Mindfulness meditation is a growth of person`s perception at the present time and some people think is a unique way to overcome anxiety and discover greater wisdom in our minds. A person who practices this meditation tries to get rid of any unwanted thoughts, concentrate on present ones, focus on attention and breathing. Some contemporary psychotherapists suggest that we can train our mind by practicing mindfulness meditation. Often almost all people catch themselves on thoughts that transfers from the present to the past and future. This is called mind wandering. This can be very distracting when a person tries to focus on certain task. Naturally, people who experience less mind wandering demonstrated greater mindfulness, and previous studies showed that practicing mindfulness meditation even for eight minutes can increase and mind wandering will decrease (Hafenbrack, 2013).
In the study Debiasing the Mind Through Meditation: Mindfulness and the Sunk-Cost Bias, the researchers investigate how mindfulness meditation affects our sunk cost biases, which means tendency of people to continue investing money, time, or effort in something only because they invested a lot of money, time, or effort already (Hafenbrack, 2013). By definition sunk cost situation is an event that happened in the past, so when we do not come back to the past in our thoughts, under the law of equilibrium our thoughts are more focused on the present time which positively affects our attention and decision making. Recent studies too showed that thinking about future events (that might not even happen) can negatively affect people`s attention in the present time because they "are influenced by emotions they expect to experience in the future" (Hafenbrack, 2013)....
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... according to Dr. Jonathan Schooler, from the University of Santa Barbara in California's department of psychological and brain sciences, "Mind wandering seems to be very useful for planning and creative thought" (Gargiulo, 2013). In addition, Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman (professor of psychology at New York University) stated that problem solving, creativity, goal driven thought, future planning, seeing the perspective of another person need a space in our brain to occur. In support, in the article The Costs and Benefits of Mind-Wandering: A Review, there was a study conducted that reveals the crucial role of mind wandering in problem solving, planning, creativity (Mooneyham, 2013). In this article the author questions whether mind wandering is the real cause of big mistakes we do. It is clear that such phenomena as mind wandering deserves deeper analysis and studying.
As psychological field of study advances with its technologies to investigate changes in the mind, using such technology to look at effects of mindfulness meditation would strengthen its argument and understanding of the mechanisms in the brain, to change meditators into the new awaken state. This essay will reveal the evidence of mindfulness meditation making an impact on the mind. First, this essay will present the studies which found physiological functional differences in the body for those who did mindfulness meditation. Second, this essay will present the studies which found functional differences in the brain for those who perform mindfulness meditation. Third, this essay will present the studies which found structural differences in the brain for those who performed mindfulness meditation.
Meditation is an important psychological practice that protects the brain against aging as well as enhancing an individual’s ability to learn new things. This practice achieves this through sharpening focus, lessening stress, lowering blood pressure, and relieving chronic pain. Generally, it helps a person to experience greater calm, connect with deepest feelings, and challenges tendencies of self-judgment. Consequently, meditation leads to open doors for actual and accessible happiness for an individual. According to Salzberg (2011), meditation is basically training an individual’s attention in order to become more aware of inner workings and external incidents (p.7). After becoming more aware of inner workings and external incidents, a person can choose his/her actions towards things that are visible. While each global religion incorporates some kind of thoughtful exercise, meditation in today’s world is usually practiced separately from any belief system.
Meditation allows for you to relax, slow down, and become more aware of yourself and your environment. By meditating in a quiet place with no distraction, you are able to greatly limit the information that is constantly entering into our brains. This information gives us a train of thought that is very difficult to be halted, because it is in the nature of our brains to analyze any information that we have coming in from our senses like what things we are seeing with our eyes and what we are hearing with our ears. By limiting the amount of information that is entering into the brain, we are able to separate ourselves from the mind that is analyzing all of that information and to become aware of it.
Mindfulness helps us achieve a balance between the two. For example, many of us develop stress because of things that may have gone wrong in the past OR we may develop stress because we are unsure about the future or if there is something expected to happen in our future that we are not looking forward to or are not comfortable thinking about. What mindfulness does is that it allows us to reduce our stress and anxiety related to issues in our past or anticipated issues in our future. It helps us recognize that it is the present - the now - that is actually more important. If we fail to pay attention to our now, our life can spin out of control making our future even more complicated and our past efforts completely
Mindfulness originates from a deeply rooted system of contemplative practice. An individual cannot achieve the benefits of mindfulness training unless they continue practicing mindfulness techniques after the training is completed. By practicing meditation on a regular basis, mindfulness becomes an intentional practice (Holas & Jankowski,
Meditation is a private devotion or mental exercise consisting of a number of techniques of concentration, contemplation, and abstraction to heighten spiritual awareness. It has also been defined as, “Consciously directing your attention to alter your state of consciousness.” Meditation has been practiced around the world since the ancient times. It was used back then and still used today for spiritual growth (becoming more conscious). Meditation is mostly concerned about your attention, where it is directed to, and how it alters or changes a person’s consciousness.
