Seven Reasons to Be Mindful

Usually, "do nothing" is poor advice to follow if you want to feel better. Literature now shows that mindfulness and meditation - the attentive art of being still, allowing thoughts to pass without indulging them – are founts of good health. Science supports the ancient practice, proving that it can influence many aspects of your body and mood.

You don't have to be a monk to reap the benefits. Research shows that on a yoga mat, in the classroom, and even at the dinner table, you can use mindfulness to feel better with a bit of practice.

1. It Lowers Stress

Published in JAMA Internal Medicine – 3500 adults in mindfulness programs showed moderate reductions in psychological stress. In a smaller study, researchers compared exercise with mindfulness meditation. They found that after six weeks, both reduced stress, anxiety, and symptoms of depression, while improving sleep quality and well-being.

2. You'll Get Better Sleep

A 2015 randomized clinical trial assigned older adults with hard-to-treat sleep disturbances to either mindfulness meditation or sleep-hygiene education. After six weeks, people in the mindful group showed significant sleep improvement compared with the other group, and they were less tired and depressed during the day. Another study showed that people with insomnia practiced slow, even breathing for 20 minutes before going to sleep, and they woke up fewer times during the night. Another study showed that mindfulness meditation worked better than a sleep aid for insomnia.

3. It Relieves Pain

A series of studies examines how mindful meditators' brains respond to pain. In one study, Dr. Fadel Zeidan, an assistant professor of neurology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, recruited 75 healthy people and scanned their brains with an MRI while they had a hot probe placed on the back of their legs. The researchers sorted the subjects into groups and gave them different types of training. Everyone thought they were receiving the intervention, but only one group received the mindfulness meditation training. This group outperformed them all with a 27% reduction in pain intensity and a 44% cut in emotional unpleasantness. Zeiden's lab has shown that meditation activates higher-order brain regions associated with emotion regulation, focus, and cognitive control while tamping down activity in the thalamus, which transmits painful information from the body. That helps prevent pain from being spread throughout the brain.

4. You'll Get Sick Less Often

In the Annals of Family Medicine, researchers found that people who mindfully meditated were about 33% less likely to develop a respiratory infection than those who didn't. Their symptoms were also less severe and didn't last as long as those of the control group. Meditation reduces stress, which may be partly responsible for these health-protective benefits.

5. You'll Upgrade Your Diet

Research has shown that people with low levels of mindfulness had a 34% higher prevalence of obesity compared to people who were generally more mindful. That's likely because they were eating less, exercising more, or both. The Journal Obesity found people who eat mindfully have better measures of heart health. In the study, 194 obese subjects underwent a 5-month diet and exercise program. Researchers gave mindfulness training that emphasized mindful eating skills, like learning to recognize the body's hunger and fullness cues and differentiating physical cravings for food from emotional ones. A year later, subjects in the mindfulness group improved significantly more in specific risk factors for type 2 diabetes and heart disease, including fasting glucose and triglyceride levels.

6. It Can Help with Some Medical Issues

Science shows that slowing down and deepening your breathing can profoundly affect your well-being. Andrew Weil, a physician and founder of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, says, "many researchers can't imagine how something so simple could affect physiology. Breathing exercises, a staple of mindfulness and meditation practices, have been shown to help control blood pressure, improve heart rate, make arteries more flexible, and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which tamps down the body's fight or flight response to stress. Weil and other experts believe that deep breathing has a place in the clinical setting.

7. It'll Mellow Your Kids

Mindfulness and meditation programs are emerging as powerful ways to calm kids down, sharpen their brains, and make them kinder to their classmates. In a study of third-graders, eight weeks of mindfulness and yoga resulted in fewer ADHD symptoms and less hyperactivity, and the effects lasted for months after the program ended. It may even help with academics. In another study, the mindful group of kids had math scores 15% higher than their peers. They'll be more sociable too. Fourth and fifth graders who participated in a mindfulness and kindness program showed better social behavior than their peers, were less aggressive, and were better liked.