Incorporate mental exercise, like meditation, into your weekly routine as commonly as physical exercise. The evidence suggests we should take our minds and brains seriously, making meditation a fundamental practice for overall well-being, like brushing teeth.
Try meditation and continue practicing regularly. It trains attention, helps handle stress, and the more you do it, the better the benefits get due to neuroplasticity.
Treat meditation as a mental fitness exercise. It stimulates neuroplasticity in a positive direction, leading to more wholesome thoughts and positive characteristics.
Understand that meditation is not about fixing things, clearing your mind, or getting rid of thoughts. These are popular misconceptions, and understanding this helps appreciate what meditation is actually useful for.
Do not view meditation as a primary cure for illnesses, but rather as an adjunct to change your relationship to symptoms. It was not originally developed to cure illnesses, though it can improve quality of life with chronic conditions.
Engage in loving-kindness meditation, wishing well to yourself, loved ones, and an ever-expanding circle of people. It immediately increases happiness, altruism, generosity, and the likelihood of helping others.
Practice loving-kindness and compassion meditation for a couple of months. It effectively shifts objective measures of implicit bias, addressing a significant societal issue.
Engage in mindfulness practice, such as watching your breath and noticing passing thoughts, and gently bringing your attention back when it wanders. This process strengthens your ability to concentrate and focus, improving attentional skills.
Begin meditating to cultivate a more relaxed response to stressful situations. It helps you avoid being easily triggered, leading to a more pleasant life and improving interactions with others.
Engage in simple mindfulness practices. It helps you recover more quickly from adversity, changing your relationship to difficult experiences rather than buffering them.
Practice simple mindfulness meditation. It strengthens the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, enabling better emotional regulation and reducing impulsive reactions.
Continue and increase your meditation practice beyond the beginner level. There’s a dose-response relationship, meaning the more you meditate, the stronger and more consistent the benefits become across all areas (attention, stress, kindness).
Incorporate meditation retreats into your practice, in addition to daily meditation. Retreats offer even better benefits than daily practice, acting as an advanced form of training, while daily practice serves as maintenance.
Prioritize longer durations of retreat practice. Retreat practice is a significant predictor of a slower breathing rate, which is an important index related to health and emotional balance.
Participate in even a single day of intensive mindfulness or insight meditation practice. It downregulates genes associated with inflammation, which are implicated in a wide range of diseases.
Maintain a consistent meditation practice, especially if there’s a family history of Alzheimer’s or dementia. While not a cure, it’s believed to impact the inflammatory response around the disease, potentially making symptoms less severe.
Aim to experience emotions fully and spontaneously without letting them linger or ‘stick.’ This allows for quicker emotional recovery and prevents grudges or prolonged negative states, as observed in advanced practitioners.
Engage in consistent, long-term meditation practice. It can lead to a trait-like increase in gamma brain oscillations, associated with creative insight and a feeling of having good ideas, even outside of formal meditation.
Engage in consistent meditation practice, reaching an intermediate level. It can lead to gamma oscillations during sleep, potentially playing an important role in restorative mechanisms during deep sleep.
Teach children a ‘breathing buddies’ practice where they place a stuffed animal on their belly and observe its rise and fall with their breath, counting their breaths. This simple mindfulness exercise strengthens cognitive control, a better predictor of future success than IQ.
Reflect on the scientific evidence of meditation’s brain-changing effects during your practice. Understanding the tangible impact on your brain can serve as a powerful motivator to continue and deepen your meditation practice.