Without practicing meditation, we do not reflect on or pay attention to our everyday actions, mostly acting on habit. The world is full of defilements and everyday we are infatuated by them, sensual desires, and delusion, although we often do not know it. Meditation weakens these unwholesome temptations and desires by making us aware that they are arising, and by revealing that they are truly unwholesome. The temptation only ceases when the concentration we obtain from meditation results in greater happiness than sensual pleasures can ever provide. While the satisfaction gained from sensual pleasures is fleeting, the clarified, focused state of mind of the meditator accumulates into a constant tranquil state. Only when we have stilled the mind’s incessant wandering and momentarily abandon the attraction to sensory experiences can we become truly aware of our hidden motivations and unconscious feelings that shape our thoughts and behavior. It is also necessary for changing our views of the world and ourselves. Through confronting these delusions, desires, and feelings we are able to renounce them. “During meditation we learn to drop from the mind what we don’t want to keep. We only want to keep in mind the meditation subject. As we get more and more skilled at it, we start to use the same faculty in our daily lives to help us drop thoughts that are
William James, the father of American Psychology was once accused of being absent minded, to which he replied he was just present minded to his own thoughts (Rebecca McMillian Ode to constructive day dreaming). Mind wandering is the experience in which an individual’s thoughts are unable to remain on a single idea, particularly this phenomenon is observed when people are engaged in a task which does not require a great deal of attention (Jennifer McVay, Michael Kane). It is believed that mind wandering mirrors temporary episodes during which ones thoughts compete with the task of processing external information into working memory (Smallwood, Going AWOL). The effects of mind wandering on the processing of external information, as well as the role post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may have in this, will be probed further during this review.
For thousands of years people have practiced mediation for spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being. Albeit there are many mediation types, in this paper I will be discussing and focusing on mindfulness mediation. Before further exploring mindfulness mediation, it is crucial to define mediation as a whole. Tang, Holzel, & Posner, 2016 state “Meditation can be defined as a form of mental training that aims to improve an individual’s core psychological capacities, such as attentional and emotional capacities” (p.213). Having that in mind, we can dive into mindfulness mediation. Mindfulness meditation is defined as “nonjudgmental attention to present-moment experiences (Tang, Holzel, & Posner, 2016).” A useful analogy to consider is going to the gym, going to the gym allows one to enhance the body, well similarly, practicing mindfulness is akin to taking the mind to the psychic gym, it enhances it. Mindfulness meditation involves focusing on your breathing and then bringing your mind’s attention to the present all while dismissing discursive thoughts and maintaining a special focus on breathing.
The purpose of meditation, and mindfulness meditation as mentioned in this course, is to increase awareness while calming the normal thought processes that often overcrowd the mind with ideas that are deemed not-true by Buddhism. These brain scans clearly show that the purpose of meditation is achieved in doing so.
Mindfulness involves accepting our thoughts and emotions without judgment, and without believing that there is a right or wrong way to feel in a given situation. Our thoughts and emotions are not labeled as good or bad. They are observed as simply happening until they pass. While practicing mindfulness one does not rehash the past or imagine the future. Attention is focused on what is being sensed in the present moment. There is a sense of self apart from things. Mindfulness is moment to moment awareness and purposefully placing attention on things that we wouldn’t normally give a second thought to. Mindfulness can be thought of as a way of being, rather than an activity. It is the awareness of wondering thoughts and purposefully directing them back, rather than letting them
They found that mind wandering caused neural activity in both default (resting) and executive (goal directed) regions at the same time (Christoff et al). This suggests that mind wandering is resource demanding, and may be a sign of a high capacity working memory (Smallwood & Schooler), perhaps facilitating the high order goal planning during daydreaming predicted by Singer decades ago (Mooneyham & Schooler). As reported by Christoff et al. (2009), neural activity was strongest when subjects were not aware of their mind wandering, suggesting that mind wandering is more prolific when it lacks meta awareness. Additionally, the test measure on the SART indicated that with meta awareness there were less errors. This study explicitly validated evidence of the previously disputed neural recruitment in mind wandering by using the triangulation method of combining neuro imaging with self-reports and the behavioural measures of brain function (Christoff et al., 2009). Equally importantly, these findings specifically relate to university education, and depending on alignment of personal goals, could augment educational goals, and the attainment of better educational outcomes. Furthermore, the more mindful or meta aware a student, the less mind wandering, providing
To begin with, mindfulness is when someone can pay attention to the present moment “without being devoted to different points of view” (Martin, 1997). Along with staying focused on the present moment, mindfulness is when the particular person does not judge the current experience as the person tries to comprehend the present situation. Mindfulness makes a person reflect on one’s self by not only figuring out one’s thoughts, but also the feelings that go along with it. The complex nature of mindfulness demonstrates that it has multiple purposes that cultivates a person into realizing the potential of the brain (Davis & Hayes,
By utilizing a set of research methods, that inducts different types of mindfulness meditation training programs, and advanced mindfulness practitioners to matched control, with a capitulation of detection that enhance our understanding of the nature of mindfulness. While providing insights that will help me to target symptoms and populations that are likely to benefit from mindfulness meditation
Shawn T. Smith’s “The User’s Guide to the Human Mind” shows the way the brain reacts and the reason it reacts to certain events, tendencies, and otherwise work against us in functional pursuits. It helps us to understand why we develop anxiety and depression. He suggests us struggling against unhappy anxious thoughts and make friends with our minds. Smith states “your mind is not supposed to make you happy it’s supposed to help you survive.” The brain has bad habits one is avoiding new experiences two is our brain looks for problems that don’t exist. Smith states that the mind is built in such a way that most of its functions and drives lie outside our control.