Learn Mindfulness Meditation

How Practicing Mindfulness Promotes Brain Health and Cognition

When it comes to aging, there are plenty of “secret recipes,” serums, diets, and trends that claim to keep you young and healthy. However, one technique has actually been found to slow the progression of many age-related conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. 

Mindfulness is the practice of being fully aware of the present moment –– from what’s happening around you to what you’re doing, down to the tiniest detail. 

While it may sound unsubstantial to those who haven’t tried it, the correct practice of mindfulness exercises has been found to have incredible benefits when it comes to the health of the brain and mind. 

How Mindfulness Boosts Your Brain

Sure, mindfulness is a great way to calm yourself during times of stress, relax after a long day of work, or just spend a few minutes enjoying life. But there are more concrete benefits researchers believe have lasting impacts on physical and mental health. 

For starters, mindfulness does reduce stress. We’re all stressed from time to time, but chronic stress actually has a big impact on things like mental health, digestion, heart disease, and obesity. In fact, the American Psychological Association reported that in 2014, almost 80% of Americans regularly experienced physical symptoms caused by stress and over 70% of Americans regularly experienced psychological symptoms caused by stress. However, a practice called mindful meditation has been found to ease psychological stress like anxiety, depression, and pain with the same effectiveness as antidepressant medication. 

Mindfulness changes the physical structure of the brain. Here’s where things get science-y. Research has found that practicing mindfulness regularly actually leads to an increase in the volume of grey matter in your brain. This grey matter lives in an area of the brain responsible for learning, memory, emotional regulation, and perspective. Additionally, that grey matter tends to stick around longer in those who meditate than those who don’t, even though the normal aging process causes brain volume to decrease over time. 

How Mindfulness Makes You Healthier

There are other reasons why mindfulness is a great way to keep yourself healthy. 

Practicing mindfulness keeps you sharp. Mindfulness has been linked to a slower progression of memory-related diseases. While conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are life-changing and challenging to cope with, mindfulness could help to stall the progression of symptoms if started early enough. A specific type of meditation called Kirtan Kriya (KK) is believed to affect the brain by increasing neurotransmitters. In turn, this slows the process of memory loss, as a loss of neurotransmitters is directly associated with Alzheimer’s. 

Mindfulness keeps you cool. Agitation and stress are common symptoms of memory loss in older adults. In addition, these symptoms often affect anyone feeling stressed or unhappy. However, mindfulness meditation helps to increase your awareness of emotions and can help teach you to recognize, accept, and dismiss negative emotions with ease. 

Mindful breathing regulates digestion and circulation. Our bodies need oxygen to breathe, but also to fuel our circulatory system. Blood carries oxygen throughout the body, helping our muscles work normally and perform their jobs. Deep breathing, a type of mindfulness exercise, can dramatically increase the intake of oxygen into the bloodstream. As a result, blood carries extra oxygen throughout the body and promotes better function in the digestive system. 

How to Practice Mindfulness 

While mindfulness can be done anywhere, anytime, it’s best to find a quiet spot where you can be alone with your thoughts. Once you’ve found the perfect zen space, you can begin the process of mindfulness. Here are a few exercises to try. 

Diaphragmatic breathing

Would you be surprised to hear that as you’re sitting here, you’re breathing incorrectly? It’s true. Subconscious breathing often becomes inefficient due to the incorrect use of the diaphragm, a large, dome-shaped muscle at the base of the lungs. By intentionally using this muscle during a deep breathing exercise, you can improve lung function, oxygen intake, and decrease heart rate. 

Here’s how to do it: 

1. Lie on your back on a flat, comfortable surface with your knees slightly bent and your head supported by a pillow. 
2. Place one hand on your upper chest and the other hand on your stomach, just below your rib cage. 
3. Slowly begin to inhale through your nose. The goal is to feel your stomach expand with one hand while keeping the hand on your chest as still as possible. 
4. To exhale, tighten your stomach muscles and release the air through pursed lips. The hand on your stomach should fall inwards while the hand on your chest remains still. 

Beginners should practice this for no more than 10 minutes 3–4 times per day. As you grow accustomed to the exercise, you can begin to increase the effort and frequency of diaphragmatic breathing. 

Body Scan 

Mindfulness doesn’t just involve our thoughts. The whole body should be used during a mindfulness exercise to get the most out of the session.

A mindful body scan is an exercise that incorporates the full body. It trains you to heighten your focus on the present moment and be objective about feelings, rather than judging or trying to fix something. 

Here’s how to do a body scan: 

1. Like diaphragmatic breathing, a body scan is best performed while lying on your back. 
2. Close your eyes and keep them closed throughout the exercise. 
3. Bring your attention to your breathing, noticing any patterns and feeling where your back makes contact with the floor as your lungs expand. Take time to focus on the breath and let any other thoughts leave your mind. 
4. As you inhale slowly, bring your attention to the tips of your toes. Begin to notice any sensations you may feel there. Feelings to notice may include buzzing, tingling, pressure from shoes or socks, temperature, or any other stimulus. If you don’t notice a particular sensation, that’s okay too. Avoid judging your thoughts or feelings and focus solely on the tips of your toes. 
5. Choose a spot slightly higher on your body, like your heels, calves or knees, and repeat the process of bringing attention to that area and noticing sensations. Continue this process, slowly moving up the body, until you’ve reached your head. 
6. Throughout the exercise, your mind will undoubtedly wander and lose focus. When this happens, there is no need to judge or scold yourself. Simply notice that your thoughts wandered, acknowledge it, and bring your attention back to the body. 
7. Once you’ve finished the process of focusing on areas of your body, return your focus to the breath. Spend a few moments in this focus, taking time to notice how your breathing may have changed. 
8. When you’re ready, open your eyes. Notice how your body feels. Does it feel more relaxed? Do you feel heavy or tired? Acknowledge these feelings and praise yourself for a successful mindful body scan.
   

