Reasons to practice mindfulness

Mindfulness can be practised to:

1. Manage pain, anxiety, stress, or mood swings.
2. Provide the body and mind an oasis of calm in between a hectic lifestyle
3. Reduce suffering, distress and trauma caused by pain and depression, along with the negative emotions that come with life-threatening diseases.

Mindfulness opens up a space inside our minds that helps us respond to outside situations with ease, instead of just reacting impulsively.

We become aware and are able to detect our default setting, which is our ‘driven-doing mind’, and catch hold of it before any impulsive reaction is acted upon. It also helps us arrest our cycle of negative thoughts.

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.

• 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.
  

Meditation has drifted from its religious connections and has been adopted by psychologists, healthcare professionals and other secular organizations as an effective way to deal with the stress and illnesses of the modern world.

• Awareness: Focus on developing awareness. 
• Non-Judgement: Witnessing an experience or sensation without attachment or criticism.
• Peace: Though your feelings are valuable, mindfulness teaches you how to find serenity despite them.

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.

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. 
  

• Breathe before eating. 
• Listen to your body and measure your hunger.
• Eat according to your hunger. You can more mindfully choose what to eat, when to eat, and how much to eat. 
• Practice peaceful eating. It’s not easy to digest or savor your food if you aren’t relaxed.
• If you don’t love it, don’t eat it. Make a mindful choice about what to eat based on what you really enjoy.

• Trip over what you want to do. If you intend to do some yoga or to meditate, put your yoga mat or your meditation cushion in the middle of your floor.
• Refresh your triggers regularly - add variety or make them funny so they stick with you longer.
• Create new patterns. You could try a series of “If this, then that” messages to create easy reminders to shift into slow brain.

Less stress leads to less anxiety.

Regular meditation helps reduce anxiety and anxiety-related mental health issues like social anxiety, phobias and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

Some types of meditation can improve depression and help you maintain these benefits.

• Two studies of mindfulness meditation found decreased depression in over 4,600 adults.
• One study found that participants experienced a long-term decrease in depression.

The goal of this technique is to achieve inner peace without concentration or effort. 

A person is assigned a mantra to repeat in a specific way. It is practiced 20 minutes twice each day while sitting comfortably with eyes closed.

It is also called visualization or guided imagery, where you form mental pictures or situations that you find relaxing.

It is commonly led by a guide, and practitioners are encouraged to use as many senses as possible to evoke calmness.

Although mindfulness originated from Buddhism, it has been stripped from most of its teachings. 

What remains is nothing more than a self-help tool to help one get used to the very conditions that caused the problems. While is it a noble aim to reduce stress and anxiety, it is more important to acknowledge and address the underlying cause of the suffering.

The message of the mindfulness movement is that the underlying cause is in our mind - a "thinking disease" or a kind of attention deficit disorder. 

Rather than discussing how attention is monetized and manipulated by corporations, mindfulness advocates to view the crisis as an internal battle. The result is that we meekly retreat into the private sphere without critically engaging with the causes of suffering in the structures of power and economic systems of capitalist society.