MEDITATION

“Eighty percent of world-class performers meditate.”

—Tim Ferriss, American entrepreneur, author and speaker.

Research suggests that meditation may be associated with structural changes in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing and can have a positive impact on age-related declines in brain structure. Other physical and mental health benefits associated withmeditation include decreased pain, better immune function, less anxiety and depression, a heightened sense of well-being and greater happiness and emotional self-control.

A 2011 study by Dr. Elizabeth Hoge, a psychiatrist at the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders, at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of psychiatry, at Harvard Medical School, found that mindfulness meditation helps ease anxiety symptoms in people with generalized anxiety disorder, a condition marked by hard-to-control worries, poor sleep and irritability.

According to Dr. Hoge, if you have unproductive worries, you can train yourself to experience those thoughts completely differently. “You might think ‘I’m late, I might lose my job if I don’t get there on time and it will be a disaster!’ Mindfulness teaches you to recognize, ‘Oh, there’s that thought again. I’ve been here before. But it’s just that—a thought and not a part of my core self,’” says Dr. Hoge.

To see if mindfulness meditation can help you, try one of the guided recordings by Dr. Ronald Siegel, an assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. They are available for free atwww.mindfulness-solution.com. Apps like Headspace and Calm are also available to help you get started. Start with small sessions of just two or three minutes. Do it every day for twenty-one days to develop the habit. Once you see how it makes you feel you’ll want to do more.