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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.
JM:You can start by learning how to practice mindfulness yourself, perhaps by taking a class, checking out a mindfulness app, or reading a book with instructions. If you’re happy with the benefits, you can build a community at work by telling your co-workers.
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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
Life is rarely ever quiet anyway. We can go into our meditation practice expecting that noises will happen, whether it’s loud music from a neighbor, a dog barking in the street, a truck backing up, or sounds in another room at home.
According to the authors, meditation programs were not shown to be more beneficial than active treatments—such as exercise, therapy, or taking prescription drugs—on any outcomes of interest. The research is also raising some interesting nuances about the effectiveness of meditation for different populations. For example, one recent, large-scale, well-designed study found that the “gold standard” Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) intervention for adults had pelo impact on depression or anxiety in teens.
Like many other aspects of meditation, whether to practice before or after exercise is mostly a personal preference. It may also feel different for you from day to day.
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 spirituality our day-to-day lives.
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You want your breathing to be relaxed, not forced in any way. It may help to take a few deep, clearing breaths before you start, and then allow your breathing to settle into a natural rhythm.
The Headspace app has hundreds of guided exercises to help you build your practice. Start by searching these three meditations to help you start a meditation practice. A happier, healthier you is a few breaths away.
JM: I think that’s definitely a risk. But given that stress is a reality in many people’s working lives, I think mindfulness can be an effective tool to buffer its negative effects. And ideally, mindfulness may even help change workplaces for meditation the better. Research suggests that mindfulness training helps make people more compassionate and empathetic toward others. By improving the way people relate to one another, ideally it can change corporate culture for the better, creating a more supportive, friendlier workplace with better relationships.
While one review of randomly controlled studies showed that mindfulness may have mixed effects increase positive vibrations on the physical symptoms of heart disease, a more recent review published by the American Heart Association concluded that, while research remains preliminary, there is enough evidence to suggest mindfulness as an adjunct treatment for coronary disease and its prevention.