9 Lifestyle Changes That Happen After You Start Meditating

Here are 9 common lifestyle changes that meditators have reported within their first year of daily practice:

This means that the time you spend meditating will be refunded back to you — the time you're not tossing and turning in bed, wishing sleep was working better. The only question is: what to do with all of that extra time?

Alcohol, after all, is a depressant. As meditation helps you release your stress, the need for excessive amounts of alcohol begins to wane. Cutting down your daily consumption to just a couple of glasses of wine in a week will start to seem like the natural thing to do.

Meditation helps to expand the window of perception, allowing you to see value in every experience and every relationship. After meditating, you get less perturbed and more patient around canceled plans, insensitive partners, rude customer service reps, or any other situation that may have elicited a negative response in your past.

Before starting to meditate, the only happiness you experienced may have come from relationships, money, or achievements. After starting meditation, happiness begins to fill you up from within. How do you know? Because as your circumstances inevitably change (i.e. your relationship ends, you lose money, you experience failure), weirdly, you'll still feel happy inside. There will be less of a need to control people, places, or situations. Why? Because you’ve tapped into the source of fulfillment, which has always resided within.

Rest is the basis for dynamic action. Meditation supplements the rest from sleep, which enhances your ability to accomplish more during the day while expending less energy.

In other words, you have an inherent feeling that the party is wherever you are, and that sense of presence can be felt even while you're in dreaded places such as gridlock traffic, the DMV, or in line at the post office.

Stress has a paralyzing effect on your potential, and it can dim your sense of adventure. As stress gets dissolved through regular meditation, you find yourself naturally becoming more daring. This means it’ll be easier to quit that dead-end job or relationship, and take more chances. So get ready to start that new business, take up that new hobby, or travel around the world.

Mixed in with the wise guidance from the heart are the myriad fears from your head. Regular meditation activates a sort of spam filter for the negative self-talk of the mind, and allows you to detect the purest messages from your true center of wisdom. This in turn, will lead you to a greater sense of trust toward the messages emanating from your heart.

There are many more changes that occur when you start meditating, ranging from normal to bizarre. When I teach my meditation classes, I try not to predict any specifics changes that my students will experience. I like to remind them that whatever happens will be exciting and amazing.