Sobre harmony
Sobre harmony
Blog Article
JM: An early, small study suggests that mindfulness may help boost the immune system. By serving as a buffer against stress, mindfulness may also lower the risk of heart disease.
The body is a wonderful touchstone for meditation. Use it to help guide your attention inward and to train it to notice what’s right happening in the moment.
In many organizations, there are bigger, systemic changes that need to be made, but I don’t think that instituting a mindfulness program will prevent those changes from happening. At the least, a mindfulness program provides workers with some relief from stress and anxiety while they campaign for systemic changes; at best, it helps to catalyze those bigger systemic changes.
Mindfulness can help combat bias: Even a brief mindfulness training can reduce our implicit biases and the biased language we use. One way this works, researchers have found, is by attenuating the cognitive biases that contribute to prejudice.
A small 2016 pilot study used neuroimaging to see how mindfulness practice changes the brains of parents—and then asked the kids about the quality of their parenting. The results suggest that mindfulness practice seemed to activate the part of the brain involved in empathy and emotional regulation (the left anterior insula/inferior frontal gyrus) and that the children of parents who showed the most activation perceived the greatest improvement in the parent-child relationship. We must remember, however, that these studies are often very small, and the researchers themselves say results are very tentative. Mindfulness seems to reduce many kinds of bias. We are seeing more and more studies suggesting that practicing mindfulness can reduce psychological bias. For example, one study found that a brief loving-kindness meditation reduced prejudice toward homeless people, while another found that a brief mindfulness training decreased unconscious bias against black people and elderly people. In a study by Adam Lueke and colleagues, white participants who received a brief mindfulness training demonstrated less biased behavior
Still, it’s encouraging to know that something that can be taught and practiced can have an impact on our overall health—not just mental but also physical—more than 2,000 years after it was developed. That’s reason enough to give mindfulness meditation a try.
How does it work? To find out, researchers in the United Kingdom interviewed 11 adults who had experienced three or more episodes of severe depression, and had undergone MBCT within the previous three years. They analyzed the interviews to create a model, published in the journal Mindfulness
Indeed, the science behind mindfulness meditation has often suffered from poor research designs and small effect sizes, as 15 psychologists and neuroscientists found after reviewing hundreds of mindfulness studies. Their paper, published in October by Perspectives on Psychological Science
Meditation is the best tool we have for increasing mindfulness. It’s also a powerful way to bring a greater sense of calm focus and equanimity to our day-to-day lives.
Mindful couples may also recover more quickly from conflict. Mindfulness affects the way we see ourselves: More mindful people have a stronger sense of self and seem to act more in line with their values. They may also have a healthier body image, more secure self-esteem, and more resilience to negative feedback.
Jason Marsh: Mindfulness describes a moment-to-moment awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. It’s a state of being attuned to what’s going on in your body and in the surrounding environment—being in the present moment without thinking about the future or what happened in the past.
To better understand the power of focus and awareness, consider an affliction that touches nearly all of us: email addiction. Emails have a way of seducing our attention and redirecting it to lower-priority tasks because completing small, healing music quickly accomplished tasks releases dopamine, a pleasurable hormone, in our brains.
of what is merely noise. To get a better start to your day, avoid checking your email first thing in the morning. Doing so will help you sidestep an onslaught of distractions and short-term problems during a period of exceptional focus and creativity.
A short meditation can be five minutes or less. If we feel like that’s not enough, a 10-minute meditation is great for beginners. Once we have a consistent practice, we can slowly increase our time.