While this may sound a bit out there for the more Type-A among us, body scans are a great way to train your brain to process negative emotions in a healthier way and at the same time, be more in tune with the way our body is feeling. 

Want to get inspiration for more great mindfulness exercises and activities? A Place for Mom has compiled a list of 25 mindfulness activities that will leave you feeling very zen. Check it out here!

Looking around, you can see that people live in many different types of lives. But so many of them aren’t really present in the lives that they’re living. Plus, they’re not taking the steps that they could to create the best life possible.

By using mindful motivation, you can create a life that brings you great relationships, enables you to meet your life goals and sets you free from negative emotions.

How To Be Present: What Is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness means that you’re specifically in the present. When someone is mindful, they’re aware of and paying attention to the moment that they’re in, not mired down in the past or future.

When you practice mindfulness, you focus your mind purposefully. Have you ever driven from one place to another and at the end of your destination, you weren’t aware of the sights you saw or how you arrived there?

VIDEO: 10 Minute Meditation for Motivation
and Building a Positive Mindset

This is a guided meditation with motivating, positive affirmations. This is a great way to start your day. This meditation will help you make stay motivated and confident. Affirmations are most effective when practiced on a daily bases. Headphones recommended for the optimal experience.

If so, you weren’t practicing mindfulness. It’s the same concept with every area of your life. You can go through life on autopilot. This means that you can sit down and have a meal, but because you’re not practicing mindfulness, you won’t even be aware of what you had to eat in terms of a portion or even the pleasure of tasting it.

This is why you can eat something and then wonder later on what it was that you had for dinner. You have to stop and think to remind yourself. The reason that you can go through life and miss things is that the mind has a tendency to blank or go through the motions when you’re doing something you’ve done numerous times before.

Mindfulness is putting a stop to allowing the mind to simply wander unchecked. It means that you direct your mind back to focus on whatever it needs to focus on. When you don’t practice an awareness of your thoughts, you can go through life and miss out on having the best life you could have.

The art of using mindfulness has its roots in Buddhism and the practice has been around for thousands of years. Not only was it practiced to enhance spiritual connectivity, but also to bring calmness, focus, and improve the brain’s ability to think.

Today, many studies have shown that there are multiple reasons why practicing mindfulness can help you create your best life. There are physical health and emotional well-being boosts that can be had when you practice mindfulness.

6 Incredible Health Benefits Of Mindfulness

When you become aware in the present moment, it can soothe your emotions and help strengthen your immune system. The use of mindfulness is tied in with many forms of meditation that are designed to bring self-awareness and rid the body of negative thought patterns.

Mindfulness helps center the user and cause him to choose to live fully active in today rather than focus on the past or get caught up in what might happen in their future.

Practicing Mindfulness To Make Better Life Choices

You might be surprised to learn that some of the choices that you make in life, you’re making without being fully aware of the present. When this happens, the choices that you make aren’t really the ones that can give you the best outcome.

This can impact your entire life. But when you practice mindfulness, you can make better choices and change your life to let it become the one that you’ve dreamed of living.

One of the areas where mindfulness can help you make better choices is in the area of eating. Plenty of people eat countless times a day without ever giving a second thought to what it is that they’re doing.

This is because it’s easy to eat while you’re busy with things unrelated to eating. You don’t have to focus on putting fork to mouth in order to accomplish this task. You learned how to do it at a young age, so you can multitask easily.

It’s easy to eat while you’re reading, while you’re talking on the phone or while you’re watching a movie. What happens then is that you miss being in the present while you’re eating.

Simple Mindfulness Techniques: How Can You Be More Mindful?

It means that you miss out on the taste of the food, the pleasure that you could derive from it – and this can also lead you to make poorer food choices in terms of the types and quantities of food that you’re consuming.

Plus, when you eat without practicing mindfulness, it can be easier for you to not connect the emotions to what you’re eating. That means if you’re an emotional eater, lacking mindfulness can cause you to eat more and not be aware of what it is that you’re eating that could be sabotaging the health or the body that you want.

But if you practice mindfulness, this practice can help you learn not to link your emotions to food.

Another area where mindfulness can help you is in your relationships. When your relationships are good, it can help make you feel better physically, lessen stress and contribute to your happiness. Mindfulness can help you have harmony in your relationships.

This is because you won’t feel as stressed, so whenever there’s an issue, you won’t immediately react to what you perceive is going on. By being mindful, you’ll be focused on being present during the interaction with the people in your life.

What this will do is help you better understand what someone else is saying and feeling. It helps eliminate the defensiveness that can be at the root of many relationship problems.

Mindfulness can help you respond to relationship interaction in an appropriate way. You’ll be able to be in the moment with the other person, not throwing out the past, or burdening the two of you with what might happen in the coming days, weeks, months or years.

You’ll be focused on that one moment, giving them all your attention, rather than having your mind be a thousand miles away. Mindfulness helps you tune in to the people in your life.

Being mindful helps you be more empathetic, which makes you more in tune with how the people in your life are acting by seeing the emotion behind the action and behind the words they speak.

It helps you not be as defensive and not react with ingrained thought patterns that can be so damaging to relationships. You’ll be able to leave your personal baggage at the door and interact with the other person based on truth, not personal perceptions.

