You can rest your hands in your lap. The most important thing is that you find a position that you can stay in for a while.

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No, you don’t need anything to meditate, although it can be helpful to use an app, especially when you’re starting out. Some apps also have timers or other prompts reminding you to meditate, which can help you make it a daily routine.

PJ: What advice would you offer someone who works in a company that doesn’t offer mindfulness training?

The raisin exercise, where you slowly use all of your senses, one after another, to observe a raisin in great detail, from the way it feels in your hand to the way its taste bursts on your tongue.

If you find yourself getting sleepy during meditation practice, open a window to let in some fresh air, or try meditating outside.

mindfulness skills might work in different ways. Look for future mindfulness research to follow a similar approach and to generate more fine-grained, actionable insights for us to apply to our lives.

Those who learned mindfulness had significantly greater reductions in their systolic and diastolic blood pressure than those who learned progressive muscle relaxation, suggesting that mindfulness could help people at risk for heart disease by bringing blood pressure down.

This exercise is often practiced walking back and forth along a path 10 paces long, though it can be practiced along most any path.

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, healing music each of which has its own buffering effect on brains,” write Goleman and Davidson in

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 natural rhythm.

To better understand the power of focus and awareness, consider an affliction that touches nearly all of us: email addiction. Emails have a way of seducing our attention and redirecting it to lower-priority tasks because completing small, quickly accomplished tasks releases dopamine, a pleasurable hormone, in our brains.

Because they’re experts on how the mind works, they offer friendly motivation and practical advice beginners typically need, like tips for using what we learn during meditation in real life.

Tips for increasing focus and awareness and decreasing stress at work. By Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter