Considerações Saber Sobre relaxing sounds

Finally, mindfulness seems to increase concentration and focus. Research looking specifically at mindfulness in the workplace is relatively new. But there’s good reason to think it makes employees more satisfied and less stressed. A 2014 study of employees at the Dow Chemical Company, for instance, showed that mindfulness training increased vigor, lowered stress, and gave employees a greater sense of resiliency. Preliminary studies suggest that a program in mindfulness also can increase productivity and reduce the number of sick days.

One kind of meditation technique that’s good for beginners is a body scan meditation, which helps us check in with our bodies by mentally scanning each part.

Notice—really notice—what you’re sensing in a given moment, the sights, sounds, and smells that ordinarily slip by without reaching your conscious awareness.

And because leaders need to absorb and synthesize a growing flood of information in order to make good decisions, they’re hit particularly hard by this emerging trend.

Mindfulness is good for our bodies: A seminal study found that, after just eight weeks of training, practicing mindfulness meditation boosts our immune system’s ability to fight off illness. Practicing mindfulness may also improve sleep quality.

A 2015 study looked at people who score high on a mindfulness awareness test, and found that they had a healthier cardiovascular risk profile than people with lower scores. One small pilot program also found that stress relief mindfulness training helped decrease depression.

First of all, a great deal of research suggests that mindfulness can help healthy people reduce their stress. And thanks to Jon-Kabat Zinn’s pioneering MBSR program, there’s now a large body of research showing that mindfulness can help people cope with the pain, anxiety, depression, and stress that might accompany illness, especially chronic conditions.

A visualization meditation that harnesses the image of a mountain to guide us into awareness of our own steady, still nature beyond the thinking mind.

This exercise is often practiced walking back and forth along a path 10 paces long, though it can be practiced along most any path.

Body scan, another common practice where you bring attention to different parts of your body in turn, from head to toe.

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’s often said that meditation may be simple, but it isn’t easy. And this makes sense. It’s not part of our normal routine to sit quietly, without any distraction, and just… breathe.

When we get distracted by a thought, notice it, self-knowledge let it go, and return our focus to the area of the body we last left off. When we finish the body scan, open the eyes.

It’s not surprising that meditation would affect attention, since many practices focus on this very skill. And, in fact, researchers have found that meditation helps to counter habituation—the tendency to stop paying attention to new information in our environment. Other studies have found that mindfulness meditation can reduce mind-wandering and improve our ability to solve meditation problems. There’s more good news: Studies have shown that improved attention seems to last up to five years after mindfulness training, again suggesting trait-like changes are possible.