When you practice mindfulness techniques, it can also help you make better choices that impact your productivity. By using mindfulness, you can stay aware of the present rather than focusing on what’s coming later. Being aware of where you are right now and working to increase your focus. When you’re unfocused, it’s too easy to let your mind start to think about what else is coming your way that you have to get done.

Can Mindfulness At Work Improve Your Career and Your life?

Mindfulness helps you accomplish tasks by keeping you on track. It can be easy to start working on something, only to start thinking that maybe you forgot to respond to a phone call, or you forgot to write an appointment down on the calendar.

So off you go to deal with these other tasks and before you know it, you’ve lost productivity. When your mind jumps from one thought to another, you can end up not being as effective and causing a rise in your stress level because you haven’t been able to get things done.

Staying in the here and now is what mindfulness can help you with. When you can focus, you’ll make much better productive choices and you can create the best life for yourself.

How To Be Mindful: Natural Therapy for Improved Mental Health

For the brain, mindfulness can be an action that can help keep the mind focused on the good rather than letting it dwell on all of the negatives.

Do you know how an untrained puppy will run around when you take it outside?

It doesn’t want to listen because it’s not focused on you. There are too many exciting things outside – like the wind pushing a leaf across the grass, the neighbor’s dog, a car passing on the street or kids out playing.

In a flash, the puppy takes off after the leaf or the neighbor’s dog or heads toward the street. Because the puppy hasn’t been trained to focus, anything goes, and he could very well end up with some negative consequences.

Just like something detrimental can happen with an untrained puppy, a mind that doesn’t practice mindfulness can also experience negative consequences. When you allow your mind to go off on any thought process, you can bet those thoughts won’t always bring you a positive return.

What Has Mindfulness Studies and Brain Research Shown Us?

Your mind will start to think about situations that caused your anger in life. You’ll start thinking about wanting to get even. You’ll feel sorry for yourself that your life isn’t like someone else’s, who seems to have everything.

Before you know it, you’re on a cycle of negativity because your mind was allowed to go there, to dwell on thoughts that produce negative feelings. Whatever the mind dwells on can either help you have good feelings about your life or it can introduce bad ones.

When your mind isn’t practicing mindfulness, it can wander off into thinking about things that cause you to feel stressed out. It can cause you to feel anxiety. You might experience a rise in anger and become bitter.

Left alone, the mind that’s not focused with mindfulness can lead you to bouts of depression. Practicing mindfulness is something that can help you focus on being present and can alter how the past affects you.

Mindfulness keeps you centered on today, not yesterday and not tomorrow. There are various techniques using mindfulness that can help improve mental health. Among these are mindfulness stress reduction and mindfulness cognitive therapy.

Practicing Mindfulness With Common Meditation Techniques

There are several techniques that you can use to harness mindfulness. The first one is meditation. Most people are familiar with the basics of meditation. To practice mindful meditation, you need a comfortable place to sit down.

Be aware of how you’re breathing and center your focus on the moment that you’re in. Concentrate on your breath, paying attention to your inhaling and exhaling.

5-Minute Mindfulness Body Scan Meditation Script & Mp3

Mindful meditation is different because when thoughts pull you away from the moment, you concentrate on your breathing, stop and refocus. During this time, you should have a non-judgmental attitude toward whatever it is that runs through your mind.

It might be hard to keep your mind focused if you’ve had a habit in the past of allowing your mind to wander when you’re trying to concentrate.

Besides meditation, you can choose to practice the mindfulness technique of deep breathing. Taking breaths isn’t something that a lot of people are aware of. We do it without thinking about it. But when you practice deep breathing involving mindful techniques, this can relieve stress, boost your energy levels and help you achieve calmness.

One technique is achieved by breathing through the nose in short breaths for a few seconds. This practice can help to give you a mindful awareness that returns your focus to the present.

Another technique is to count the deep breaths that you take for a few seconds. You would focus on breathing in through the nose and exhaling slowly through the mouth.

COMPLETE GUIDE: Deep Breathing Exercises To Alleviate Stress

The object technique is used in mindfulness to help raise the level of focus that you have. To do this practice, you pick out an item near you and focus on that item.

Your awareness should only be about that item such as a vase or a chair or whatever other objects you choose. You keep the focus until that item is all that your mind centers on.

When your thoughts start to drift away, you consciously pull them back to the item that you’re looking at.

Walking is another technique used in mindful practices. Make sure that you’re in an area where you can walk unimpeded. Place your focus on what’s around you. Take in the five senses that are present in your surroundings – such as what you can hear or smell or see.

Breathe normally and be aware of how you pick up your foot and put it down as you take a step. Focus your thoughts on how your feet feel as they connect with the walking surface.

Pay attention to how your body is working as you walk. Keep your focus on the movements that you make as you walk, including swinging your arms, the speed you walk, and more.

How To Live In The Present: Snapping Yourself Out Of The Past or Future Focus

What’s already happened is long gone. No one can change the events or emotions that have already passed. It’s human nature to look at the past and feel nostalgic, or even fearful or angry – but the trouble comes in when we focus on the past and let it guide our present actions, rather than living in the present moment.

When that happens, you miss the chance to create your best life and you’re settling either for the pain or the glory of what used to be. A life of potential fullness can easily be lost by looking at life in the past.

In the same way that focusing on the past can limit your ability to have your best life, so can focusing on the future. The future isn’t here yet. You don’t want to waste the quality of the present on what might happen in the future. Usually, what you focus on for the future, when it arrives, is different from what you thought it would be. To have the best life possible, you need to aim for keeping your focus solely on the present.

