Considerações Saber Sobre relaxing sounds
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.
One kind of meditation technique that’s good for beginners is a body scan meditation, which helps us check in with our bodies by mentally scanning each part.
Add to this that we have entered what many people are calling the “attention economy.” In the attention economy, the ability to maintain focus and concentration is every bit as important as technical or management skills.
As the authors note, this doesn’t mean meditation can’t help teenagers—it could well be the case that we need to develop and test interventions aimed at younger people. The upshot? Meditation is generally good for your well-being, yes, but so far it doesn’t appear to be actually better than many other steps you can take to stay healthy and happy. It should definitely be considered an adjunct to, not a replacement for, other kinds of treatment for mental conditions like bipolar disorder.
A small 2016 pilot study used neuroimaging to see how mindfulness practice changes the brains of parents—and then asked the kids about the quality of their parenting. The results suggest that mindfulness practice seemed to activate the part of the brain involved in empathy and emotional regulation (the left anterior insula/inferior frontal gyrus) and that the children of parents who showed the most activation perceived the greatest improvement in the parent-child relationship. We must remember, however, that these studies are often very small, and the researchers themselves say results are very tentative. Mindfulness seems to reduce many kinds of bias. We are seeing more and more studies suggesting that practicing mindfulness can reduce psychological bias. For example, one study found that a brief loving-kindness meditation reduced prejudice toward homeless people, while another found that a brief mindfulness training decreased unconscious bias against black people and elderly people. In a study by Adam Lueke and colleagues, white participants who received a brief mindfulness training demonstrated less biased behavior
Meditation does seem to improve mental health—but it’s not necessarily more effective than other steps you can take. Early research suggested that mindfulness meditation had a dramatic impact on our mental health. But as the number of studies has grown, so has scientific skepticism about these initial claims. For example, a 2014 meta-analysis published in JAMA Internal Medicine
Once you finish this practice and get ready to start working, mindfulness can help increase your effectiveness. Two skills define a mindful mind: focus
Like many other aspects of meditation, whether to practice before or after exercise is mostly a personal preference. It may also feel different for you from day to day.
Recently, researchers have been exploring this question—with some surprising results. While much of the early research on mindfulness relied on pilot studies with biased measures or limited groups of participants, more recent studies have been using less-biased physiological markers and randomly controlled experiments to get at the answer.
Doing this helps us become more aware of our thoughts, act more compassionately toward ourselves and others, and connect with the present moment.
Become a subscribing member today. Help us continue to bring “the science of a meaningful life” to you and to millions around the globe.
In another study, people with heart disease were randomly assigned to either an em linha program to help them practice meditation or to a waitlist for the program while undergoing normal treatment for heart disease.
Want to give it a try? With our eyes closed, bring our focus to the top of our heads. Slowly, begin to scan down. Spend about 20 seconds noticing how each body part feels, then move on to the next.
At the end, participants who’d practiced mindfulness had higher levels of the protein interleukin-oito 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 healing music study found that patients who had greater increases in mindfulness after an MBSR course also showed faster wound healing, a process regulated by the immune system.