5 elementos essenciais para spirituality
Recognize that your thoughts and emotions are fleeting and do not define you, an insight that can free you from negative thought patterns.
The body is a wonderful touchstone for meditation. Use it to help guide your attention inward and to train it to notice what’s right happening in the moment.
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And because leaders need to absorb and synthesize a growing flood of information in order to make good decisions, they’re hit particularly hard by this emerging trend.
People tend to lose some of their cognitive flexibility and short-term memory as they age. But mindfulness may be able to slow cognitive decline, even in people with Alzheimer’s disease.
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How does it work? To find out, researchers in the United Kingdom interviewed 11 adults who had experienced three or more episodes of severe depression, and had undergone MBCT within the previous three years. They analyzed the interviews to create a model, published in the journal Mindfulness
Those who learned mindfulness had significantly greater reductions in their systolic and diastolic blood pressure than those who learned progressive muscle relaxation, suggesting that mindfulness could help people at risk for heart disease by bringing blood pressure down.
. “Then there’s self-selection: Perhaps people with the brain changes reported in these studies choose to stick with meditation while others do not.” In other words, we should use caution when championing results.
Mindfulness is good for our minds: Several studies have found that mindfulness increases positive emotions while reducing negative emotions and stress. Indeed, at least one study suggests it may be as good as antidepressants in fighting depression and preventing relapse.
But meditation is more like sleep. The harder we try to sleep, sometimes the harder it is to drift off. When we sit to meditate, zen buddhism if we try hard to empty the mind, it tends to feel full.
When they do, rather than becoming frustrated and focusing on the noise, “Why is my neighbor having a dance party right now?” or trying to tune it out, “I wish this music would stop,” we can notice our thought, let it go, and return to our breath.
JM: I think that’s definitely a risk. But given that stress is a reality in many people’s working lives, I think mindfulness can be an effective tool to buffer its negative effects. And ideally, mindfulness may even help change workplaces for the better. Research suggests that mindfulness training helps make people more compassionate and empathetic toward others. By improving the way people relate to one another, ideally it can change corporate culture for the better, creating a more supportive, friendlier workplace with better relationships.
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.