It’s true that everyone can have times where the past or the future seems to be all they can focus on. But you can change that. You change it by living in the now.

Top 9 Mindfulness Life Lessons From 100-Year-Olds

When you’re working on something, don’t work on several things at once. When you’re eating, don’t do anything else besides eat. When you’re spending time with someone, don’t split your thoughts by trying to pay attention to the other person while at the same time opening mail or answering an email.

Don’t always be thinking about what’s coming next. Be in the present fully aware of your actions. Slow down. Don’t try to zip through life at full speed to get stuff over with.

Stop overcrowding your day by multitasking your way through everything. You’re not really getting more accomplished because you’re not able to give one single thing your complete attention.

Stop packing so much into your life – because too many things will cause you to suffer from a mental frenzy. This happens when you take on so much that you feel as if you don’t have time to think.

Take a break on purpose. It’s rare that people simply be instead of doing. For a set amount of time every day, stop. You might have heard the phrase “take the time to stop and smell the roses” and this is the same principle.

Take the time to stop and be present. Don’t do anything during your time of stopping but drink in your surroundings. Notice the day. The scents on the air. The beauty around you.

When you take the time to practice mindfulness, it allows you to not only create the best life you could ever dream of, but you get to savor it, too.

When you begin practicing this process, you’ll notice how many others are not living in the present, and you’ll be grateful that you’re no longer chained to the old way of living.

The way that you conduct yourself in your personal and professional life begins with how you use your mind. You can teach your mind to accept yourself and gain empowerment – or you can stay stuck in self-defeating behaviors.

You are what you think. When you want to introduce change into your life, you need to first accept and empower yourself before you begin altering anything. Your mind is the greatest tool that you have for living the best possible life that you can live in.

Countless studies have shown that the brain is constantly working. Your brain can be wired to think or cause you to act in a certain way based on how you handle your mind’s ability to tap into your subconscious mind.

What Has Mindfulness Studies and Brain Research Shown Us?

You will find a “Short Guided Meditation Script” to release the need for control at the bottom of this article. This Mindfulness Meditation will teach you to live in the moment without expectations or judgments.

When you practice mindfulness, you can empower yourself and fine tune the subconscious abilities that you have. Using mindful strategies, you’ll be able to focus better, lower your stress and boost your confidence and self-esteem.

Once you learn to accept yourself, you’ll be able to have compassion for yourself, too. This will defeat any negative internal talk that you may have been practicing. Meditation is a strategy that you can use to achieve mindfulness in order to accept and empower yourself.

How Can These Mindfulness Strategies Create A Better Life?

It helps users quiet the mind so that they can be fully in the present and accepting of the emotions and thoughts that they have. Choose a place where you’ll be comfortable so that you’ll be able to feel relaxed.

Some people choose to sit while meditating and others prefer to lie down. You can also practice mindful meditation while you’re walking outside or in your home. Relax and focus on what’s around you and how you’re inhaling and exhaling.

Be aware of the sensations you feel and the emotions that you’re experiencing. Another strategy that’s often used is deep breathing. You can start this the same way that you would with mindful meditation where you find a comfortable place and begin.

But you can also practice deep breathing while you’re active at home or at work. You focus on drawing in deep breaths and slowly releasing them. You can also use mindful replacement techniques.

These are strategies that call for you to be aware of the thoughts that you think about yourself rather than simply letting them pass through your mind. Whenever any negative self-talk pops into your mind, you make a conscious choice to stop and correct the thought.

You correct it by replacing it with affirming words that help you accept yourself as you are. This helps you reprogram your thoughts to enable you to feel empowered rather than listening to words that hinder you and create self-doubt.

Mindfulness In The Workplace – Increase Productivity Through Mindfulness

If you want to increase your productivity, you can do that through mindfulness. Studies have shown that people who practice mindfulness have a greater output than those who don’t.

Plus, using techniques involved in mindfulness can help you maintain a clear focus and lead to the ability to make better choices for productivity.

When you practice mindfulness, it helps to unleash the intuition that can influence your choices for the better.

That means that you’ll focus on thoughts, ideas and take action that allows you to accomplish the goals that you set for yourself. Mindfulness prevents you from having to overthink situations.

This frees you up from the chains of inactivity. You’ll be able to bring your thoughts back to the task at hand. When you’re working on something and it causes you to feel frustrated and to think negatively about the task, mindfulness can center your thoughts and give you calmness.

This then helps you to be able to give whatever you’re doing your full concentration. You’ll also be able to see what needs to be done more clearly. When you practice mindfulness, it keeps you from spacing out and losing focus on what it is you’d like to accomplish.

Plus, this focus lessens anxiety which can derail productivity. It allows you to keep moving forward. Mindfulness enables you to find an inner satisfaction with whatever it is that you’re doing which lets you be fully engaged in the task.

Can Mindfulness At Work Improve Your Career and Your life?

This will make a difference not only in what you get done but in how you get it done because your interactions with others and with yourself will change for the better.

You’ll gain a greater sense of commitment for the follow through. Mindfulness is a technique that can be used to improve your cognitive skills. This unleashes your thought processes to free your creativity.

This enables you to see other ways that you can get something done other than the way that you’ve always done it. Sometimes when you’re working on something at home or at the office and you need to be productive, you can feel pressured to perform and to get it done.

Mindfulness can eliminate the pressure and give you the freedom to calmly think through the steps that you need to take. The reason that this works is that mindfulness allows you to recognize the emotions that you feel, but to focus on what needs to be done in a non-judgmental way.

