the events going on around you, how you felt, what you saw and thought. 

There is another benefit. You are writing something you may want to keep for future writing. Journals like these often become memoirs or stories.

Just start writing and describing whatever comes to mind. Writing is meditation. Describe everything you saw, everything you heard, everything you felt. It might be a walk on the beach or hiking on some peaceful trail or getting a tan or just a fun time with family.

You can find several of these that I have written for my blog. Every one of them is a direct application of this technique. I always come away from them more relaxed, optimistic and focused.

Meditation For the Purists

I have just touched the surface of meditation techniques here. You can spend your entire life trying out different methods with more spiritual benefits. But, for busy people with stressful lives, the simpler techniques serve the single purpose of relaxing and reducing stress.

Along with physical exercises like walking, a progressive muscle relaxation exercise and self-guided meditation you can reduce stress to where you feel totally in control. Some stress is good. You do not want to eliminate it totally, since it acts as a motivator.

Other Benefits

Preparing and using meditation helps you to understand how you think.  This is an extremely important component of mental health. I think mental health is ignored in our society because we believe that we can not cause ourselves harm with our thoughts.

Yet, time and again, science has shown that our thoughts govern the level of hormones in our body and the feelings in our bodies.

What happens in one system affects all our systems. 

Because we can talk about separate parts of our whole being does not mean that they are separate. Because we identify rational, emotional, physical and spiritual as separate systems, as a way of talking about them, does not mean that the divisions exist.

We learn that we must be objective, not subjective. Again, you cannot separate parts of a whole except to talk about them. There is only one way a human can be and that is subjective. Objectivity is a linguistic distortion.

Through even the simplest meditation you can learn to improve and gain control of all your thinking and  as a result your fears, emotions and stress.