MBCT’s credibility rests firmly on ongoing research. Two randomized clinical trials (published in 2000 and 2008 in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology) laid the foundation, indicating MBCT reduces rates of depression relapse by 50% among patients who suffer from recurrent depression. Recent findings published in The Lancet in 2015 revealed that combining a tapering off of medication with MBCT is as effective as an ongoing maintenance dosage of medication....

Dishonesty is common among children (and adults) and begins as early as age three. Apart from lying to cover up a misdeed, children also commonly tell lies to be polite. In some ways, lie-telling is evidence that kids have reached important developmental milestones because it requires both cognitive and social maturity—understanding that others can have different beliefs from your own, being able to flexibly maneuver conflicting information in the mind, and recognizing societal expectations of when to be truthful and when to tell a lie....

Tim Ryan, a congressman in Ohio, believes mindfulness can help our navigate and thrive during these difficult times. He’s especially interested in how mindfulness can help veterans. He believes there’s great a great need to help our traumatized veterans, and mindfulness is a key part of helping them. Ryan’s goal is to bring together a coalition of like-minded individuals and groups, in order to further all kinds of mindfulness and well-being projects and causes, from integrative health for veterans and the current military, to urban agriculture....

What happens when expectations aren’t met? When the project isn’t done or the kayaking day stretches to 15 miles? People become attached to their expectations. They can be very disappointed when their expectations are not met. Unmet expectations can lead to disappointment, anger, and other disruptive feelings. If you are furious about the project delay when you walk into a meeting with the team that is behind schedule, at best your ability to think clearly about how to move forward will be impaired....

The new study specifically explored the brain changes that occur when a child is able to recognize that another person believes something that the child knows is false. Once children gain this ability, they can better predict other people’s behavior and modify their own—like denying a wrongdoing that Mom didn’t see or helping out a friend who doesn’t know the rules of kickball. Recognizing the false beliefs of others is a key step in developing what psychologists call a theory of mind, the understanding that other people may have different thoughts, beliefs, intentions, or perspectives....

I received a steady diet of these inspiring messages in movie theater ads preceding the coming attractions during Christmas. They were being used to sell…Tylenol. Words are indeed cheap, and many of the words used to promote mindfulness are the same words used to sell lots of stuff these days. For good reason: We crave these things. As cheesy as it sounds, we do want “moments that matter” and we do want to “live in the now....

Matteo Farinella and Hana Roš wrote the comic book, with Farinella doing the illustrations. They spend their working days at the University College of London on computational neuroscience and analyzing brain cells, respectively. The objective of Neurocomic is to introduce a wider audience to the inner workings of the brain, so storytelling and entertainment are just as important as the science. Have an inside peek at this sample of Neurocomic....

As a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher, I walk around this relatively small town and run into people who know what I do for a living. Often the first thing I hear is, “Oh but, I don’t need training in mindfulness. Running/skiing/climbing/biking is my moving meditation.” For the most part, I believe that answer. The self-awareness and mental precision I learned from my years as a competitive skier and mountain biker were my doorway into contemplative practice....

It was the first and only time I was so directly confronted by the issue of a person’s right to die—from the person who wanted to control the timing of his or her own death. At presentations that I do, both in the United States and other countries, the question almost always comes up, “Do you believe in euthanasia?” It’s a question almost always asked by someone who has strong ethical or moral convictions about the right to die....

Meng shares 3 tips to stay sane over the holidays: Self honesty: Acknowledge to yourself, this is hard. Even people with 10,000 hours of meditation practice find themselves ruminating over fights with relatives, replaying past hurts in their minds, and trying not to get caught up in their triggers. Knowing this, don’t give yourself too much blame. Practice loving-kindness: Look at everyone in the room, and no matter how difficult your relationship may be, just think to yourself, “I wish for this person to be happy, I wish for my mother-in-law to be happy....

2) GRATITUDE Oliver Sacks (Knopf) Few people can claim to have changed the way large numbers of people think about themselves and their fellow humans. Neurologist Oliver Sacks did so repeatedly. By bringing a child’s curiosity to brains that veered from the “norm,” he asked us to think of them not as defective but as unique worlds of perception. This tiny book of four essays, written as he faced death, overflows with joy....

Dr. Lalkhen, who has been helping patients with pain for over two decades, and who is on the Faculty of Pain Medicine at UK Royal College of Anesthetists, hopes to advance all of our understanding—medical professionals and laypeople alike—of the subtleties of pain. And in so doing he asks that we get past some fundamental and harmful misconceptions: “Simply put, we need to stop viewing our bodies as machines that medicine can fix when they go wrong....

Exercise Physical activity is pretty clearly linked to brain health and cognitive function. People who exercise appear to have greater brain volume, better thinking and memory skills, and even reduced risk of dementia. A recent study in the journal Neurology found that older people who vigorously exercise have cognitive test scores that place them at the equivalent of 10 years younger. It’s not totally clear why this is, but it’s likely due to the increased blood flow to the brain that comes from physical activity....

Now, Epstein has contemplated and compiled
all he has learned from using the lens of self-awareness to view the health-care system and the lives of the people in it. Both analytically clear and empathic, he guides us to a vision of
a new kind of doctor in a new system: covering everything from how doctors need to pay attention to their mindware (the thought processes they use to make diagnoses and decisions), using meta-cognition (being aware of your own thinking) to healing the healer (how to travel the path from burnout to resistance), to what makes a compassionate and humane health-care system (one where small acts of kindness can make
“the unbearable bearable”)....

A Guided Loving-Kindness Practice to Cultivate Curiosity read more Stephanie Domet March 21, 2022 Judson Brewer January 12, 2022 Judson Brewer January 6, 2022

If you’re the kind of person who finds themselves wide awake at 3 a.m. contemplating the shadows on their ceiling, practicing mindfulness may offer the secret to sleeping better. A randomized clinical trial from UCLA found that mindfulness meditation improves sleep quality among older adults with sleep disturbances. The following guided meditation was used in that study to help people fall asleep. May it do the same for you....

Many wise and creative people know about ma. A poet leaves a pause between words to emphasize them. A musician knows that the silences are what make a song or performance great. Athletes watch the space between players, between the ball and the goal. We think of physical space as rooms, not walls. That space is important because it’s where anything can happen. Often, it is the empty space that actually gives things a shape and even makes them beautiful....

My fellow travelers become increasingly restless, wipe wet brows, and shift uneasily in narrow seats, their discomfort leaning threateningly toward desperation. I glimpse it in the eyes of the college-aged backpacker seated across from me, so close his knees nearly touch mine, and in the young mother’s fruitless fanning of her little one. I peer over at my seventeen-year-old daughter and watch nervously as her eyes grow gradually wide, my mind quickly registering her expression—she is teetering on the precipice of a full-blown panic attack....

In the significant losses in my life, the death of my father and my brother, I had no opportunity for anticipatory grief. My father died suddenly of a heart attack one Christmas Eve. My brother died of an asthma attack. At 74 and 52 respectively, both died prematurely by today’s standards of life expectancy. While their deaths were sudden, they were not marked by violence. The recent events in Tucson, the murder of six people and the wounding of 14 others, sent shock waves of grief through that community and beyond....