What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness – a term you’ve heard of, as these days, it is easily tossed around. But what does it truly mean, and how can it help you?
Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as following, “The awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally”.
We live in an extremely fast-paced world where we get a portion of stress served to us almost daily. This stress can not only influence our mental health, but it can also cause serious damage to our physical health as well as our relationship with others, even reduce our productivity and capability.
Dealing with stress and learning how to cope with it requires you to be in the present moment, aware of your thoughts and consciously taking mindful action.
Mindfulness is an accessible tool that helps people increase the perception of their body; you become more aware of your body sensations, thoughts, emotions and general perception of life. This enables you to perceive them, without any judgement and with it decrease the stress, anxiety, and depression that come from not living in the present moment.
Benefits of mindfulness
There are many emerging areas of research on mindfulness meditation benefits. The following topics are some of the ones where there is ample solid, robust research that points to the fact that mindfulness can positively impact:
Stress reduction (preventing / recovering from a burnout)
Anxiety and depression and irritability reduction
Insomnia reduction
Reduction of the impact of chronic pain
Reduction of emotional reactivity
Awareness of the present moment increase
Gaining better concentration and memory