Sobre harmony
Sobre harmony
Blog Article
As the day progresses and your brain starts to tire, mindfulness can help you stay sharp and avoid poor decisions. After lunch, set a timer on your phone to ring every hour.
Meditation is a highly personal activity, with everyone finding their best own way to practice. Some find guided meditations to be useful, especially when starting out, to help focus their attention.
Ideally, you should meditate when you feel calm but alert, and when you won’t be distracted. If you’re a morning person, then meditating in the morning might be perfect for you.
A Q&A with Jack Kornfield about giving feedback at work, using social media wisely, and the poetry in his teachings.
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
If you find yourself getting sleepy during meditation practice, open a window to let in some fresh air, or try meditating outside.
Soften your gaze and lower your eyes, not focused on anything in particular. You may also close your eyes, if that’s more comfortable.
The researchers found that these different dimensions of mindfulness were linked to different benefits. First, present-moment attention was the strongest predictor for increased positive emotions—the more attentive people said they were, the better they felt overall. Second, nonjudgmental acceptance was the strongest predictor for decreased negative emotions—the more people reported nonjudgmental acceptance in their lives, the less negative emotion they reported experiencing. For participants who had encountered a hassle in their day, adopting a nonjudgmental stance also stress relief seemed to protect their positive feelings (which took a bigger hit when people were less accepting of their hassles). Acting with awareness did not predict people’s positive or negative feelings beyond the other two skills.
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On the other hand, another study with breast cancer survivors found no differences in telomere length after taking an MBSR course; but they did find differences in telomere activity, which is also related to cell aging. In fact, a 2018 review of research ties mindfulness training to increased telomere activity, suggesting it indirectly affects the integrity of the telomeres in our cells. Perhaps that’s why scientists are at least optimistic about the positive effects of meditation on aging.
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, quickly accomplished tasks releases dopamine, a pleasurable hormone, in our brains.
Some people find listening to music while meditating helpful. Indeed, some music, especially slow or instrumental music, can invoke a quiet, relaxed state that’s conducive to meditation. Just make sure to choose music that won’t distract you.
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.