Quintero, Praactices. Share On. Which one works better? Dehydration and fatigue appreciate your interest. Little by little, start focusing on the sounds that are farther away.

Mindfulness practices for focus -

Focus on the task at hand and recognize and release internal and external distractions as they arise. In this way, mindfulness helps increase effectiveness, decrease mistakes, and even enhance creativity.

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.

This release makes us addicted to email and compromises our concentration. Instead, apply mindfulness when opening your inbox. Focus on what is important and maintain awareness 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. Richard Davidson. Rhonda Magee explains how to apply mindfulness to the workplace.

How mindful are you? Take our quiz! As the day moves on and the inevitable back-to-back meetings start, mindfulness can help you lead shorter, more effective meetings.

To avoid entering a meeting with a wandering mind, take two minutes to practice mindfulness. Even better, let the first two minutes of the meeting be silent, allowing everybody to arrive both physically and mentally.

Then, if possible, end the meeting five minutes before the hour in order to allow all participants a mindful transition to their next meeting. As the day progresses and your brain starts to tire, mindfulness can help you stay sharp and avoid poor decisions.

After lunch, set a timer on your phone to ring every hour. 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.

Finally, as the day comes to an end and you start your commute home, apply mindfulness. However, the more we avoid doing something, the more burdensome that task becomes. Choose a chore that you want to master or one that you usually do but dislike.

Focus on the activity. Start by visualizing the outcome. How would you like the kitchen to look like? Start doing the chore. Pay attention to every detail. Observe your movements. How can you improve your craft? Experiment with alternative ways.

Which one works better? How do you feel when you improvise instead of repeating the same movement over and over? Keep the end-result present. You are not just doing something. You want to become the best kitchen cleaner ever. Once you are finished, take some time to appreciate the outcome.

You can practice this with the same chore next time or with a different one. Find a window. Look at everything you see. Start by the things that are closer to you and then, progressively, move your focus to those that are farther away. Avoid judging or labeling things.

Focus on the shapes, colors, movements, or textures. This exercise is about increasing focus by developing your ability to see things. This practice requires just a few minutes yet increases our ability to discover new things even in familiar places.

Everyone has the same time: 3 minutes. Then they switch roles. Switch roles again. Then their partners do the same. The purpose of this exercise is to realize our ability to pay attention. But, most importantly, the effect that mind-wandering can have on others. While listening to their story being retold by others, most people realize we are not good listeners— a gentle reminder for everyday conversations.

We are continually experiencing emotions. This exercise will help you familiarize with your feelings. Practice labeling your emotions as they happen. Close your eyes and focus on your emotions. Name them without passing judgment.

Feeling upset is not the same as being angry, sad, or frustrated. Most of the times, we mix our emotions. Check this post to learn to discriminate different feelings. Becoming more mindful about how you feel can help you uncover what affects your mood but, most importantly, to avoid overreacting because you are not fully aware of what you are feeling.

The more you get to know your feelings, the less they will cloud your behavior. When we are consumed with our thoughts, worries, or dramas, we stop paying attention. Feeling grateful requires noticing everything that happens in our life.

Practicing daily gratitude boots our happiness by grounding us to the present. Reserve some time, preferably before you go to sleep, to capture all the good stuff that you should be thankful for.

Recap your day, and think of all the people you met, all the moments you enjoyed, what you achieved or learned, the small battles you won.

Keeping a gratitude journal is an excellent practice, as I explain how to do it here. Food is much more than fuel to your body.

Mindful eating is not just about appreciating the food but also understanding why you are eating. We feel a compulsion to eat. When other people are eating around us, we feel the urge to eat too.

Mindful eating is about becoming more aware of our relationship with food. Start by enjoying the smell and visual appearance of what you are going to eat. Cut small bites. Chewing may help you feel fuller longer, leading to less eating overall. Snacking is a clear example of compulsory eating.

Why do I want to eat this now? When you feel the desire to eat, reflect on your feelings first. Most of the time, we eat to silence our emotions. If you are feeling distracted, anxious or upset, rather than eating try going out for a walk or engaging in another mindful task.

