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But people can learn mindfulness on their own. Simply learning to focus your attention on your breathing in the present moment is a big part of mindfulness. At a new website we’ve created, called Greater Good in Action, we offer several step-by-step guides to mindfulness practices.
Ultimately, meditation is something you can do anywhere and at any time, so getting comfortable meditating without guidance can be useful.
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“The type of meditation matters,” explain postdoctoral researcher Bethany Kok and professor Tania Singer. “Each practice appears to create a distinct mental environment, the long-term consequences of which are only beginning to be explored.” How much meditation is enough? That also depends. This isn’t the answer most people want to hear. Many of us are looking for a medically prescriptive response (e.g., three times a week for 45-60 minutes), but the best guide might be this old Zen saying: “You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day—unless you’re too busy. Then you should sit for an hour.” To date, empirical research has yet to arrive at a consensus about how much is “enough.
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
A 2015 study looked at people who score high on a mindfulness awareness test, and found that they had a healthier cardiovascular risk profile than people with lower scores. One small pilot program also found that mindfulness training helped decrease depression.
First of all, a great deal of research suggests that mindfulness can help healthy people reduce their stress. And thanks to Jon-Kabat Zinn’s pioneering MBSR program, there’s now a large body of research showing that mindfulness can help people cope with the pain, anxiety, depression, and stress that might accompany illness, especially chronic conditions.
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 mindfulness in their day, adopting a nonjudgmental stance also seemed to protect their positive feelings (which took 528 hz 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.
. “Then there’s self-selection: Perhaps people with the brain changes reported in these studies choose to stick with meditation while others do not.” In other words, we should use caution when championing results.
Doing this helps us become more aware of our thoughts, act more compassionately toward ourselves and others, and connect with the present moment.
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And we do our best to recognize how we’re feeling without judging ourselves or trying to change what we feel. Research shows that practicing regular body scans can help reduce stress-induced hormones.
, to demonstrate how MBCT enables people to increase positive energy relate mindfully to the self and with others. The key, it seems, lies in the way MBCT enhances relationships: Less stress about relationships in turn helps prevent future episodes of depression. Three specific themes emerged from the study:
But that doesn’t mean we’ll feel clear, calm, and kind as soon as we start or finish. Since the mind is always changing, our experience might feel different each time we meditate.