But people can learn mindfulness on their own. Simply learning to focus your attention on your breathing in the present moment is a big part of mindfulness. At a new website we’ve created, called Greater Good in Action, we offer several step-by-step guides to mindfulness practices.

Heart disease is the leading killer in the United States, accounting for about 1 in 4 deaths every year. So, whatever decreases the risks or symptoms of heart disease would significantly impact society’s health. Mindfulness may help with that.

Ideally, you should meditate when you feel calm but alert, and when you won’t be distracted. If you’re a morning person, then meditating in the morning might be perfect for you.

A Q&A with Jack Kornfield about giving feedback at work, using social media wisely, and the poetry in his teachings.

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

Jon Kabat-Zinn emphasizes that although mindfulness can be cultivated through formal meditation, that’s not the only way. “It’s not really about sitting in the full lotus, like pretending you’re a statue in a British museum,” he says in this Greater Good video.

mindfulness skills might work in different ways. Look for future mindfulness research to follow a similar approach and to generate more fine-grained, actionable insights for us to mindfulness apply to our lives.

The researchers found that these different dimensions of mindfulness were linked to different benefits. First, present-moment attention was the strongest predictor for increased positive emotions—the more attentive people said they were, the better they felt overall. Second, nonjudgmental acceptance was the strongest predictor for decreased negative emotions—the more people reported nonjudgmental acceptance in their lives, the less negative emotion they reported experiencing. For participants who had encountered a hassle in their day, adopting a nonjudgmental stance also seemed to protect their positive feelings (which took a bigger hit when people were less accepting of their hassles). Acting with awareness did not predict people’s positive or negative feelings beyond the other two skills.

Meditation is the best tool we have for increasing mindfulness. It’s also a powerful way to bring a greater sense of calm focus and equanimity to our day-to-day lives.

Mindfulness changes our brains: Research has found that it increases density of gray matter in brain regions linked to learning, memory, emotion regulation, and empathy.

But meditation is more like sleep. The harder we try to sleep, sometimes the harder it is to drift off. When we sit to meditate, if we try hard to empty the mind, it tends to feel full.

It might also be easier for beginners to make meditation a habit if we can remember there’s no pressure 528 hz to “get it right.” As long as we show up to take time for ourselves, we’re doing great.

It might be helpful to schedule meditation sessions like an exercise music to manifest class or appointment. Or we could tack it onto an existing routine, like every time we shower or brush our teeth.

Mindfulness makes us more resilient: Some evidence suggests that mindfulness training could help veterans facing post-traumatic stress disorder, police officers, women who suffered child abuse, and caregivers.