Os Princípios Básicos de personal development
Mindfulness may also be good for hearts that are already relatively healthy. Research suggests that meditating can increase respiratory sinus arrhythmia, the natural variations in heart rate that happen when we breathe that indicate better heart health and an increased chance of surviving a heart attack. Mindfulness may decrease cognitive decline from aging or Alzheimer’s
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Mindfulness fosters compassion and altruism: Research suggests mindfulness training makes us more likely to help someone in need and increases activity in neural networks involved in understanding the suffering of others and regulating emotions. Evidence suggests it might boost self-compassion as well.
Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them—without believing, for instance, that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment.
We could always meditate to reset ourselves before our last work meeting or after we drop the kids off at school. Anytime we feel overwhelmed, we can take a break and meditate instead of pushing through.
Meditation trains us to notice the traffic without chasing or fighting it — just to let the thought come. Then gently shift our focus away from it and back onto our breath — to let the thought go.
Life is sometimes difficult, stressful, and challenging. We can’t control what happens, but we do have the potential to change the way we relate to those things.
Indeed, the science behind mindfulness meditation has often suffered from poor research designs and small effect sizes, as 15 psychologists and neuroscientists found after reviewing hundreds of mindfulness studies. Their paper, published in October by Perspectives on Psychological Science
mentally. Then, if possible, end the meeting five minutes before the hour in order to allow all participants a mindful transition to their next meeting.
It doesn’t take long to feel the benefits of a regular meditation practice. Research shows that Headspace can reduce stress in 10 days. And thousands of studies have shown mindfulness and meditation can positively impact mental and physical health.
To help your focus stay on your breathing, count silently at each exhalation. Any time you find your mind distracted, simply release the distraction by returning your focus to your breath. Most important, allow yourself to enjoy these minutes. Throughout the rest of the day, other people and competing urgencies will fight for your attention. But for these 10 minutes, your attention is all your own.
To better understand the power of focus and awareness, consider an affliction that touches nearly all of us: email addiction. Emails have a way of seducing our attention and redirecting it to lower-priority tasks because completing small, quickly accomplished tasks releases dopamine, a pleasurable hormone, in our brains.
Nine or ten hours have passed but you’ve accomplished only a few of your priorities. And, most likely, you can’t even remember exactly what you did all day. If this sounds familiar, don’t worry. You’re not alone. Research shows that people spend almost 47 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing. In other words, many of us operate on autopilot.
According to neuroscience research, mindfulness practices dampen eliminate negative energy activity in our amygdala and increase the connections between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. Both of these parts of the brain help us to be less reactive to stressors and to recover better from stress when we experience it. As Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson write in their new book,