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Meditation is the Fastest Growing Health Trend in America - Mindful
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Mindfulness is no longer considered a “soft skill,” but an essential part of overall health care.
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Meditation helps you navigate stress, both acute and chronic
Mindful breathing can interrupt our stress and fight-or-flight reactions—meditation may “quiet” the amygdala, the area of the brain that responds to stress.
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Regular mindfulness practice improves mental focus
When we multitask, our concentration levels deplete But the simple act of returning to the breath, over and over again, builds the “muscle” of attention, helping you both stay on task and recognize distractions.
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Mindfulness reduces bias—toward the negative, and toward others
We tend to focus on the negative. Research suggests mindfulness might help us shift gears out of our knee-jerk reactivity toward “bad” things.
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Mindfulness may improve mental health
When combined with traditional approaches, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy may help individuals with anxiety and depression work with rumination and troubling thoughts.
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Mindfulness
... is a collection of practices aimed at helping us to cultivate moment-to-moment awareness of ourselves and our environment.
Meditation sharpens your attention
Meditation helps to counter our tendency to stop paying attention to new information in our environment. Other studies have found that mindfulness meditation can reduce mind-wandering and improve attention.
Larger randomized controlled trials are still needed to understand how meditation might work with other treatments to help people manage attention-deficit disorders.
Consistent meditation
Long-term, consistent meditation mindfulness changes our ability to handle stress in a better, more sustainable way.
- Practicing meditation reduces the inflammatory response in people exposed to psychological stressors.
- Mindfulness practices help us to be less reactive to stressors and to recover better from stress when we experience it.
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Not backed up by science
While popular, researchers say there is a serious lack of evidence to back up mindfulness apps, even though they are increasingly perceived as proven treatments for mental health.
Seeking scientific validation
A handful of studies have been published on the efficacy of mindfulness apps, thanks in part to Headspace, one of the most popular apps in the field. In hopes of getting its app scientifically validated, the organization has partnered on more than 60 studies with 35 academic institutions. In the meantime, in lieu of research proving that apps work, marketers tend to draw misleading, but attractive claims.
The paradox of mindfulness apps
Mindfulness disrupts unhelpful habits. If you get distracted easily or have addictions, mindfulness helps curb these habits. But, in contrast, apps become popular and profitable by getting users lightly addicted to repetitive use. So, can an app really treat addiction, or is it inherently part of the problem? As of now, we don’t know the answer to that question.
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Mindfulness Meditation
Practitioners of mindful meditation focus their attention on only one thought. The goal is to be firmly affixed to the present moment. This typically means concentrating on the breath - observ...
Changes to the Brain
Buddhists have meditated for literally thousands of years. Buddhists are trying to hack their own minds, to harness them.
Only in recent times have neuroscientists discovered that meditation changes the brain physically.
Health Benefits
- Meditation improves attention. Studies show that 20 minutes a day are sufficient to get beneficial results.
- Meditation reduces stress after eight weeks of training.
- Meditation has also been shown to increase levels of empathy.