Wednesday

Is Meditating Ten Minutes a Day going to Make a Difference to You?

 You know the life you are leading is crazy, full and overstimulated.

That life is also the same life where you don't possibly have the time to meditate half an hour a day.

But what about ten minutes a day?

Surely that's a manageable time for you to implement this new habit within.

If you can see this as a possibility for you, then I suggest you invest some time (9min 22sec) to view this short TED Talk by mindfulness expert, Andy Puddicombe and some more time (2min 25sec) to read four short scientific studies on how meditation can affect your heart, brain and creativity (thanks to Kate Torgovnick May ) and then a little time to review (1minute) my handy-dandy ten hot tips for ten minute mediators.

Let me know if you are willing to do this for a month's trial if you decide this is a worthy new practice to adopt.

 Four Scientific Studies:
  1. For years, meditation fans have said that the practice keeps them healthy. But a new study, published in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes in November 2012, actually tested this. For the study, 201 people with coronary heart disease were asked to either (a) take a health education class promoting better diet and exercise or (b) take a class on transcendental meditation. Researchers followed up with participants for the next five years and found that those who took the meditation class had a 48% reduction in their overall risk of heart attack, stroke and death. It’s an initial study, but a promising one. [Time]
  2. Is meditating a good way to increase creativity? Maybe, but it depends on what kind. Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands looked at the way two types of meditation — focused-attention (for example, focusing on your breath) and open-monitoring (where participants focus on the both the internal and external) — affected two types of creative thinking — the ability to generate new ideas and solutions to problems. In a study published in April 2012 in Frontiers in Cognition, they revealed that the participants who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show improved results in the two creativity tasks. However, those who practiced open-monitoring meditation did perform better at task related to coming up with new ideas. [Meditation Research]
  3. Researchers at UCLA wanted to study the brains of people who had been meditating for years, versus those who had never meditated or who had only done it for a short period of time. They took MRI scans of 100 people — half meditators and half non-meditators. They were fascinated to find that long-time meditators showed higher levels of gyrification (a folding of the cerebral cortex that may be associated with faster information processing). In a study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in February of 2012, they shared that, the more years a person had been meditating, the more gyrification their MRIs revealed.  [UCLA Newsroom]
  4. Distractions are everywhere. But can meditation help a person better navigate through them? A computer scientist at the University of Washington teamed up with a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona to test this. The pair recruited 45 human resources managers, and gave a third of them eight weeks of mindfulness-based meditation training, a third of them eight weeks of body relaxation training and a third of them no training at all. All the groups were given a stressful multitasking test before and after the eight weeks. In a study published in the Proceedings of Graphics Interface in May of 2012, they showed that the mindful-mediation group reported less stress as they performed the multitasking test than both of the other groups. [Washington.edu]
So, if you have gotten this far - well done!

You may be interested in creating some structure about how you do this ten minute process as a daily habit.  You will find my ten hot tips on how to be a ten minute meditator useful in setting up your new habit:
  1. You will get the best results for yourself if you do it at the same time every day.  You will get good results anyway, but Regular practice + Consistancy = a Rhythm that your body and mind relates to and grows to look forward to, in much the same way a dog really looks forward to their morning walk.
  2. Morning works best for me.  It sets up my thinking for the day, it is usually the most convenient.  You have to figure out what time works best for you.
  3. Find somewhere where you feel private and comfortable
  4. Even temperature works well
  5. one minute of music as a prelude to your meditation works well as an anchor to get you quickly into the meditative state.
  6. You can program some music to gradually bring you back to reality, say at 9 and a half minutes
  7. You can use your timer on your phone, with the most gentle alarm possible to bring you back to reality
  8. It's fun to do this with a friend or partner, but ultimately this is your gig, your habit and your time with yourself.
  9. Don't judge your thoughts - simply observe them
  10. Don't judge yourself because your mind wanders - simply observe it in action.
Do this for a month, it will become a habit, then spend the rest of your 2014, having regular time out with yourself, doing nothing - you won't recognise yourself!

Thanks for visiting us here. What would your life be like with some clarity?  Call me on (+61) 439 979 577 or  email me, Mike Kennedy... to find out if this would work well for you.

No comments: