Do these benefits apply to people with attention-deficit disorders, and could meditation possibly supplant drugs like Adderall? We can’t yet say for sure. While there have been some promising small-scale studies, especially with adults, we need larger randomized controlled trials to understand how meditation might mix with other treatments to help both kids and adults manage attention-deficits.

Become a subscribing member today. Help us continue to bring “the science of a meaningful life” to you and to millions around the globe.

Join Mindfulness.usando co-host Cory Muscara for a 10-day course to master the foundational principles of mindfulness and establish a realistic daily mindfulness practice that can easily integrate into your modern, busy life.

When the timer rings, cease your current activity and do one minute of mindfulness practice. These mindful performance breaks will help keep you from resorting to autopilot and lapsing into action addiction.

We might feel sleepy. If we doze off, don’t worry. The mind’s getting used to figuring out the difference between slowing down and shutting off.

Meditation does seem to improve mental health—but it’s not necessarily more effective than other steps you can take. Early research suggested that mindfulness meditation had a dramatic impact on our mental health. But as the number of studies has grown, so has scientific skepticism about these initial claims. For example, a 2014 meta-analysis published in JAMA Internal Medicine

The authors speculate that bringing mindful awareness to uncomfortable experiences helped people to approach situations that they would previously avoid, which fostered self-confidence and assertiveness.

A visualization meditation that harnesses the image of a mountain to guide us into awareness of our own steady, still nature beyond the thinking mind.

During body scan, for example, participants saw the biggest increases in how aware they were of their bodies (unsurprisingly) and the sharpest decline in the number of thoughts they were having, particularly negative thoughts and thoughts related to the past and future. Loving-kindness meditation led to the greatest boost in their feelings of warmth and positive thoughts about others. Meanwhile, observing-thought meditation seemed to increase participants’ awareness of their thoughts the most. Previous research also suggests that observing-thought meditation has an advantage in reducing our judgmental attitude toward others. Taken together, these and other studies suggest that if you’re tackling a specific issue—say, feeling disconnected from your body—then you can choose a practice aimed at helping that issue, like the body scan. Loving-kindness might help in conflict with others, while observing-thought meditation can help break rumination. Body-Scan Meditation

Meditation does have an impact on physical health—but it’s modest. Many claims have been made about mindfulness and physical health, but sometimes these claims are hard to substantiate or may be mixed up with other effects. That said, there is some good evidence that meditation affects physiological indices of health. We’ve already mentioned that long-term meditation seems to buffer people from the inflammatory response to stress. In addition, meditators seem to have increased activity of telomerase, an enzyme implicated in longer cell life and, therefore, longevity. But there’s a catch. “The differences found [between meditators and non-meditators] could be due to factors like education or exercise, each of which has its own buffering effect on brains,” write Goleman and Davidson in

To start, aim for three meditation sessions per week, and increase that number over time. As you begin to notice its effects in your life, you’ll look for any opportunity to meditate!

Loving-kindness meditation, which the GGSC’s Christine Carter explains in this post, involves extending feelings of compassion toward people, starting with yourself then branching out to someone close to you, then to an acquaintance, then to someone giving you a hard time, then finally to all beings everywhere.

Participants also reported that they became more assertive in saying ‘no’ to others in order to lessen their load of responsibility, allowing them to become more balanced in acknowledging their own as well as others’ needs.

While one review of randomly controlled studies showed that mindfulness may have mixed effects on tibetan healing sounds the physical symptoms of heart disease, a more recent review published by the American Heart Association concluded that, while research remains preliminary, there is enough evidence to suggest mindfulness as an adjunct treatment for coronary disease and its prevention.