I am returning to this subject.
Simply because it is so important to us humans. For the world we live in has changed, and changed drastically. Now we are ‘wired up’ and that means less time to do nothing.
In 2010 I presented a book review Mindfulness by Ellen Janger.
Now I want to share an article presented by The Conversation.
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Mindfulness won’t burn calories, but it might help you stick with your health goals
Masha Remskar, Arizona State University
Most people know roughly what kind of lifestyle they should be living to stay healthy.
Think regular exercise, a balanced diet and sufficient sleep. Yet, despite all the hacks, trackers and motivational quotes, many of us still struggle to stick with our health goals.
Meanwhile, people worldwide are experiencing more lifestyle-associated chronic disease than ever before.
But what if the missing piece in your health journey wasn’t more discipline – but more stillness?
Research shows that mindfulness meditation can help facilitate this pursuit of health goals through stillness, and that getting started is easier than you might think – no Buddhist monk robes or silent retreats required.
Given how ubiquitous and accessible mindfulness resources are these days, I have been surprised to see mindfulness discussed and studied only as a mental health tool, stopping short of exploring its usefulness for a whole range of lifestyle choices.
I am a psychologist and behavioral scientist researching ways to help people live healthier lives, especially by moving more and regulating stress more efficiently.
My team’s work and that of other researchers suggests that mindfulness could play a pivotal role in paving the way for a healthier society, one mindful breath at a time.
Mindfulness unpacked
Mindfulness has become a buzzword of late, with initiatives now present in schools, boardrooms and even among first responders. But what is it, really?
Mindfulness refers to the practice or instance of paying careful attention to one’s present-moment experience – such as their thoughts, breath, bodily sensations and the environment – and doing so nonjudgmentally. Its origins are in Buddhist traditions, where it plays a crucial role in connecting communities and promoting selflessness.
Over the past 50 years, however, mindfulness-based practice has been Westernized into structured therapeutic programs and stress-management tools, which have been widely studied for their benefits to mental and physical health.
Research has shown that mindfulness offers wide-ranging benefits to the mind, the body and productivity.
Mindfulness-based programs, both in person and digitally delivered, can effectively treat depression and anxiety, protect from burnout, improve sleep and reduce pain.
The impacts extend beyond subjective experience too. Studies find that experienced meditators – that is, people who have been meditating for at least one year – have lower markers of inflammation, which means that their bodies are better able to fight off infections and regulate stress. They also showed improved cognitive abilities and even altered brain structure.
But I find the potential for mindfulness to support a healthy lifestyle most exciting of all.
How can mindfulness help you build healthy habits?
My team’s research suggests that mindfulness equips people with the psychological skills required to successfully change behavior. Knowing what to do to achieve healthy habits is rarely what stands in people’s way. But knowing how to stay motivated and keep showing up in the face of everyday obstacles such as lack of time, illness or competing priorities is the most common reason people fall off the wagon – and therefore need the most support. This is where mindfulness comes in.
Multiple studies have found that people who meditate regularly for at least two months become more inherently motivated to look after their health, which is a hallmark of those who adhere to a balanced diet and exercise regularly.
A 2024 study with over 1,200 participants that I led found more positive attitudes toward healthy habits and stronger intentions to put them into practice in meditators who practiced mindfulness for 10 minutes daily alongside a mobile app, compared with nonmeditators. This may happen because mindfulness encourages self-reflection and helps people feel more in tune with their bodies, making it easier to remember why being healthier is important to us.
Another key way mindfulness helps keep momentum with healthy habits is by restructuring one’s response to pain, discomfort and failure. This is not to say that meditators feel no pain, nor that pain during exercise is encouraged – it is not!
Mild discomfort, however, is a very common experience of novice exercisers. For example, you may feel out of breath or muscle fatigue when initially taking up a new activity, which is when people are most likely to give up. Mindfulness teaches you to notice these sensations but see them as transient and with minimal judgment, making them less disruptive to habit-building.
Putting mindfulness into practice
A classic mindfulness exercise includes observing the breath and counting inhales up to 10 at a time. This is surprisingly difficult to do without getting distracted, and a core part of the exercise is noticing the distraction and returning to the counting. In other words, mindfulness involves the practice of failure in small, inconsequential ways, making real-world perceived failure – such as a missed exercise session or a one-off indulgent meal – feel more manageable. This strengthens your ability to stay consistent in pursuit of health goals.
Finally, paying mindful attention to our bodies and the environment makes us more observant, resulting in a more varied and enjoyable exercising or eating experience. Participants in another study we conducted reported noticing the seasons changing, a greater connection to their surroundings and being better able to detect their own progress when exercising mindfully. This made them more likely to keep going in their habits.
Luckily, there are plenty of tools available to get started with mindfulness practice these days, many of them free. Mobile applications, such as Headspace or Calm, are popular and effective starting points, providing audio-guided sessions to follow along. Some are as short as five minutes. Research suggests that doing a mindfulness session first thing in the morning is the easiest to maintain, and after a month or so you may start to see the skills from your meditative practice reverberating beyond the sessions themselves.