We tend to drink the way we do everything: fast. Drink because you enjoy it, not to get rid of your problems. Drink because you want to, not because of social pressure. Drink to enjoy it, not to get drunk. Start by appreciating the moment.

Enjoy the holistic experience. First, feel the glass. Notice its temperature and texture. Focus on the color. What do you see?

What do you notice? Swirl the wine or drink slowly. Observe the legs that it leaves behind in the glass. Take a slow deep breath in to inhale all of the aromas. What do the smells remind you of? Take a slow sip.

Allow all of the different flavors to swish around your palette. Concentrate on how it feels, tastes, and the memories or sensations it evokes. You can practice this exercise with coffee, tea, or even water too. A cluttered desk is a cluttered mind.

When you approach your work with mindfulness, you enjoy it more. Turn the act of clearing and organizing your desk into a mindful moment. My desk usually looks chaotic. I feel the need to have my notes, post-its, and books in front of me.

My desktop is also full of various open windows and files. I perform well in my organized chaos but, at some point, it starts to slow me down. So, I take a break to organize my stuff. Some people like it tidy; some thrive in chaos.

Whatever your style is, decluttering your desk cleanses your mind. We all love to enjoy music. Listening to music not only calms us, but it can also change our brain improving memory and learning. Meditation is used as a mindfulness technique to help us achieve this optimal state of awareness, which can help you improve concentration and reduce stress.

Mindfulness also incorporates acceptance into everyday situations. This means that we do not judge our thoughts or feelings — we allow them fully. For example, instead of thinking that our emotions or thoughts need to be put into a category of right or wrong, practicing mindfulness allows us to accept how we feel in any given moment and allow ourselves a sense of freedom.

As I mentioned earlier, this can help with stabilizing our emotions, such as intense anger, fear, or sadness. Mindfulness helps us achieve growth of new neural networks in the brain. By growing neural networks, you are essentially rewiring your brain to find better and new ways to handle tasks and cope with stress and emotions.

You are also helping yourself increase your focus. Practicing mindfulness has been shown in research to increase gray matter in the brain. Gray matter holds most of the actual brain cells compared the other structures of the brain. An increase in density may mean an increase in connectivity between the cells, and an increase in two areas known as the pons and raphe nucleus can improve our overall psychological well-being.

A recent study on mindfulness meditation showed that participants had less psychological stress from anxiety, depression, and pain. To me, this makes sense, because while we experience anxiety, we tend to give our thoughts too much power. Our thoughts run our lives, and if they are negative, that becomes overwhelming.

A study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital was the first to report changes in density in the gray matter of the brain. In as few as 8 weeks, participants had increased density in the areas of the brain responsible for:. These areas of the brain are known as the posterior cingulate, the temporo-parietal lobe, the hippocampus, and the cerebellum.

As research continues, increases in gray matter density in different brain structures show promise for positive brain changes. These changes can help improve your focus and enable you to remember what you read more thoroughly.

To a higher degree, practicing mindfulness may help you to take more control of what you think about, enabling more space for learning new things, remembering what you have just read, and increasing long-term memory. Of the participants in the study referenced earlier, they were all new to meditation.

That means that anyone can start feeling the benefits in several weeks. At first, you might think your practice is actually making you more distracted. As you learn to concentrate and focus on your breath, you will notice more thoughts because you are aware of them.

So it may seem as if a thousand things come to you during this time.

Mindfulness can help Mindvulness focus and reduce stress, Blood sugar levels help create Dehydration and fatigue neuronal pathways in the Mindfulnesd. As an Mincfulness of meditation, I use mindfulness because it is Mindfulnwss and the benefits are extremely Mindfulness practices for focus. Read below prxctices discover Mindfulness practices for focus history of mindfulness and how you can practice it today. Mindfulness originated in Buddhism, and the 2,year-old tradition is part of a much wider set of beliefs and behaviors. Some of these behaviors and beliefs are referred to as a psychological process or as a skill developed over time. Mindfulness has been studied at Penn State for years and it has been turning heads outside of the University with programs and workshops. Meditation is a large portion of the practice, if not the only practice.