During the past two decades, more and more scientists have studied mindfulness -a collection of practices aimed at helping us to cultivate moment-to-moment awareness of ourselves and our environment. Their early findings triggered an enormous amount of enthusiasm for meditation.
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.
Would you describe yourself as a compassionate person? Even if you don't necessarily see yourself that way, I bet you're compassionate at least some of the time (e.g., when you're well-rested and not in a hurry), or with certain people in your life (e.g., with your closest friends).
Compassion can be understood as a mental state of cognitive recognition of suffering, with an emotional feeling, and a desire to do something to end that suffering.
I'm a yogi. I'm also a skeptic. Sometimes I wonder if the two can go together. I cringe whenever an instructor claims I'm "wringing the toxins" out of my organs with a twisting pose, for instance. Still, after eight years, I keep going back.
Although the research on yoga is still weak, based on the available findings, Yoga is probably just as good for your health as many other forms of exercise.
It seems particularly promising for improving lower back pain and — crucially — reducing inflammation in the body.
There is no certainty whether some forms of yoga are better than others, whether yoga should be prescribed to people for various health conditions, and how yoga compares with other forms of exercise.
There's also no good evidence behind many of the supposed health benefits of yoga, like flushing out toxins and stimulating digestion.