JM: An early, small study suggests that mindfulness may help boost the immune system. By serving as a buffer against stress, mindfulness may also lower the risk of heart disease.

Meditation is the practice of lightly holding your attention on an anchor, such as your breath, and gently bringing it back there when it wanders.

It’s about stripping away distractions and staying on track with individual, as well as organizational, goals. Take control of your own mindfulness: Test these tips for 14 days and see what they do for you.

Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them—without believing, for instance, that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment.

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To get the most benefit, meditating every day is best. Making it a daily habit also means that you don’t have to try to remember to fit it in. But any amount of meditation is better than no meditation at all!

Life is sometimes difficult, stressful, and challenging. We can’t control what happens, but we do have the potential to change meditative mind the way we relate to those things.

In this meditation, you bring your awareness to different parts of your body, commonly starting at your feet and traveling to the top of your head.

It’s tempting to lie down to meditate, especially if you’re doing it before bed or right when you wake up. Ideally, though, you want to be in an upright seated position, to avoid any urge to fall asleep.

Mindfulness changes our brains: Research has found that it increases density of gray matter in brain regions linked to learning, memory, emotion regulation, and empathy.

You want your breathing to be relaxed, not forced in any way. It may help to take a few deep, clearing breaths before you start, and then allow your breathing to settle into a conterraneo rhythm.

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of what is merely noise. To get a better start to your day, avoid checking your email first thing in the morning. Doing so will help you sidestep an onslaught of distractions and short-term problems during a period of exceptional focus and creativity.

It’s not surprising that meditation would affect attention, since many practices focus on this very skill. And, in fact, researchers have found that meditation helps to counter habituation—the tendency to stop paying attention to new information in our environment. Other studies have found that mindfulness meditation can reduce mind-wandering and improve our ability to solve problems. There’s more good news: Studies have shown that improved attention seems to last up to five years after mindfulness training, again suggesting trait-like changes are possible.