This new app is a personalized two-week course that includes daily video lessons from Dan Harris and renowned meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, guided audio meditations, and a personal coach to guide you through the course. Once you have purchased the app, you have full lifetime access to all the videos and materials for any future use. Harris’ app is designed to be accessible to everyone interested in meditation— even the most doubtful—by focusing on simple and practical exercises that have been backed by science....

But when we’re clear on our core values, and they appear to be under attack, what role can our mindfulness practice play? Judson Brewer is Director of Research at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. His forthcoming book, The Craving Mind (Yale University Press, March 2017) explores how our impulse control often takes us off course when we participate in addictive behaviors—everything from smoking to binge-watching Netflix....

Wrzesniewski’s answers to these kinds of questions contribute to a growing heap of evidence that individual disposition and personality traits have real implications for how we experience our work. A job itself is neither awesome nor terrible, since the experience we have doing a job depends largely on what we bring to it. Most of us, she has found, see our work as a “job,” a way to make money....

Yet a recent paper by researchers from Stanford and Harvard suggests we better stop taking workplace stress for granted and address it head on. The researchers posit that health issues arising from job stress—like hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and poor mental health—can lead to conditions that kill more than 120,000 people per year. This would make work-related stress one of the top-five causes of death in the United States, akin to accidents, more lethal than diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or influenza....

This is usually because a) the study is easy to describe b) it connects with an experience that most of us empathize with and c) it offers a clear picture of how mindfulness helps. I felt one of those waves of excitement (a springy sensation in the solar plexus) when I read Bruce Barrett’s latest study, which looks at whether there’s a relationship between starting a mindfulness practice or exercise regime and the subsequent incidence of respiratory infections....

For more about the study, click here.

Listening to each parent wax poetic about their beautiful, loving dreams for their children’s futures, I realized that “happiness” was defined as the wish for them to never feel let down or disappointed and for everything in their lives to be perfect. You see the problem with this version of happiness, right? Happiness Is Riding the Waves If you have children, you know the feeling: the deep desire to fix things that don’t go their way....

We are often so busy at this time of year that we can’t do what we’d really like to do: appreciate one another, give thanks, celebrate. Instead, we’ve got a long to-do list, our usual routines are disrupted, and we get less sleep than usual. It’s a perfect recipe for boosted stress levels. So here are three suggestions to help keep you on an even keel over the holidays:...

Mindfulness practice has taught me that whatever turmoil or emotional storm I’m experiencing, I can trust that eventually I will be able to weather it and start again. The more I practice, the more confident I become in my ability to experience my own vulnerability, as well as the vulnerability of others. And being accountable is an experience of intense vulnerability. When we are called out for being wrong or for hurting someone, we fear we will be deemed unloveable....

Noticing and giving time to what is present doesn’t come so easily to most of us, especially when we’re under stress. However, there are steps we can take to train ourselves to bring awareness to the nourishing aspects of our lives and cultivate the conditions for enduring contentment. Raising and broadening our gaze can reveal many moments of appreciative joy in everyday life. Recognizing, seeing, and stepping away from our judging mind creates the conditions for enduring contentment....

In his new book, The Way of Mindful Education, Daniel Rechtschaffen argues that there is something simple that can be done to help change this: teaching mindfulness in schools. Rechtschaffen, a leading mindfulness educator and founder of the Mindful Education Institute, believes that mindfulness training can increase social-emotional skills—like attention, empathy, forgiveness, and impulse control—that help improve the classroom social climate and increase academic performance for kids. Research on mindfulness has proliferated in recent decades, and the results are promising, according to Rechtschaffen....

Eventually I came to mindfulness. At first, I approached it with the same demand for instant relief. But then something unexpected happened. I saw that it was impossible to really follow the instructions for mindfulness meditation—gently paying attention to the flow of breath, allowing things to be just as they are—and strive for results at the same time. So I stopped looking for cures and results, and to my surprise, some helpful openness and clarity began to arise in my mind....

We can notice this tendency before making an important decision or doing something for the first time, when a tiny voice inside our head says: “You can’t do that.” Moments of self-doubt are a normal part of life, but indulging the inner critic can become a habit that paralyzes us, sometimes leading to fear, depression, and anxiety.A little daily mindfulness practice interrupts the mental habit of self-doubt, according to research....

While many take this time of year to look back (best-of lists, anyone?) or look ahead (are we making resolutions for 2021 or just letting it wash over us?), here’s an invitation to just be here. Right here, right now, in this moment. Some of these moments will bring great peace. Others will leave us in pieces. The more we can bring our focus and presence to these moments, the more skilled we become at compassion—for ourselves and others—kindness, and finding joy, and the more we can surf the changes of our lives with ease....

4 Steps to Change a Habit for Good Step 1: Mindfulness What are habits? Habits are behaviors that become automatic because they have been performed frequently in the past. This repetition or automaticity creates a mental association between the situation (cue) and action (behavior). Automaticity is the opposite of mindfulness. Research suggests that 45% of our behaviors are repeated almost daily (1). Mindfulness is paying attention in the present moment. When mindfulness is present, we can see our thoughts, feelings, motivations, reactions, and responses with greater clarity and wisdom....

One of my clients—we’ll call her Sara—received that in a nasty text from her ex-husband, who was angry because their daughter, a young adult, had excluded him from a milestone event. Instead of confronting their daughter, the ex-husband was pinning his daughter’s actions on Sara. Understandably, the accusation consumed Sara. Even when we aren’t provoked by such high-emotion personal conflict, these days it’s hard to escape the daily dramas playing out all around us....

The origins of anxiety In general, anxiety is the unpleasant feeling of dread that something negative is going to happen in the future. The feeling of anxiety is particularly fed by rumination, such as worrying about calorie-intake, weight gain, appearance, social rejection, healthy, or unhealthy foods. The list of threats is endless. People with restrictive eating patterns (or more extreme: anorexia, orthorexia) often experience anxiety before, during, or after a meal....

We know that we are failing to lead with the kind of excellence that we are innately capable of exhibiting. Missed opportunities, lack of innovation, ethical mistakes, and loss of productivity can be the result. And that isn’t even the end of the story! The personal and professional impact of this day-to-day autopilot existence is burnout and disengagement. We begin to feel as though we are simply going through the motions, or barely making it through the day....