What’s Wrong with Being Wrong? Years ago, I worked for a professional choir. The conductor told everyone that, during rehearsals, if you sang a wrong note, you should acknowledge it by raising and lowering your hand while you keep singing. In other words, you were allowed to be wrong. It didn’t have to hold you up, or get you down, or be more than a quick flick of the hand. Since then I have often wished for the simplicity of this relatively painless way to make a mistake without viewing it as a mortifying mess....

It sounds so improbable. When we think of those who have taught us the most about meaningful change, we think of people who are very, very brave, say, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama. Unwavering. Deep. Devoted to others and willing to die for what they believe, quite literally. How do you get to be such a person? Well, I have no idea, but I would put money on the idea that the ground, path, and fruition of their lives is sadness....

Heather Hurlock: First, we need to know, do you use your own app? Dan Harris: I don’t use the app every day—but that’s not because I don’t think it’s awesome. It’s mostly because I don’t want to have to watch all that video of myself. Heather: What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given about how to quiet that voice in your head through meditation? Dan: The best advice I’ve gotten on this score is that you don’t have to “quiet the voice,” per se, you just have to learn how to not take it so seriously....

Because as the world convulses with turmoil, my mind convulses, too. My thoughts fly like a storm in a snow globe: pandemic, death, disease, fear, invisible air particles, racial violence, social injustice, micro- and macroaggressions, shouting, anger, political warfare, economic freefall, joblessness, uncertainty, anxiety—all are swirling in my snow globe. Yours too? I feel raw, unsettled, hurt, angry, sad, furious, compassionate, sorrowful. It’s all in there, around me, inside of me, all swirling....

Mindfulness or Compassion for Mental Health Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) are among the most widely used mindfulness-based treatments for depression, anxiety, and stress. The two may be similarly effective, finds a new study from the Mindfulness Institute in Reykjavik, Iceland. At a residential rehabilitation and health clinic, 58 adults were assigned to either a MBCT group, a CFT group, or a group receiving no mindfulness-based treatment....

According to Andrew Horn, the founder of Dreams for Kids DC, much of confidence comes from our sense of presence. “Presence is that embodied existence in the moment, it’s when you’re only responding and reacting to what’s happening right now,” Horn says. “There’s no story from the past, there’s no fear of the future, and it’s a magical thing when we can create that in conversation.” Here’s how you can soothe social anxiety, and uncover your confidence:...

The conversation was recorded in December 2012 and the RMA describes the video this way: “the actor wrestles with the concepts of happiness, love, and death with the same courage and compelling insight that he brought to his roles.”

At some point today, you will most likely walk. You may even go for a walk. It’s one of our greatest gifts, and when we manage early in life to use our legs to get around, it’s cause for celebration. Parents call their parents just to report on the event. The very fact that walking— or whatever form of ambulation you use to get around—is so central to our lives makes it a ready focus for mindful, meditative attention....

Here’s the recap: On a cold January morning, in a Washington DC metro station, a man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. While he played, approximately 2,000 people went through the station, most of them probably on their way to work. Six adults stopped for a short while, one of them recognizing the violinist. Twenty-seven people gave him money (a total of $52.17). A number of small children seemed interested in stopping to listen, but parents tugged them along hurriedly....

That’s a question Jared Minkel, assistant professor and director of the adult behavioral sleep medicine program at Brown University, answers in this video from Happify. “One of the most common difficulties with getting to sleep is people just can’t turn their minds off,” Minkel says. “You might be tired and sluggish all day, but you lay down in bed and all of a sudden your mind just starts going and won’t stop....

But Louis Cozolino, professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, is deeply engaged with another idea. In Timeless: Nature’s Formula for Health and Longevity, he emphasizes the positive impact of human relationships. “Of all the experiences we need to survive and thrive, it is the experience of relating to others that is the most meaningful and important,” he writes. His thinking grows out of the relatively new field of interpersonal neurobiology, based on the recognition that humans are best understood not in isolation, but in the context of their connections with others....

