Trauma, derived from the Greek word meaning ‘wound’, refers to emotional distress following a shocking or harmful event that overwhelms a person's ability to process it. Be it one time or a chain of occurrences, the emotional impact can influence a person's psychological well-being. However, perception towards trauma varies; that event that overwhelms one may not necessarily disturb another. According to recent research on trauma and recovery, meditation has been increasingly taken on with a view to emotional rehabilitation since it provides a scope to work through distress along with enhancing psychological resilience along the way.
Mind-Body Connection
Psychological trauma often manifests in the body as stress, anxiety, and even sleep disturbances. Many forms of meditation, including mindfulness, have been found to decrease physiological markers of stress, such as heart rate and cortisol levels. One 2017 review of 45 studies indicated that meditation can reduce stress and induce physical relaxation, an important part of emotional recovery. Meditation calms the body's reaction to stress, helping it to control its reaction to traumatised related triggers thus curing symptoms associated with their ills such as irritable bowel syndrome and fibromyalgia.
Coping with Trauma Symptoms
When we spoke to Dr Neerja Agarwal CEO & Co-founder at Emoneeds, she said that meditation has proven extremely potential in countering the tight grip of post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition where the past brutally revives and makes people replay the most terrifying moments of their lives. Meditation, especially mindfulness and yoga, enables victims of trauma to confront painful memories in a safe controlled manner. These practices persuade victims of trauma to live in the moment, away from hypervigilance and emotional reactivity usually linked with PTSD.
Resilience and Emotional Strength
Meditation builds up emotional resilience to better bounce back from trauma. It helps the individual get accustomed to dealing with problems by strengthening his or her emotional capacity and allows easier coping with future challenges. For instance, a study done in 2015 concluded that individuals who received the meditation exercise had fewer negative thoughts when exposed to disturbing images than the control group. This shows that the practice of meditation affects reframing bad experiences and creating adaptive thinking patterns.
Better Sleep and Recovery
Trauma usually disrupts sleep, adding to emotional and physical recovery. The relaxing effects of meditation may enhance the quality of sleep by allowing an individual to control racing thoughts that result in insomnia. According to a study in 2014, mindfulness-based meditation increased sleep time and decreased the severity of insomnia compared to controls who received no intervention. By quieting the mind, meditation promotes deeper, more restorative sleep, which is essential for overall healing and emotional resilience.
