Reduce Stress and anxiety
As I wrote about in my blog post about why yoga is a great practice for Performers, this is a very stressful industry. Meditation is a great way to reduce your levels of stress and anxiety. Meditation is both great to use when stress pops up to reduce it in the moment, but also as a long term solution. Developing a consistent meditation practice can help reduce overall levels of stress by decreasing the amount of cortisol (the stress hormone) in the body.
Enhances Self Awareness
Self-awareness is important for everybody, but I think it is particularly important for actors and other performers. Acting is all about connections. Connection between you as an actor and the character you're portraying, connections between other people, and connection to the world and environment around you. Meditation can help deepen your understanding of yourself as well as develop a better sense of your connections to others.
Improves Sleep
Rest is super important to the human body and performers tend to have really long days at work. So it’s important to maximize the amount of good quality sleep you get as a performer. Meditation is a great practice to improve overall sleep quality. Who doesn’t want better sleep?
Improved memory and attention span
It has been shown that meditation can improve a person's memory, particularly as they age as well as to improve one’s attention span. This is a fantastic benefit for performers. Actors have to memorize lines, dancers have to memorize choreography and so on and so forth. So being able to help improve one’s ability to improve memory and improve attention span (super important when getting critical information given to you in rehearsals) is something you shouldn't pass up.
Increase Imagination & Creativity
Lastly, meditation can help increase your imagination and creativity. This one seems like an obvious benefit to me. As performers that is one of the things we enjoy most about this field of work, that we get to be creative and enjoy the wonder that being creative brings. We literally bring creativity to life.
Clearly, meditation has some amazing benefits for everyone. But I hope this blog really demonstrates why it can be such an awesome practice to include in your daily life. If you are interested in beginning a meditation practice I suggest looking into apps that can help guide you and that you can take with you wherever you are. There are tons out there. Some are free and some cost, but it’s always best to do your own research and find what works best for you. You can also find thousands of guided meditation practices of various lengths on YouTube.
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