The sensational euthanasia angle crowded out the scientific story about the remarkable advances being made in connectomics—the science of figuring out a brain’s complete wiring diagram—and the once-absurd dream that it might one day be possible to upload a mind into the cloud, Ray Kurzweil-style, achieving cyber-immortality. Although “it will be at least 50 years before the first human mind is successfully uploaded and 100 years before it’s routine,” Hayworth said, he regards it as not only scientifically possible but ethically imperative....

Campbell has shown up for others in her work as a hospice nurse, chair of the Acute and Specialty Care department at the University of Virginia School of Nursing, and hospice chaplain. Lately, she’s found a renewed sense of purpose. At a hospice conference, she wandered into a room offering refreshments and soon realized she was at a presentation about LGBTQ+ healthcare. The presenter was a trans man who shared a story about a hospital stay where he had to be cared for in a bed in the hallway because nurses weren’t sure if he should go in a shared room with men or with women....

This “it’s-work-to-seem-fine” coping mechanism illustrates just one way in which depression complicates your life. Not only are you exhausting yourself pretending to be OK, you may find it hard to rally support from friends, family, and coworkers who only see how well you seem to be functioning. While there is rapidly growing recognition of the very real difficulty and damage caused by depression, the stigma of past decades and centuries lingers....

“We know that being mindful is really good for a lot of explicit cognitive functions. But it might not be so useful when you want to form new habits,” says the Georgetown study’s leader, Chelsea Stillman, in a Sunday NYT Magazine article titled “Breathing In vs. Spacing Out.” The author of the article, Dan Hurley, also the author of Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power, sums up the study this way: it’s up to us to find the balance between “breathing in” and paying attention (which is equated with practicing mindfulness) and “spacing out,” or letting our attention go....

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, by Daniel Goleman In today’s world of Internet bombardment, it’s easy to become distracted by social networks, video games, and emails to the exclusion of more important activities, like having an uninterrupted conversation or finishing a work project. What is this costing us as a society? A lot, writes bestselling author Daniel Goleman. In Focus, Goleman makes the case that paying attention is a lost art form that needs resurrecting, especially for our kids....

Her delight was refreshing, and it didn’t alter the underlying fact that she felt heavy-hearted and off-kilter because of the state of the world. She nonetheless found momentary joy in a bowl of cherries. Joy can be like that—small, unassuming, disarming. It’s hiding in a cherry, a song note, or a pair of comfortable shoes. Often, we have to coax these small moments of joy into our awareness. We have to let our guard down and allow them rub up against us like a purring cat....

Evolution must have had something else in mind, though, or sadness wouldn’t still be with us. Being sad from time to time serves some kind of purpose in helping our species to survive. Yet, while other so-called “negative emotions,” like fear, anger, and disgust, seem clearly adaptive—preparing our species for flight, fight, or avoidance, respectively—the evolutionary benefits of sadness have been harder to understand…until recently, that is. With the advent of fMRI imaging and the proliferation of brain research, scientists have begun to find out more about how sadness works in the brain and influences our thoughts and behavior....

Dr. Jutta Tobias Mortlock outlines how anticipating stress as a team and responding collectively can transform workplace challenges. 5 Ways to Navigate Workplace Stress as a Team 1) Brainstorm around your challenges As a leader, share a personal concern about an upcoming challenge and invite team members to reciprocate. Where do concerns overlap and diverge? What do individual team members focus on? How can the team prepare to master the challenge together?...

When Harris had an on-air panic attack in 2004, it prompted him to visit a psychiatrist and find a way to cope with his “well-hidden and well-managed” drug use and depression—both of which had developed after he returned from covering the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and Palestine. In his book, 10% Happier, Harris talks about how meditation helped him make changes to keep his life in check. One of those changes was looking at how meditation could improve his relationships....