, “These changes are trait-like: They appear not simply during the explicit instruction to perceive the stressful stimuli mindfully, but even in the ‘baseline’ state” for longer-term meditators, which supports the possibility that mindfulness changes our ability to handle stress in a better, more sustainable way.”

Heart disease is the leading killer in the United States, accounting for about 1 in 4 deaths every year. So, whatever decreases the risks or symptoms of heart disease would significantly impact society’s health. Mindfulness may help with that.

Acting with awareness: The ability to focus your attention on your own activities rather than doing things mindlessly or automatically.

Meditation is the practice of intentionally spending time with our mind. We take time out of our busy days to sit, breathe, and try to remain focused on our breath.

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.

Set a timer on your phone to remind you to meditate, or subscribe to a meditation app that sends you notifications.

’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good

While you often hear about “clearing your mind” through meditation, the truth is you can’t really clear or empty your mind. Thinking is what these big ol’ brains of ours do! And stopping thinking isn’t the goal of meditation, anyway—not getting caught up in those thoughts is.

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The more we practice, the more we can see thoughts for what they are: just thoughts. It’ll get easier to let them go and “get out of our heads” to be more engaged in what we’re doing, whether we’re spending time with family, making time for self-care, or working against a deadline.

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, if we try hard to empty the mind, it tends to feel full.

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.

of what is merely noise. To get a better start to your day, avoid checking your email first mindfulness thing in the morning. Doing so will help you sidestep an onslaught of distractions and short-term problems during a period of exceptional focus and creativity.

It’s not surprising that meditation would affect attention, since many practices focus on this very skill. And, in fact, researchers have found that meditation helps to counter habituation—the tendency to stop paying attention to new information in our environment. Other studies have found that mindfulness meditation can reduce mind-wandering and improve our ability to solve problems. There’s more good news: Studies have shown that improved attention seems to last up to five years after mindfulness training, again suggesting trait-like changes are possible.