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How to Renew Your Compassion in the Face of Suffering
Using the Negative Emotion
- The negative emotions that come when confronted with thousands of people facing human rights abuse, can be channeled into brainstorming solutions and coming up with concrete strategies to help.
- Providing a clear roadmap and with assured results makes people trust their ability to make a real difference, which can increase motivation.
- Talking about the crisis in an objective way, without reaction, also helps, avoiding being overwhelmed and helpless.
- Meditation is another effective method, as it brings detachment and helps us focus on the crisis without negative and emotional outbursts.
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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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Altering the brain
In 2005, studies began to point out that meditation can change the structure of your brain by thickening the cortex. The cortex controls your attention and emotions.
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Mindfulness meditation
It typically refers to a practice for training your attention. It is an awareness that comes through paying attention in the moment, but non-judgmentally.
It involves sitting down with closed eyes and focussing on feeling your breath go in and out. When your attention starts to wander, you take note and bring your attention back to your breath.
Reduced amygdala activity
Meditation shows reduced activity in the amygdala, our brain’s threat detector. When the amygdala perceives a threat, it sets off the fight-flight-freeze response.
In a study, after practicing mindfulness for 20 minutes per day over just one week, participants showed reduced amygdala reactivity only while they were engaged in mindfulness, suggesting they need regular practice.