Mindfulness is a state of mind focus on the present or a psychological state of awareness, can be described as a moment-to-moment without judgment of our thoughts or actions even if they were good. Some studies have shown that we spend up to 50 percent of our time caught up in our thoughts and normally this happens more often in those repetitive day-to-day activities.

Where did mindfulness come from? How it has been applied?

Mindfulness practice have become internationally popular in the past decade, however their roots have more 2,500 years into the past. It’s based on centuries of Buddhist meditation and breathing exercises and have been used or prescribed to thousands of patients to prevent anxiety, depression and stress.

Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation

There are many benefits already identified of a regular practice of meditation, nonetheless keep in mind that results just can be reached if you consider it for a long term practice.

There are many benefits, according with many researches…

It’s proved that mindfulness can improve:

Focus – It’s true that experienced meditators easily can manage better their attention avoiding distracting information than non-meditators.

More cognitive flexibility – Researchers have found that mindfulness meditation can help people to develop skills related to self-observation. Also can activate some brain regions associated with more adaptive responses to stressful or negative situations.

Relationship satisfaction – Mindfulness meditation can help people to predict relationship satisfaction – it means people can respond more effectively to stress and find the right way to communicate their emotions to a partner.

Stress reduction – Studies also demonstrate that mindfulness meditators who used to have some clinical issues with stress could create strategies which enables them to experience emotion selectively and also some experiences may be processed differently in the brain.

How to start

You can start applying it when you’re for instance commuting to your job, university, wherever…try to focus on that specific moment avoiding thoughts because they are the cause of anxiety, stress and so on. Don’t think about today’s meeting or your exam.

Mindfulness meditation can be done also when you’re working out, just concentrate your full attention on your body this will also help you to get the best of your work out. At home when you get some spare time just sit down with your back straight and focus on your breathing for 10 minutes, that’s it…relax.

Now, there is something you need to know is not that easy how it looks, you will see that your mind will come up with thoughts many and many times. You’ll find yourself thinking about the future, about the last discussion with your partner, about last night, about such stupid thing you’re doing at the moment (sat down trying to think about nothing), yes it’s tough at the beginning! But don’t give up as more as you put it on practice more comfortable you will get with and soon you will see some results.

Conclusion

Mindfulness meditation is a technique to provide you with skills to live life in a positive way, to keep your mind clean and healthy more focus in what is really important to you. You will find yourself many times thinking about the past and future, about what is right and wrong but meditation for sure can help you to clean some ‘trash’ from your mind and be a better person, a happy one.

References:

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/23/should-we-be-mindful-of-mindfulness-nhs-depression

http://welldoing.org/article/basics-of-mindfulness-come-from

http://www.dailygood.org/story/497/5-ways-to-bring-mindfulness-into-everyday-life-headspace-com/

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/07-08/ce-corner.aspx