Forget complicated New Year’s resolutions (you probably already have). Simply taking the time to meditate can make all the difference in your health and well-being this year.

The hottest well-being trend right now isn’t a hardcore workout or a fad diet. It’s a gentle, ancient practice that millions say is the antidote to the 21st-century stress that affects everything from job performance and sleep to your weight.

We’re talking about meditation, and it has cheerleaders from all walks of life—entertainers, businesspeople, athletes, even government legislators. Oprah Winfrey, a longtime meditator, has teamed up with Deepak Chopra to offer a series of 21-day online meditation “challenges” that have drawn more than 3 million participants so far. Hip-hop tycoon Russell Simmons’ new book, Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple (Gotham), aims to demystify meditation for the masses. He even inspired comedian/talk show host Ellen DeGeneres to take it up.

In the business world, Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington meditates daily, calling it the “third metric” in success, after money and power. And meditation programs are used to help at-risk schoolchildren thrive in the classroom, and prison inmates cope with the stress of incarceration.

Clearly, meditation is having a moment. And if you’re distracted while reading this —texting, checking email, thinking about what to have for dinner—it could help you, too.

“The goal of mindfulness is to make you more focused and aware, so your mind and body can be in the same place at the same time,” says U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who credits mindfulness for helping him prevent burnout. “I compare it to what athletes experience when they’re totally in the zone.”

Ryan believes in mindfulness so strongly that he holds weekly meditation sessions on Capitol Hill. “Stress is bipartisan,” he says. “Mindfulness cuts through current political divides—it’s based on self-care, and preventing illness, and increasing overall well-being and can save healthcare dollars and promote individual responsibility.” Ryan’s goal is “infusing mindfulness into the different institutions in our country.”

While meditation has roots in Buddhism, many people today practice a non-religious form of mindfulness that requires nothing more than sitting quietly and focusing on your breath. When your mind wanders—and it will—just refocus on your breathing.

“It really is that simple,” says Ryan, who has written A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance and Recapture the American Spirit (Hay House). “Thanks to mindfulness, I’m calmer, more focused, and nicer to people around me. I believe this is something that can help many Americans who are struggling right now.”

Body-Building for Your Brain

It’s hard to believe something so easy can be so powerful. “Mindfulness looks like you aren’t doing anything, but when we watch the brain in these studies, we see different parts lighting up and activating,” says psychologist Elisha Goldstein, author of Uncovering Happiness: Overcoming Depression with Mindfulness and Self-Compassion (Atria Books). “You can literally change your brain through this practice.”

In the 1970s, molecular biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn decided to study “Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism.” Kabat-Zinn, now a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, had discovered meditation through a friend, and began to suspect it could improve both mental and physical health.

He developed a program called “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction” (MBSR) and documented how it worked to ease pain, suffering and stress in cancer patients, bone marrow transplant patients and even prison inmates. His findings were so compelling that over 250 hospitals around the world now use MBSR to promote patient well-being.

And the evidence keeps growing. In a new Harvard study, brain scans showed that mindfulness meditation increased gray matter in brain areas associated with learning, memory and compassion, and a decrease in the part of the brain linked to anxiety and stress.

Anxiety-Busting for Kids & Teachers

Meditation can have huge benefits for children, too. “We’re always yelling at our kids to pay attention,” says Ryan. “But we never teach them how to pay attention. That’s where mindfulness comes in.”

The Holistic Life Foundation, a Baltimore-based nonprofit, aims to change that with mindfulness programs for at-risk kids in the city’s poorest elementary schools. A pilot study of their program by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Pennsylvania State University found that fourth- and fifth-graders who participated in the 12-week program were better able to handle chronic stress, experienced fewer emotional outbursts, and had less ongoing anxiety.

Mindfulness can be a tool for educators, too. The U.S. Department of Education is now funding a major study on how mindfulness can help teachers cope with the pressures of overburdened classrooms. “When we’ve piloted these programs in schools, the teachers come back begging us to do more,” says Ryan. “They know it works and that they need this so they can be their best selves with our kids.”

Attention-Boosting for All of Us

Mindfulness is especially handy this time of year, when New Year’s resolutions typically include pledges to lose weight. “Food is one of the most popular applications for mindfulness because we all have to eat, every day,” says Goldstein. “But for most of us, eating has become this mindless activity that we do while we’re working, driving, watching television or looking at our phones. We barely even taste what’s on our plates.”

And that piles on calories. Study participants who ate their lunch in front of a computer screen gobbled twice as many cookies an hour later as subjects who ate without distractions, according to recent research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

But mindfulness can help you reconnect with your body’s cues for hunger and satisfaction. A study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education & Behavior found that learning mindfulness strategies helped participants eat more slowly—and eat up to 300 fewer calories a day.

That’s pretty powerful stuff. Still, some critics of mindfulness are quick to dismiss it as another New Age fad like hot yoga or juice cleanses. But the proponents of mindfulness say that’s OK. “The beauty of mindfulness is that you can stop doing it, notice you’ve stopped, and then re-engage at any time,” says Goldstein. “We are continually learning from what did or didn’t work and beginning anew. And that’s mindfulness.”

Mindfulness is free, it’s portable, and you don’t have to be sitting on a pillow somewhere for an hour with your eyes shut to achieve it, says psychologist Susan Albers, author of Eating Mindfully. “You can do it at the dinner table, you can do it during a meeting at work, you can do it while driving your car.”

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