So you learn to act rather than to react. With mindfulness comes a greater sense of confidence in your abilities and in your skills. Rather than think negatively and have a can’t-do attitude, you’ll learn to foster a can-do attitude toward whatever you’re doing.

Overcoming Low Self-esteem – A Mindful Method to Boost Confidence

Having confidence means that you view yourself favorably. You know that you can do what you need to do, that you have the skills and talents to be able to handle yourself.

You trust that your instincts, thinking, and abilities are sufficient. When you don’t have confidence it means that you struggle to accept who you are. You’ll lack the confidence to do things because you simply don’t trust that you can.

You go through life feeling as if you’re not educated enough, skilled enough, smart enough, talented enough, pretty enough, or handsome enough. You judge yourself, often thinking of what you could have, should have said or done, and you always fall short.

What mindfulness does to help you change this and build your confidence is to replace the feelings that you’re not enough with the trust that you are. Using mindfulness calls for you to not dwell on your past or on any negative experiences where you feel that you failed or fell short.

It helps you to not focus on the future or on what you hope to be and it helps train you to focus on who you are right now and see that who you are is good enough. You learn to accept yourself – and with that, strong confidence in yourself is built.

6 Incredible Health Benefits Of Mindfulness

Practicing mindfulness can also boost your self-esteem. Mindfulness can lead you to a life settled in the present. With living in the present comes a non-judgmental acceptance of who you are.

So many people have an internal voice that’s extremely ugly. This internal voice has been conditioned to speak this way by us. The disturbing results are that when we allow this internal voice to have a negative say, we can trigger stress, anxiety and even depression.

This self-talk has a direct impact on how you feel about yourself. Learn to be aware of this negative self-talk. If you call yourself names, that’s a sign that you’ve been engaging in the negative self-talk that can lower your self-esteem.

Some people call themselves stupid or an idiot. When they consider doing something, this internal self-talk always tells them why they can’t. You’ll tell yourself things like “I’m not smart enough” or “I’m too dumb to do it.”

When you allow these thoughts to run rampant, you can get into the mindset that you can’t do something – that you’re unworthy – and then your feelings follow that internal self-talk until it becomes a belief.

This habit can be so ingrained within you that the negative self-talk plays constantly in your mind, so much so that it becomes like white noise. What mindfulness does is bring your attention to the inner dialogue that’s eroding your self-esteem.

You learn what this internal conversation is doing to you and how it’s impacting your emotions. Mindfulness helps you learn to accept who you are without expectations or blaming. You’ll gain skills that you can use to learn how to raise your confidence and acceptance of yourself.

4 Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Techniques

Recent studies have revealed that mindfulness is a useful anti-depressant medication, relieving mounds of anxiety, stress, and depression.

In one study, Lancet researchers sampled a group of 424 UK adults who were at high risk of experiencing further depression for study.

Half of the adults were put in a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy where they were guided through meditation and mindfulness methods while the other half was placed on medication for two years. Later, the researchers compared the progress of the two groups.

Then, the progress of each cluster was assessed. The study found that a similar number of individuals from both groups had relapsed. Experts explained that mindfulness provides long term useful skills hence putting you in control of your life unlike relying on anti-depressants.

Mindfulness is the cognitive ability to pay close attention to your feelings at the moment without judgment, fostering emotional resilience. It also helps you to develop positivity in life by helping concentration in class, work, and even home.

With the benefits of mindfulness now known in medical settings, perhaps you might want to learn how to practice this technique to relieve anxiety and stress. The techniques are easy to follow, and you do not need any special equipment; you just need to a few minutes.

5-Minute Mindfulness Body Scan Meditation Script & Mp3

The following are ways to practice mindfulness to reduce stress and improve concentration.

1. Mindful Yoga

Spend at least fifteen minutes of your time in a quiet and open environment for meditation and yoga. Meditation helps you to bring your full awareness to both your emotional and physical sensations as you try various poses. These feelings will bring about relieving tension and even reduced pain in your body, helping you to relax.

2. Body Scan Meditation

Like yoga, this technique involves spending your time in a secluded place, sitting in a comfortable position without feeling disturbed. During the exercise, you close your eyes and focus your concentration to your toes. Try to bring close attention to every part of your body starting from your toes, feet, ankles, calves, knees, hands and even up to your head.

3. Mindful Eating

During your mealtime, find a serene place where you will not be distracted. As you take your meals, try to eat slowly while you also engage your senses of taste, smell, sight, touch, and sound. Try to finish all your meal by chewing and swallowing slowly.

4. Mindful Breathing

Mindful or conscious breathing is another great way to eliminate stress and tension. Take at least five minutes in a convenient location, like the shower or subway and shift your concentration to breathing in and out. To concentrate during the exercise, you can pick one aspect to focus on.

Nothing else has the potential to boost your relaxation the way mindfulness can. Give it a try; you might be astonished what it can do for you.

Short Guided Meditation Script To Release the Need for Control

This Mindfulness Meditation will teach you to live in the moment without expectations or judgments.

