Obtendo meu self-knowledge para trabalhar
Obtendo meu self-knowledge para trabalhar
Blog Article
Meditation has proven benefits, but the style that works best depends on a person's habits and preferences. In this episode of The Science of Happiness, we explore walking meditation, a powerful practice for feeling more centered and grounded. Dan Harris, host of the award-winning 10% Happier podcast, shares how walking meditation helps him manage the residual stress and anxiety from years of war reporting and high-pressure TV anchoring.
Mindfulness enhances relationships: Research suggests mindfulness training makes couples more satisfied with their relationship, makes each partner feel more optimistic and relaxed, and makes them feel more accepting of and closer to one another.
Add to this that we have entered what many people are calling the “attention economy.” In the attention economy, the ability to maintain focus and concentration is every bit as important as technical or management skills.
“The type of meditation matters,” explain postdoctoral researcher Bethany Kok and professor Tania Singer. “Each practice appears to create a distinct mental environment, the long-term consequences of which are only beginning to be explored.” How much meditation is enough? That also depends. This isn’t the answer most people want to hear. Many of us are looking for a medically prescriptive response (e.g., three times a week for 45-60 minutes), but the best guide might be this old Zen saying: “You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day—unless you’re too busy. Then you should sit for an hour.” To date, empirical research has yet to arrive at a consensus about how much is “enough.
We might feel sleepy. If we doze off, don’t worry. The mind’s getting used to figuring out the difference between slowing down and shutting off.
Meditation does seem to improve mental health—but it’s not necessarily more effective than other steps you can take. Early research suggested that mindfulness meditation had a dramatic impact on our mental health. But as the number of studies has grown, so has scientific skepticism about these initial claims. For example, a 2014 meta-analysis published in JAMA Internal Medicine
Meditating after a large meal—and certainly after drinking alcohol—can make you feel sleepy, which isn’t ideal. The goal is to stay alert during your practice.
A visualization meditation that harnesses the image of a mountain to guide us into awareness of our own relaxing sounds steady, still nature beyond the thinking mind.
However, social bias isn’t the only kind of mental bias mindfulness appears to reduce. For example, several studies convincingly show that mindfulness probably reduces sunk-cost bias, which is our tendency to stay invested in a losing proposition. Mindfulness also seems to reduce our natural tendency to focus on the negative things in life. In one study, participants reported on their general mindfulness levels, then briefly viewed photos that induced strong positive emotion (like photos of babies), strong negative emotion (like photos of people in pain), or neither, while having their brains scanned. More mindful participants were less reactive to negative photos and showed higher indications of positive feeling when seeing the positive photos. According to the authors, this supports the contention that mindfulness decreases the negativity bias, something other studies support, too.
Mindfulness changes our brains: Research has found that it increases density of gray matter in brain regions linked to learning, memory, emotion regulation, and empathy.
JM: Here in the San Francisco Bay area, we’re seeing growing interest. Initially, that was among tech and social media companies. Google has been a pioneer in providing mindfulness practice training for its employees. In fact, an engineer at Google first instituted a mindfulness training program there, which has now become the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, offering mindfulness training for companies around the world.
Loving-kindness meditation, which the GGSC’s Christine Carter tibetan healing sounds explains in this post, involves extending feelings of compassion toward people, starting with yourself then branching out to someone close to you, then to an acquaintance, then to someone vibration raising giving you a hard time, then finally to all beings everywhere.
It does this through various points of support based on experience level, how much time you may have, and with practices designed to meet you exactly where you are that day, in your particular life stage, and wherever you are along your meditation journey.
Taken together, the studies suggest that mindfulness may impact our hearts, brains, immune systems, and more. Though nothing suggests mindfulness is a standalone treatment for disease nor the most important ingredient for a healthy life, here are some of the ways that it appears to benefit us physically.