Based on our research on mindfulness and exercise, I collaborated with the nonprofit Medito Foundation to create the first mindfulness program dedicated to moving more. When we tested the program in a research study, participants who meditated alongside these sessions for one month reported doing much more exercise than before the study and having stronger intentions to keep moving compared with participants who did not meditate. Increasingly, the mobile applications mentioned above are offering mindful movement meditations too.
If the idea of a seated practice does not sound appealing, you can instead choose an activity to dedicate your full attention to. This can be your next walk outdoors, where you notice as much about your experience and surroundings as possible. Feeling your feet on the ground and the sensations on your skin are a great place to start.
For people with even less time available, short bursts of mindfulness can be incorporated into even the busiest of routines. Try taking a few mindful, nondistracted breaths while your coffee is brewing, during a restroom break or while riding the elevator. It may just be the grounding moment you need to feel and perform better for the rest of the day.
Masha Remskar, Psychologist and Postdoctoral Researcher in Behavioral Science, Arizona State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Moments of rest are essential, grounding moments as written in the article. The article is great and has great motivation to abide by the recommendations.
Please read carefully the article and change your ways.
Learning from Dogs 
Dear Paul: Very interesting…. It has always amused me that people would think that concentrating on the lowest sensations and functions would be the gateway to wisdom. I concentrate on breadth in two cases: heavy exercise or deep diving. Most of the rest of the time, it’s automatic (I amuse myself sometimes to lower my heartbeat below 50 with the help of a machine).
However, being aware of one’s body, and the passions the brain-body entanglement can generate is one of the gateways to wisdom, as it generates different brain modes… In particular, different moods.
By switching on and off various parts of the brain, in various moods and emotions, one can generate not just different sensory viewpoints, but clearly new and different neural networks. This can be achieved by putting the brain in different modes, through various exercises (different exercises, different modes), or by privileging some sensory pathways (listening to music, say). The brain does this all the time, in particular when sleeping and dreaming.
The mathematician Hadamard in the 19th century wrote a book on mathematical creativity where he pointed out that many ideas came in dreams… So have some musicians, who actually woke up and wrote down the notes before sleep stole them away. These “subconscious” actions are actually the evanescent formation of tentative new neural networks: they click together for a few runs, but have not been heavily reinforced by the Hebb Mechanism (“what fires together links together”)
The insistence of Buddhism on “not making judgments” is the dead give away that Buddhism was meant as a slave religion. Literally all what brains do, when creative, is to generate judgments. Judgments are the only ways to domesticate uncertainty. Enforced judgments are how to get out of the Buridan ass situation: ACTION IN THE AVERAGE ALWAYS BEATS INACTION.
When I run downhill among rocks, my brains make much more judgments, per second, than I am aware of. (And sometimes guesses are wrong, as I crashed last July in an electrifying storm as a rock gave way… Ending up with ongoing surgeries…)
Human beings have will because they cannot survive without AGENCY. It is important to teach a bit of inaction to the hyperactive, sure. But brain inaction shouldn’t be a an aim, as the only way to make some parts of the brain inactive is dynamically, by switching on and off other parts (which can adjudicate oxygen).
Religions have been enforced to tie (ligare) again (re) their practitioners with inaction against their superiors. A ferocious conqueror, Emperor Ashoka (3rd century BCE) of the Mauryan Empire, imposed Buddhism on all of India. He was too successful, and, Buddhism having made all into sheep, Hinduism soon reconquered India.
More specifically, Ashoka began his reign as a brutal and ambitious military leader, expanding the Mauryan Empire across nearly all of the Indian subcontinent. The turning point was the bloody Kalinga War (c. 260 BCE), which caused him such remorse that he converted to Buddhism.
There is a presumption, in the very concept of “mindfulness” that others do not have full minds. But they do. Predators are very smart.
Buddhism declined through lack of royal patronage and a Hindu philosophical counterattack. A seductive aspect of Buddhism was egalitarianism (relative to the jungle of Hindhuism). However, Indian Buddhism became increasingly centered on large, wealthy monastic universities (like Nalanda), which gradually became detached from the lay population who were its original patrons.
Invasions and Destruction: The most catastrophic blow came from the Turkic-Muslim invasions starting in the 11th and 12th centuries. The invaders believed that the more Non-Believers they killed the closer to God they would get. They targeted and destroyed the great monastic universities, effectively decapitating the institutional structure and centers of learning for Indian Buddhism.
Mindfulness could do nothing against the sword.
The times we are immediately facing are those of the sword. The CO2 crisis is beyond repair, and Putin’s salvation involves risking an uncontrolled world war…
Paradoxically, war may be, for humans, the most drastic way to achieve “mindfulness”: nothing concentrates a mind better than possible imminent termination. A;; the crises we face have solutions… But to find them will require full minds. unafraid to move very far away from their navels…
All the crises we face have solutions… But to find them will require full minds. unafraid to move very far away from their navels…
Some are bound to say that I miss the point entirely, that what they mean by “mindfullness” was not full minds but the exact opposite, emptying the mind of thought. Agreed. My point entirely…. We need thought, especially new thoughts, not coma…
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Patrice, thank you for your long and comprehensive reply. Masha Remskar endorsed your words completely, or so I see it! And you are correct in you saying in your last paragraph that “We need thought, especially new thoughts, not coma…”.
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