Sobre harmony

Sobre harmony

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JM: An early, small study suggests that mindfulness may help boost the immune system. By serving as a buffer against stress, mindfulness may also lower the risk of heart disease.

Ultimately, meditation is something you can do anywhere and at any time, so getting comfortable meditating without guidance can be useful.

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

PJ: What advice would you offer someone who works in a company that doesn’t offer mindfulness training?

In one study, people with pre-hypertension were randomly assigned to augment their drug treatment with either a course in mindfulness meditation or a program that taught progressive muscle relaxation.

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

Soften your gaze and lower your eyes, not focused on anything in particular. You may also close your eyes, if that’s more comfortable.

So what do I do? We can approach this common experience exactly like we approach distracting thoughts: the moment we realize we’re fidgeting, notice it, let it go, and return our focus to our breath.

Not bad for a few minutes of sitting in silence, right? And it just gets better from here. Read on to learn more about meditation and how to start meditating yourself.

JM: There are many. Some of the earliest studies, which involved the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, showed that mindfulness can help ease stress. Mindfulness fosters positive emotions and helps provide resilience against negative experiences. There’s also evidence that the practice of mindfulness promotes empathy and a sense of compassion. Indeed, brain imaging research shows that a half hour of mindfulness meditation a day increases the density of gray matter in parts of the brain associated with memory, stress, and empathy.

PJ: Some tech companies have been criticized for harsh working conditions. Could mindfulness training become a “Band-Aid” fix to serious workplace problems?

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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.

At the end, participants who’d practiced mindfulness had higher levels of the protein interleukin-8 in their nasal secretions, suggesting improved immune function. Another study found increases in interleukin-10 in colitis patients who took a mindfulness meditation course compared to a mind-body educational program, especially among patients whose colitis had flared up. Yet another study found that patients stress relief who had greater increases in mindfulness after an MBSR course also showed faster wound healing, a process regulated by the immune system.