(Beginning Of Script)

This guided meditation on the breath will help you to simply be…

I invite you to join me to enter a state of simply being…

release the desire or need to control or do and simply be…

Allow your body to become still and relax and bring your attention to your breath…

Become aware of the movement of your breath as it enters through your nose and leaves through your nose or mouth…

Simply allow and observe your breath…

Do not try to manipulate or change your breath in any way simply be aware of it…

And be aware of the feelings that connect with your breathing…

And now observe the depth of your breath…

Notice how your chest or stomach expands on the in breath…

And notice the fall of the stomach or chest on the out breath…

Staying in the moment with each breath…

Simply being with your breath

Not trying to do anything or go anywhere

Give all attention to each breath… as they follow one after another…

Simply observe and allow

You may notice that your mind may wander to thoughts… simply allow them to pass and return your focus to your breath…

Anytime you notice your mind wander simply bring your focus back to your breath at the tip of your nose and observe your breathing…

Every time you find your mind wandering off the breath gently bring it back to the present moment and continue to observe the flow of your breathing…

It is perfectly natural to have thoughts and even self-talk passing through your mind… do not allow yourself to interact or become distracted

Simply observe these thoughts…allow them to pas and gently bring your awareness back to your breath…

Notice the rise and fall of your chest as the air goes in and releases out…

Simply stay with the breath

You may find yourself becoming aware of sensations in your body…

As you stay with the present moment you may want to observe some of these sensations…

You are free to experience and notice these…expand the field of your awareness to include the sense of your body as you stay with your breath…

Feeling your body from head to toe and becoming aware of all the sensations of your body…

Now you are observing the sense of your body as a whole along with your breathing

And again whenever you notice your mind is wandering off bring your awareness back to your body and your breath as you sit here just simply being…

Not going anywhere or doing anything just being…

Allowing your awareness to return to your breath… allowing your awareness to stay with the breath… the fullness of the in breath and the out breath…

Just being with your breath and sitting still and remaining present just as it is simply allowing and being right here in the moment.

(End Of Script)

As you know, meditation is not only a fantastic tool, but it’s also a great way to practice being more aware of your own thoughts and feelings, such that you can then take full control of them. This brings us to the concept of CBT – or cognitive behavioral therapy.

What is CBT – or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? CBT is essentially a type of psychotherapeutic intervention that teaches people who struggle with anxiety or other issues, how to better control the nature of their own thoughts.

This all starts with perception, and this is where you can use mindfulness. In mindfulness meditation, we discussed where we mentioned that you should ‘watch’ the contents of your thoughts?

Try doing this the next time you’re stressed: what are you actually thinking?

What you’ll find is that when you’re stressed, you are imagining the worst and this is what is causing you to get worked up. And this is the big secret to stress: other than the physiological response that we’ve discussed, stress is really a result of your perception of what’s going on around you.

Put it this way: if you’re faced with a lion you will get a stress response as soon as you notice it. But if you believe the lion is your friend, then you won’t get the same stress response. Or if you think the lion is a hologram, you won’t get the stress response.

The reality doesn’t matter here: what matters here is what you are thinking.

And the same is true for all those sources of chronic stress we’ve discussed so far. If you are struggling with debt and with work, then your perception is that there’s a great big lion ahead of you. But if you can convince yourself that there’s no benefit to being stressed and if you can convince yourself that it’s not worth getting worked up, then you can overcome that stress and your response will be the same as if there was no pressure in your life.

What is Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)?

Cognitive Restructuring So how do you do this?

The first step is to note the thoughts that are making you more worked up. If you’re stressed about talking in public, then perhaps you are filled with thoughts like:

• What happens if I stutter?
• People are going to laugh at me
• I won’t be able to talk
• I don’t know my script

None of this is helpful – it makes that lion seem bigger!

You want to replace these for more positive thoughts but simply telling yourself it’s all alright won’t work. You need to genuinely believe it. To do this, you use cognitive restructuring. A big part of this is ‘thought challenging’, where you challenge your assumptions and test just how accurate they’re likely to be.

Are you really likely to stutter? Do you normally stutter? Would people really laugh at you? Are the people in your audience that rude and unkind? And if they do laugh at you – why does it matter? You won’t have to see them again. Everyone knows that people stutter from time to time. And a little embarrassment never killed anyone: it will just make you a better public speaker next time.

3 Instantly Calming CBT Techniques For Anxiety

And neuroscience is showing that strong emotions often precede thoughts, so changing thoughts may do little for extreme conditions like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and addictions.

So in this video, I seek to give you a sense of the true values and limitations of CBT, and I share 3 CBT techniques you can use for anxiety.

If you can do this as you go through your routine and be more aware of your state of mind, then you’ll find that you can prevent the stress response before it arises and rob your anxieties of all their power over you.

For more serious anxieties and phobias, you can even take this one step further and try what is known as ‘hypothesis testing’. Here, you simply test your fears by standing up to them and letting them happen. For example, you would go out onto the stage and purposefully stutter. You’ll find that no one laughs and nothing bad comes from it!

Find Out How Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Works Here…

Understanding The Complexity Of Your Stress Systems

But what if you’re not stressed?

What if your work isn’t particularly high pressured, your relationships are good and you have plenty of money? Does that mean you’re fine? Probably not. Unfortunately, many other aspects of our modern lifestyles cause symptoms similar to those of stress.

One example is our use of technology and artificial lighting. The brain is designed to use external cues (‘zeitgebers’ to use the correct terminology) to set its own biological rhythms including the sleep-wake cycle (circadian rhythm).

This actually triggers the release of stress hormones at certain times of day. That’s because stress hormones are one of the tools that the body uses to wake itself up when you are sleeping. The release of stress hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine triggers activity in the brain that stirs you out of sleep and makes you fully alert.

But if the light is on at night, or you’re looking at your phone in the evening, this will cause the release of similar stress hormones right when you’re meant to be relaxing. That means you’ll continue to feel alert and won’t give your brain time to recover.

And what doesn’t help is the way that everything on the web and on TV is designed to grab our attention and pull us this way and that – this has been shown to cause effects similar to ADHD in the long term and make it harder for us to concentrate on any one thing for very long.

