1. Start your day out right The way we start our day makes a big difference in how we feel the rest of the day. Take a moment to pause, check in with how you’re feeling, relax your body, think about what you’re grateful for, and bring a sense of presence to your morning routine. 2. Check your body posture Science shows that how we hold our bodies directly impacts our confidence....

For teens and tweens, who are actually hardwired for self-consciousness, the constant comparing and curating, which used to end with the final bell of the school day, when kids could go home and put on their sweatpants, is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. Socializing and social comparison begins first thing in the morning and ends last thing at night. Predictably, psychology research consistently shows that social media is making kids unhappier and more narcissistic....

I (Mitch Abblett) have 20 years of clinical experience with a range of challenging clients, from teen sex offenders to combat veterans to teens at intensive residential and therapeutic school settings. I’m a licensed psychologist who’s spoken nationally and internationally—I literally wrote the book on mindful management of difficult clients. And I couldn’t even start a conversation with my own daughter, only six years old. As I gripped the steering wheel and caught glimpses of her as she sat in the back seat, munching away on a bag of stale popcorn, I found myself going stale as well—my courage for breaking open the possible Pandora’s box of her pent-up angst over her own challenges at school was getting the better of me again....

To find this inner choice point, start by questioning destructive mental habits. Even though there may be a bit of legitimacy to our grievances, are the disturbing emotions we feel way out of proportion? Are such feelings familiar? Are you ruminating? If so, we would do well to gain more control over those self-defeating habits of mind. This approach takes advantage of an effect studied by Kevin Ochsner, a neuroscientist at Columbia University....

You’re excited about this role because you would get to… Direct the development of technological resources for a growing companyBring new solutions to the growing and impactful practices of meditation and mindfulnessWork with a variety of people across multiple departments and organizations to help leverage technology to support business goalsIdentify, recommend and manage digital assets, service providers and best practicesOversee the technological aspects of direct marketing including Email list management, list imports, segmenting, grouping, tagging, suppressing, etc....

What gets in the way of forgiveness? In order to begin the process of forgiveness, we need to embrace all our feelings with compassion and understanding. That’s why I say forgiveness is an inside job. How can we truly be forgiving to another if we are not able to forgive ourselves first? I often share with students and clients that we need to name and acknowledge our feelings to “tame” them....

Flash forward more than twenty years and now I feel utterly naked without my smartphone and daily, if mildly annoying, notifications from family, friends, and the small collection of apps I have an oddly intimate relationship with. As a psychologist, I’m all too aware of the emerging and sobering body of psychological literature showing the serious and quantifiable emotional downsides to all this screen time, video gaming, Netflix-bingeing, and social media scrolling....

The free conference series will discuss ways to change our thinking around romantic relationships, sexuality, family life, how to raise children, and how to work out struggles with others. There will be weekly hour-long interviews with seven guests, including Tara Brach, a long-time meditation practitioner and founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, and Christine Carter, a parent coach and author of Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents....

Notice Your Need to Fidget Stimming, short for self-stimulation, is a common behavior for most folks but a more frequent habit for people with ADHD. This might look like chronic hair twisting, finger drumming, or knee bouncing, among other things. For most, it happens in a state of hyperfocus or boredom. Some people stim to manage anxiety or sensory overwhelm. There’s nothing wrong with the need to stim, but bringing mindfulness to the habit can be a stress management exercise that also helps you understand why you stim, and if there’s something else going on that needs addressing....

The back-story is a simple one, and picks up a narrative that was fairly common in 1971. A large campus evangelistic group at a major public university needed a guitar player. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but I needed an audience. I was a newly minted young scholar and recently retired musician, fresh off the college party circuit and occasionally larger venues where I earned my first real money as a guitarist....

⁠For many of my own heart patients, however, it’s now part of the routine. You may wonder why a cardiologist is teaching his patients to meditate. While many of us tend to think of our emotions, or meditation for that matter, as only affecting our mind, research shows that these “mental” states do come with very real, physical outcomes. Try to remember the last time you or a loved one felt stuck in a mood or unpleasant state of mind, like anxiety, sadness, depression, loneliness, or hopelessness....

If you would like more information, please email shoner[email protected] with the subject “ROE East Bay.” See also, on Mindful.org: Video: Mary Gordon, founder of Roots of Empathy, shares how babies have something to teach about emotions.

It might seem to go without saying, but people with sunnier dispositions are better able to regulate their emotions than people with gloomier personalities, who are more likely to be thrown by unpleasant events. Why is this? There are several possibilities. One is that happier people wear metaphorical “rose-colored glasses” that allow them to focus on positive things and filter out negative ones. Another possibility is that happier people are just better at savoring the good things and allowing them to lift their mood, while still seeing the bad....

Feeling Healing Neuroscientist, mindfulness teacher, and founder of the “Science of Social Justice” framework, Dr. Sará King recently launched her third project with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, titled, “Art and Awareness as a Catalyst for Collective Healing.” This installation pairs artwork with soundscapes to explore how increased awareness of ourselves, our environment, society, and culture can help heal intergenerational trauma. “There’s something so visceral about standing in front of a gigantic painting and bearing witness to the emotions and other sensations that arise within the soma,” King says....

The same attitude carries over for parents around daily routines, school, or anything else. If one parent expects bedtime to be stressful and another feels it should happen without much adult effort, who has a harder time sticking to sleep training when it gets challenging? Our perspective toward whatever we encounter in life fundamentally changes how we experience it. Stress itself can be defined as the perception that something is more than we can handle....

Hours spent inside with the kiddos, while waiting out a storm or blizzard can evoke cabin fever in some parents and caregivers. “Being at home with your children and taking on the idea that you have to be the entertainer, with no sign of sanity-saving alone time for yourself can cause anxiety,” says Susan Verde, a mom of three, kids yoga instructor, and the author of, I Am Yoga. Worry may also stem from the inevitable and repeated words, “I’m bored....

We can experience a variety of difficulties at work. Organizational actions may trigger suffering like job loss and downsizing. It was found in a study that downsizing unsettles people who lose their jobs and distresses survivors who are concerned about their colleagues’ losses, along with their own job security (Mishra et al. 2009). Suffering at work may arise from events in an individual’s personal life, including marital or relationship difficulties, a child’s special needs, divorce, or loss of a family member....

Oh no, you think. Is this a sign of Alzheimer’s? Am I losing my brainpower? If you have such concerns, you’re not alone. A recent survey by the Alzheimer’s Association showed that 60 percent of people worldwide believe—incorrectly—that Alzheimer’s is an inevitable part of aging, a worry second only to getting cancer. The good news is that there is more information than ever available these days about staving off mental decline and staying sharp into your twilight years....

It’s not all in your head—you can practice mindfulness by sitting down for a formal mindfulness meditation practice, or by being more intentional and aware of the things you do each day. If you want to learn more about mindfulness and how to practice mindfulness meditation, visit our Getting Started guide. How to Practice Mindfulness Meditation on the Go Nearly every task we perform in a day—be it brushing our teeth, eating lunch, talking with friends or exercising—can be done more mindfully....

The challenge is that we live in an increasingly distracting world, and need a method to make our attention, the touchstone of consciousness, more readily available to us. The challenge is that the speed of the world and the nature of our technology makes it difficult to make best use of this precious resource, which is a core component of mindfulness. John Teasdale captured the centrality of this point as follows: “Mindfulness is a habit, it’s something the more one does, the more likely one is to be in that mode with less and less effort… it’s a skill that can be learned....