Use Gardening to Achieve Mental Relaxation
Gardening is known for many things. Besides growing your own foods and being able to eat healthier, the hobby can help you achieve mental relaxation. Many studies have shown that people who spend time outdoors engaged in gardening have a lower stress and anxiety level than people who don’t.
One of the thoughts behind this is that gardening provides a form of exercise which helps with mental focus and relaxes the body. The act of gardening is known for tranquility because you’re spending time in nature.
The Benefits of Being in Nature
Ever notice that when you’re inside all day, you experience a feeling of being cooped up? And if you’re inside too much, you feel restless and you may experience some downswings in how you feel emotionally.
It happens because you can’t find the same kind of peace inside that you can find when you spend time with nature. When you’re outside, working in the Earth, you experience a meditative reception within your body that’s different from what happens when you’re indoors.
Some scientists believe the reason for the meditative association with nature has to do with the work involved in gardening. Preparing the soil for plants or flowers offers a repetitive task that allows the mind to free itself from the busy chaos and chatter of daily life.
It gives you a sense of happiness and a feeling of letting go while you work the soil. Studies also show that the work in your garden produces feel good hormones because it’s a form of exercise from the smallest to the largest accomplishment.
Not only does handling the soil help you achieve a meditative state, but so does handling the plant. One of the reasons for this is due to all the greenery that you’re surrounded with.
The color green symbolizes growth as well as healing, which automatically relaxes the mind. It boosts your mental well-being and makes you feel joy despite whatever stress you have going on in your life.
Being in nature can help you clear your mind because the greenery boosts your immune health, which in turn keeps sickness at bay. So you feel good physically and when you feel good physically, you feel better mentally and emotionally.
Having the hobby of gardening is known to relieve things like headaches, upset stomach, mood swings and more because of its ability to relieve stress. When you find relief from stress, it’s easier to maintain a meditative state of mind.
Any time that you feel stressed or on edge about something, go outside and start working in the gardening. You’ll feel better quickly and the things that are bothering you won’t weigh so heavily on you.
Finding the Solace in Gardening
Even if you’re single and live by yourself, it can be hard to focus on relaxation. That’s because life is almost like one giant to-do list. You can’t take days on end off from your life because there’s always something that has to be handled.
You’ll always have responsibilities - taking care of yourself, your pets, working your job, doing home repairs, taking care of your vehicle or handling transportation issues, getting groceries, cleaning, visiting the doctor or dentist.
The list is never-ending. With the workload, both physical and mental, that people have to deal with, it’s why doctors recommend finding stress relief to prevent or cure health issues that stem from stress.
You have to find a way to clear your mind and free it from stress if you want to have a long, healthy life. You have to have mental downtime in order to recuperate. Most people don’t get that.
It’s one of the reasons that stress is so prevalent in today’s society. Whether you’re alone or not in gardening isn’t as important as you finding peace in what you’re doing. It’s the peace and the focus that helps you achieve a state of mental relaxation.
When you get in touch with nature, you’ll find that you distance yourself from the mental buzz that often comes with living a busy life. You’re always “plugged in,” always having to take care of stuff and not having a time out to recharge leads to compounding stress and mental clutter.
You need time by yourself even if you only have that time mentally. You can use gardening to achieve relaxation. You can’t reach the point of relaxation if you don’t free yourself from the mental noise and stress.
That’s what gardening will give you. It will allow you to stop and get off the never-ending busy hamster wheel of demands. These demands clamor for your time and for your complete attention.
When you garden, you get to stop the hamster wheel and live in the moment for as long as you’re in nature. Studies relating to relaxation and mental health have shown that out of all the hobbies you can engage in, gardening ranks number one as the most effective for achieving mental relaxation.
In fact, gardening can give you relief from stress and help you find peace faster than exercising does. The repetitive, relaxing state of gardening works to drop your levels of stress hormones, too.
So you feel better and have more energy to boot. Plus, you’ll be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor at harvest time with all the lovely flowers or delicious foods you’ll have grown yourself.
Gardening Helps You Focus
Many articles talk about the bonus of reaching the harvest point of gardening, but for those who are looking for mental relaxation gardening is a process. Rather than ending up with the harvest as your benefit, you reap a reduction in stress and a greater ability to focus.
One of the big issues with achieving mental relaxation is that you have to be able to clear your mind in order to focus. If you can’t focus, it’s much harder to achieve a point of complete mind relaxation.
Too many things are trying to butt in for you to quiet them all unless you know how to focus. If you’ve tried mental relaxation exercises in the past, then you know it can be difficult to completely clear your mind.
There’s simply too much going on and each person will have a different amount of mind interruptions and different types of these interruptions. It’s hard because we’ve conditioned ourselves to go 24/7 and it can become a habit to not be able to turn off the mind and go to sleep.