How Physiological Changes Trigger Stress

The above is an example of how stress is entirely a result of what’s going on in your life or even what you’re thinking. Instead, stress can be a result of outside factors that physically influence you.

A way to think of it is like this: Physical Sensations > Feelings > Emotions > Thoughts > Behaviors That is to say that your emotions are very often the result of physical things affecting your physiology.

For example, if you’re in a colder environment, this actually increases the amount of cortisol and the amount of norepinephrine. Physiologically, this is the same as low-level stress and that’s why a cold shower is a great way to wake yourself up!

This is also why being cold for too long can make you ill – as the stress response is suppressing your immune system.

Likewise, if you are hungry, then this triggers a physiological type of stress. Essentially, hunger causes your brain to release cortisol due to a decrease in blood sugar. When blood sugar is low, cortisol is released and the body responds to this as it would any other type of stress.

Why? Because as far as the body is concerned, this is a form of danger. If you are hungry, then you need to become active and get out there in order to seek out a source of food. Ghrelin, the hunger hormone, is released alongside cortisol and myostatin which breaks down tissue to provide energy.

When you eat, on the other hand, this causes a sudden spike in your blood sugar. That, in turn, will cause you to release insulin, which absorbs the sugar for use around the body (either in the muscles and brain, or to be stored as fat).

This also has the effect of leaving behind another substance called ‘tryptophan’, which is found in most foods but doesn’t get absorbed. Tryptophan makes its way through the circulatory system all the way to the brain, where it crosses the blood-brain barrier and converts to serotonin (as it is a ‘precursor’ to serotonin). Serotonin is the ‘feel good hormone’ and it’s also a precursor itself: this time to melatonin – the sleep hormone.

This is why when you eat a large meal, you tend to feel full, then happy, then sleepy. Christmas dinner ring any bells? This is the opposite of the stress response. This is the aforementioned ‘rest and digest’ response.

And this is another cycle that your body goes through constantly: it moves from fight or flight to rest and digest. You just don’t notice this because in a perfect world, that shift will be subtle and you won’t feel it too much. You just move slightly up and down the spectrum, becoming slightly more alert and focussed and then slightly less so.

Nevertheless, though, this constant fluctuation does have an impact on things like your productivity and your mood. And it is also closely tied to the sleep-wake cycle. When you wake up, for instance, you are in a fasted state having slept all night: thus you have high cortisol.

Hopefully, at this point, you have all the tools and knowledge you need to begin reducing and combating the stress in your own life. This isn’t going to be an easy ride. Stress for many of us has become a normal part of life and habits are hard to change.

But by using meditation, you’ll find that you can reduce your base level of stress and rebuild some of the damage to your brain caused by anxiety.

What’s more, is that this will teach you to be more aware of your thoughts and better able to control them and thereby steer your emotions.

It’s time to wrestle back control of your mind. You tell your body when it needs to wake up and when it needs to focus. You decide what’s worth worrying about. And when you’re home and work is over, you use this power to allow yourself to rest, recover and forget all about the stresses of the day.

Once you can do all this, you’ll find your mood improves, your productivity skyrockets and your health is greatly enhanced in both the long and short term. Stress less, live more

Related Questions:

What is mindfulness cognitive behavioral therapy? Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) combines cognitive-behavioral techniques with mindfulness strategies in order to help individuals better understand and manage their thoughts and emotions in order to achieve relief from feelings of distress.

Is Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Effective? While cognitive behavioral therapy has always emphasized the end result of the change of one’s thoughts, mindfulness really looks at how a person thinks — the process of thinking — to help one be more effective in changing negative thoughts.

Is mindfulness the same as CBT? CBT generally involves one-to-one sessions with a CBT therapist identifying which thoughts or situations may be a problem and working together to improve or change a particular way of thinking. Both CBT and Mindfulness encourage you to be aware of your thoughts and feelings rather than push them away or ignore them.

In our every day lives, we are all guilty of neglecting our minds, allowing our brains to be lulled into a lazy, neglected, and unaware state. It is as if we are allowing ourselves to be sculpted by bland and repetitive consumerism, our individuality being chiseled away by tedium we cannot even be bothered to challenge with any will.

Life need not be like that. We are each blessed with a powerful mind; but normally people have forgotten or, most likely, never even knew how to use it. It is such a waste of our own greatest resource.

One way to start to extricate ourselves from the mindless quicksand is to gently exercise our minds, using mindfulness and meditation as a way of bringing ourselves more emphatically into the real world, and start the process of exercising control over our minds and our lives.

Mindfulness practices can help us to increase our ability to regulate emotions, decrease stress, anxiety, and depression. It can also help us to focus our attention, as well as to observe our thoughts and feelings without judgment.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the leading mindfulness researcher in the field of psychology, and developer of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, further clarifies that engaging in mindfulness is a secular practice and not a form of religion.

It’s true that mindfulness is often used to complement religious practices by quieting one’s mind before prayer or meditation. But while meditation can be a method of practicing mindfulness, mindfulness can also be practiced in non-religious ways.

What Exactly Is Mindfulness? Exploring Mindfulness And Meditation By Embracing The Present Moment.

Essentially, mindfulness is a form of meditation that has been adopted by CBT. CBT, in turn, is ‘cognitive behavioral therapy’; a psychotherapeutic approach that can be used to treat all manner of psychological conditions like anxiety, phobias, addiction etc.

Mindfulness essentially gives us a tool that we can use to not only calm our thoughts and escape the stressors of the day but also reflect on the contents of our mind in the interests of self-improvement.

