It’s an important question but one that science has yet to fully answer. We’ve learned a lot about the demographics of happiness and how it’s affected by conditions like income, education, gender, and marriage. But the scientific results are surprising: Factors like these don’t seem to have particularly strong effects. Yes, people are generally happier if they make more money rather than less, or are married instead of single, but the differences are quite modest....

Mind Talk and Brain Talk To those of us without a degree in neurobiology, it seems completely natural to refer to the mind. We talk about feeling this way and thinking of that, of remembering one thing and dreaming of another. Those verbs are examples of mind talk. Using mind talk, we would say, “I recognized my first-grade teacher in the crowd because she was wearing the necklace with the beetle scarab, which was so unusual I still remembered it after all these years....

Over the last several decades, through my work with tens of thousands of clients and meditation students, I’ve come to see the pain of perceived deficiency as epidemic. It’s like we’re in a trance that causes us to see ourselves as unworthy. Yet, I have seen in my own life, and with countless others, that we can awaken from this trance through practicing mindfulness and self-compassion. We can come to trust the goodness and purity of our hearts....

Mindfulness, however, wasn’t always on her leadership-training radar. While today she’s the Executive Director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership and author of the book Finding the Space to Lead, in the early 2000s Marturano was a “twenty-first-century juggler” living the sandwich-generation nightmare: school-aged children, aging parents, a demanding job at a Fortune 200 company, and a high-stakes assignment overseeing an acquisition. During the eighteen months that assignment took, her parents died—first her mother, who’d been ill, then six months later, her father, who had not....

Over the last few months, I have actually suffered several strokes or TIAs. Some more impactful than others. Each had slightly different symptoms and effects, some of which remained, while others passed after a short period of time. All of this has been extraordinary teaching in uncertainty and humility. I feel a deep gratitude for years of awareness practice. The accumulated effect of decades of studying the mind, heart, and body has proved to be a reliable companion as I attempt to navigate the new set of conditions I have been given....

The confident psychologists could well be right about their healing abilities. But Scott Lilienfeld wonders. A research psychologist at Emory University, Lilienfeld has written papers on the resistance of clinical psychologists—practitioners who treat depression, social phobia, marital troubles, personality disorders, and the whole woeful litany of human mental miseries—to evidence-based practice, in which the choice of treatment is guided by rigorous, large-scale studies. Whenever Lilienfeld advocates this, the blowback is immediate: We know what works; we see it every time a satisfied client leaves therapy cured of what troubled her....

However, striving for success usually gets in the way. As soon as we try to get something else, or be somewhere else, we move into desire or aversion, rather than accepting the reality of how and where we are. This creates trouble. We try to work out how to get calm, or get rid of negativity, or force insight to come. We start pushing for results. Peace can come with practice, but only when we stop trying to hold on to, avoid, or resist what’s already happening....

But if we’re constantly looking to what is next as we go through life, when, then, are we ever satisfied? If the answer is “never,” then we’re left to constantly search for happiness that never comes. Obviously, this “race to nowhere,” encouraged by our society and culture, is flawed. As I’ve discussed in a previous blog post, this needs to be replaced with the “race to right here, right now....

He recently sat down with author Gretchen Rubin. Gretchen has spent the past decade researching and writing about happiness and is the author of several books, including the blockbuster New York Times bestsellers The Four Tendencies, Better Than Before, and The Happiness Project. In this episode, Michael and Gretchen discuss how happiness and habits are linked. Michael Gervais: Welcome back or welcome to the finding mastery podcast. I am Michael Gervais and the idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery or switched on and dedicated their life’s efforts to figuring out difficult stuff and what these conversations are designed to do is understand what they’ve come to understand as best we possibly can but also work to understand the psychological framework....

Feeling enormous responsibility to treat her patient with care and empathy, McGeehan called upon tools she learned in 2016 during a mindfulness and resilience program for nurses. Bringing awareness to her physical experience—with the help of mindful breathing and a body scan—allowed her to self-soothe and regulate the emotional whirlwind she felt. Asking herself questions such as, “How can I serve?” and “What is the need here?” gave her the focus she needed to effectively care for her patient, as well as be the touchpoint for the patient’s family....

A recent post on the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute blog—a program developed at Google—suggests small ways to bring mindfulness to work without raising eyebrows. In particular, the blog tackles the topic of bringing mindfulness to meetings. While Mirabai Bush and others who have worked with major companies suggest practicing two or three minutes of mindful meditation before a meeting, Search Inside Yourself tries a modification of that: taking a moment to pause before meetings....

Do your most common sources confirm or challenge your perspective? How much time do you spend listening to or reading opposing points of view? When you make decisions, are you likely to choose the option that the people closest to you will affirm? In my recent Mindful article, I talked about the importance of adaptability as an essential emotional intelligence competency for leaders. Part of being adaptable is seeking out and being able to take in a broad range of information from many perspectives....

Taking a mindful approach to spending can help you focus less on the money you’re spending, and more on the experiences you’re gaining—so you can stop worrying you spent too much, and truly appreciate your holiday. Mindful spending begs you to consider each dollar you spend an extension of your personal values, creating an individual economy that centers on what you love, and not what society tells you you have to have....

“I think the average workday is not mindful,” he said. “It’s full of ongoing distraction, mistrust, multitasking, a wide range of emotions that can change from a text to a cell phone call to a Slack message.” In an interview with Greater Good Science Center, he explained how modern offices produce a domino-effect of distraction, which is damaging to everyone involved. “People [distract] each other all the time: They go into each other’s offices and cubes—Can I interrupt you?...

While mindfulness might seem simple, it’s not necessarily all that easy. The real work is to make time every day to just keep doing it. Here’s a short practice to get you started: That’s it! That’s the practice. You go away, you come back, and you try to do it as kindly as possible. Read More Mindful Staff January 6, 2023 Diana Winston February 26, 2016

What It’s Not I’ve spent eight years with people who were in various stages of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Although my hospice patients in San Francisco were all in the later stages, I heard painful stories from their families of how people reacted to them when they still could function with some help. From others who are in the earlier stages, I heard identical stories involving relatives, long-time friends, and close colleagues who drifted away or interacted with them as if they : – Stepped back into their childhood – Possessed the mind of a developmentally delayed child....

Listen to the full conversation: The NYPD Health and Wellness Section Barry Boyce: Often health and wellness are divided into physical health and mental health. At Mindful, we like to think in terms of the intersection of those two aspects of wellness and how they’re interrelated as a whole. How do you view that in the Health and Wellness Section of the NYPD? Eynat Naor: That’s definitely how we view it....