Walking meditation, where you focus on the movement of your body as you take step after step, your feet touching and leaving the ground—an everyday activity we usually take for granted.

Remember: there’s pelo such thing as the perfect meditation. If we notice ourselves getting frustrated that the traffic in our mind is moving too fast or we’re wondering, “Why is this so hard?” we can give ourselves some compassion. Let out a big sigh to draw our focus back to the breath.

Mindfulness practices of MBCT allowed people to be more intentionally aware of the present moment, which gave them space to pause before reacting automatically to others. Instead of becoming distressed about rejection or criticism, they stepped back to understand their own automatic reactions—and to become more attuned to others’ needs and emotions.

Fascinating though it is, we shouldn’t overplay meditation’s effects on physical health at the expense of its importance to emotional health. In fact, it may be difficult to separate out the two, as a key impact of mindfulness is stress reduction, and psychological stress has been tied to heart health, immune response, and telomere length.

The good news is you can train your brain to focus better by incorporating mindfulness exercises throughout your day. Based on our experience with thousands of leaders in over 250 organizations, here are some guidelines for becoming a more focused and mindful leader.

Overall, these findings suggest that mindfulness meditation can have disease-fighting powers through our immune response. Mindfulness may reduce cell aging

The authors speculate that bringing mindful awareness to uncomfortable experiences helped people to approach situations that they would previously avoid, which fostered self-confidence and assertiveness.

As the day moves on and the inevitable back-to-back meetings start, mindfulness can help you lead shorter, more effective meetings. To avoid entering a meeting with a wandering mind, take two minutes to practice mindfulness.

mentally. Then, if possible, end the meeting five minutes before the hour in order to allow all participants a mindful transition to their next meeting.

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.

(It’s hard, we know.) In the past, research has sometimes led to conflicting findings on whether mindfulness benefits our positive and negative emotions. This study sheds some light on a possible reason why, by illustrating how specific

To better understand the power of focus and awareness, consider an affliction that touches nearly all of us: email addiction. Emails have a way of seducing our attention and redirecting it to lower-priority tasks because completing small, quickly accomplished tasks releases dopamine, a pleasurable hormone, in our brains.

It does this through various points of support based on experience level, how much time you may have, and with practices designed to meet you exactly where you are that day, in your particular life guided meditation stage, and wherever you are along your meditation journey.

And for what? Meditation is about befriending yourself. Treat thoughts and other distractions with a friendly curiosity, as you might a passerby in the neighborhood. Maybe give ‘em a wave as they walk by, and then get back to your practice.