While that kind of burning the midnight oil drive might allow you to get a lot of things accomplished in your life, eventually, you’ll burn out physically and mentally. No one can keep up a frantic pace without a point of stopping to decompress.
Your body simply won’t let you push it beyond a certain point. That’s why you need to do something that can help you with relaxation, something that can help you learn how to focus - such as gardening.
The beauty found in a garden and the way that the scents of nature appeal to the senses also help you to be able to clear your mind, which aids in helping you focus. When you focus, you achieve awareness and it allows you to pay attention to your inner thoughts and feelings.
This is important because many problems in life are rooted in how we think and feel. These can become conditioned patterns that cause us to react to stress in ways that are detrimental to our life goals and our personal happiness.
When you practice concentrated focus and follow peaceful meditation through gardening, it lets you stop allowing issues in your life to be at the forefront. Gardening offers you a break from stress by giving your creative side a way to develop with nature.
When you learn how to use gardening to help you focus so that you relax mentally, it will aid you in all the other areas of your life. People that know how to relax for increased focus are known to meet their goals easier than other people.
It allows you to be able to concentrate better on the things you want to accomplish in life. Plus, it gives you the ability to be happier while you’re doing whatever it is you’re pursuing.
Benefits You Gain by Using Gardening for Mental Relaxation
When you achieve mental relaxation, there’s plenty of reward found in that. You feel better emotionally. When you don’t have a way to find mental relaxation, you feel on edge all the time.
You can have higher levels of irritability. You might find it’s easier to walk away in frustration rather than take care of stuff or deal with people. Gaining mental relaxation through gardening can help you because you’ll be able to reach a more thoughtful way of dealing with issues.
When you do that, you’ll notice that your level of anxiety is lower. The things that were once big enough to cause you to get upset either won’t seem like a big deal or you’ll have an easier time dealing with them.
That’s because when you’re not stressed mentally, you can handle things in a calmer manner. You won’t immediately react to the emotion of the situation or to the person, but rather you’ll be able to concentrate on the core problem and resolve it.
You’ll learn how to be fully present in your life as a benefit of gardening for mental relaxation. With the meditation mindset you can find through gardening, you’ll learn to stop and really experience life at that moment rather than letting it happen all around you.
You won’t be a bystander anymore - you’ll be a participant. You’ll feel the moistness of the soil through your fingers. You’ll hear the sound of the water as it gives the plants the hydration they need.
Experiencing these things in nature help you to connect with nature, move you to relax and let go of tension. Gardening benefits you gain also include finding harmony between your body and your mind.
It gives you a way to reflect inwardly and creates an opening for you to experience gratitude. As you observe the cycle of growth and life in gardening, it helps you be able to regain a state of being mindful of what’s going on around you and within you.
You’ll learn how to pour yourself into the moment that you’re living. It’s this process that lets you reach a state of natural meditation and your mind and body gain the same benefits from it as if you were actively engaging in practiced meditation habits. You’ll feel your body’s energy and zest for life restored through gardening.
The Natural Way to Reach Mental Relaxation
There are all kinds of practices that people will attempt in order to find relief from stress. Some people will turn to food. Others turn to activities that let them blank out such as mindlessly watching television.
Some people don't want to deal with things that bother them so they live in a state of having that nagging stress at the back of their minds, unable to relax completely. People want to achieve mental relaxation and so they’ll seek avenues to help that often aren’t good for their bodies.
Some people will attempt to find relief through the use of medications that have unpleasant side effects. Others will try to find relief by seeking out mind numbing alternatives, anything to disconnect from the stress they’re living under.
The problem is that when you seek to find mental relaxation through unnatural methods, it’s only a temporary fix. As soon as the effects of whatever you’re using wear off, you’ll feel the same or even worse than you did in the beginning.
It’s always better to choose a more natural method in order to achieve mental relaxation. Gardening can give you this and you won’t need to resort to any artificial means.
It doesn’t matter if you spend a few minutes a day gardening or hours each day, you’ll still find the peace you’re seeking. That’s because nature itself works to help you get to that meditative point.
When you work in a garden, you’ll be out in the sun. Even if you carefully cover your head with a hat and put on sunscreen, you’ll still gain the benefits of boosting your serotonin level.
When the serotonin level is increased, you’ll experience an upswing in your emotions. You’ll feel happier and less anxious. Being outside and experiencing the stillness of the day or the gentle breeze is beneficial toward achieving mental relaxation because it boosts your energy as well as helps to get rid of insomnia.
You also get a boost in your vitamin D level. This vitamin, which is also called the sunshine vitamin, is necessary for you to feel good emotionally. When you’re outside working in the garden, you gain the ability to be able to center yourself.
This allows you to put everything else in perspective and regain control over the stress that seems like it’ll never end.