As the day progresses and your brain starts to tire, mindfulness can help you stay sharp and avoid poor decisions. After lunch, set a timer on your phone to ring every hour.

Meditation is a highly personal activity, with everyone finding their best own way to practice. Some find guided meditations to be useful, especially when starting out, to help focus their attention.

It’s about stripping away distractions and staying on track with individual, as well as organizational, goals. Take control of your own mindfulness: Test these tips for 14 days and see what they do for you.

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.

The raisin exercise, where you slowly use all of your senses, one after another, to observe a raisin in great detail, from the way it feels in your hand to the way its taste bursts on your tongue.

Mindfulness is good for parents and parents-to-be: Studies suggest it may reduce pregnancy-related anxiety, stress, and depression in expectant parents, and may even reduce the risk of premature births and developmental issues. Parents who practice mindful parenting report less stress, more positive parenting practices, and better relationships with their kids; their kids, in turn, are less susceptible to depression and anxiety, and have better social skills.

According to the authors, meditation programs were not shown to be more beneficial than active treatments—such as exercise, therapy, or taking prescription drugs—on any outcomes of interest. The research is also raising some interesting nuances about the effectiveness of meditation for different populations. For example, one recent, large-scale, well-designed study found that the “gold standard” Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) intervention for adults had pelo impact on depression or anxiety in teens.

In this meditation, you bring your awareness to different parts of your body, commonly starting at your feet and traveling to the top of your head.

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Doing this helps us become more aware of our thoughts, act more compassionately toward ourselves and others, and connect with the present moment.

It helps people have a break with whatever they were doing before the meeting, and to focus their thoughts and respond to one another in a way that’s more thoughtful and respectful.

In recent decades, researchers have been gaining insight into the benefits of practicing this ancient tradition. By studying more secular versions of mindfulness meditation, they’ve found that learning to pay attention to our current experiences and accept them without judgment might indeed help us to be happier.

The best posture for meditation is sitting upright, comfortable and alert, with your hips slightly higher than your knees to support a natural spinal curve. This can be done sitting on the edge of a chair or other piece of furniture that’s not too low, or by sitting upon a meditation cushion on the floor.

April 11, 2016 Print Bookmark You probably know the feeling all too well: You arrive at the office with a clear plan for the day and then, in what feels like just a moment, you find yourself on your way back home.