Meditation generally has something of a ‘bad’ reputation. That is to say that a lot of people associate it with religion or esoteric ideas and they think that they can’t meditate unless they’re‘spiritual’. This can be off-putting for someone who doesn’t hold any religious beliefs or who don’t like esoteric ideas in general.

But in fact, you can practice meditation whether you are religious or an atheist. All meditation really is, is a directed attempt to control your thoughts and the content of your mind and thereby to gain some peace and quiet or at least to be able to better understand the contents of your own brain.

Often this means completely silencing all thoughts. Many types of meditation, such as transcendental meditation, instruct you to think of ‘absolutely nothing’ and often this is achieved by focussing on your breathing, a mantra or a physical object like a candle flame. This can be difficult for beginners though, as they constantly find their mind wandering.

The idea behind mindfulness meditation then is not to try and empty your thoughts but instead to simply step back from them and ‘observe’ them like a detached third party. This way, you aren’t letting your thoughts affect you and make you stressed but you also aren’t going to struggle with not being ‘allowed’ to think anything.

Meanwhile, using this technique will also allow you to become more aware of your own thoughts and thereby able to edit any thoughts that are leading you into trouble. For instance, if you constantly find yourself thinking about the ways that you could hurt yourself, you might notice that this is a bad habit and then attempt to fix that.

This may be the long term aim of mindfulness when used in CBT. In the short term though, we are simply to use it in order to remove ourselves from our thoughts and emotions so that we can get some calm and thereby recover ready to tackle the day ahead.

Mindfulness in Daily Life – Awareness 101

This is what mindfulness refers to in most cases but it has also been appropriated to mean a lot more. If mindfulness means being more aware of your thoughts, then it can also be applied outside of meditation and to the way you go about your day. In this case, mindfulness simply means being mindful of what you’re focussing on and what you’re thinking at any given point. This is useful because very often you’ll find that your mind isn’t perhaps where it should be.

For example, if you are walking through a beautiful scenic woodland but you are thinking about work, then as far as your body is concerned you may as well be at work. In this case, mindfulness can be used simply to make yourself more aware of where you are and to actually focus on what’s around you. That means feeling the breeze on your skin, looking at the beautiful flowers and smelling the fresh air. When you do all that, you will benefit much more from the experience.

Likewise, you can use mindfulness to direct your attention to all manner of other things. For example your physical sensations. Often we aren’t aware of just how we’re sitting, how we’re standing or how we’re feeling.

Take a moment right now to reflect on this. How comfortable are you at the moment? Does any part of your body hurt? If you’re sitting down, then where is most pressure on you? Can you feel your clothes against your body? A watch maybe? How warm are you? Are you leaning more to one side?

This kind of mindfulness can be useful if you want to try and fix your posture but also if you want to improve your abilities in sports or just move more efficiently.

Being more mindful of the way you speak can meanwhile help you to speak more eloquently, to stop using derogatory words, to stop swearing, or to change the whole way that people perceive you. For example, if you want to sound more intelligent, then you can simply try using bigger words or speaking a little more slowly.

You can also use mindfulness to be happier in everyday life. Simply try to stop letting negative emotions affect you by identifying them as temporary and destructive. You can simply ‘notice’ that you’re getting angry and acknowledge that your thoughts will be tainted by that. With practice, this can make you a much calmer and much happier person. But what do you find when you try and do this?

In all likelihood, you’ll find that you forget. This is just the same way that you forget to pick up bread when your other half asks you to. And it’s just the same way you forget to pick up your keys on the way out of the house. The point is most of the time we have no control over what we’re focussed on or what we’re paying attention to. And as such, we find ourselves forgetting things, getting into bad habits or stressing when we should be enjoying ourselves.

Practicing mindfulness both as a form of meditation and during the day can, therefore, help you to improve your ability to control your thoughts and thereby to decide how you want to improve yourself and what you want to focus on.

Creating a mindfulness meditation is a gentle but powerful exercise. But how do you go about it?

A Simple Mindfulness Meditation Exercise

As with any meditation session, you need to get into a relaxed and comfortable position, eyes closed, and then commence with deep nasal breathing, focusing your thoughts on the breathing to ease yourself into a meditative state.

Once you feel that you are calmed by your breathing and that your breath is under your rhythmic control, then you can move on to focusing on your own body, a part at a time. I was first taught this at yoga class, where we were taught to concentrate first of all on the left foot, focusing on it from a position above ourselves. Then move up the body slowly, left ankle, knee, thigh and so on. When reaching your head, you then do the same in reverse on the other side of the body: right shoulder, right elbow, right hand and so on.

Once you have completed the tour of your own body, as if you were someone else examining it, then it is time to open your eyes and increase the mindfulness of your surroundings.

To do this, focus on any object in the room; it does not have to be anything special: a cup on the coffee table, a vase, a plastic flower, anything. Try to maintain that focus for half a minute, and then move on to any other object. You can repeat this several times, always maintaining a focus on your own body and your own breathing, creating a triple harmony with each object on which you focus.

By using this simple mindfulness meditation you are increasing awareness both of yourself and your surroundings, in a very gentle and easy way. It can serve as a prelude to some mental task, as well as being part of an ongoing mindfulness campaign to strengthen and expand the use of your own mind.

For example, most days I write, but sometimes I just do not seem able to concentrate on what I am supposed to be writing about. I find this type of exercise, even just for 10 minutes, will snap me out of that inexplicable malaise, and I can get right to it and write what I should have written earlier.