Walking meditation, where you focus on the movement of your body as you take step after step, your feet touching and leaving the ground—an everyday activity we usually take for granted.

Mindfulness helps us focus: Studies suggest that mindfulness helps us tune out distractions and improves our memory, attention skills, and decision-making.

Mindfulness fosters compassion and altruism: Research suggests mindfulness training makes us more likely to help someone in need and increases activity in neural networks involved in understanding the suffering of others and regulating emotions. Evidence suggests it might boost self-compassion as well.

Mindfulness may be beneficial to teens: Practicing mindfulness can help teens reduce stress and depression and increase their self-compassion and happiness. Once teens arrive at college, it could also reduce their binge drinking.

, it might help to practice being in the present moment. For example, throughout the day you could notice when your attention wanders to thoughts about the past or anticipation of the future, and redirect your attention back to just one thing—like your breath, your body, or something in your immediate surroundings.

For example, drug addictions, at heart, come about because of physiological cravings for a substance that relieves people temporarily from their psychological suffering. Mindfulness can be a useful adjunct to addiction treatment by helping people better understand and tolerate their cravings, potentially helping them to avoid relapse after they’ve been safely weaned off of drugs or alcohol. The same is true for people struggling with overeating.

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, argues that there is still much we don’t understand about mindfulness and meditation. Worse, many scientists and practitioners don’t even agree on the definition of those words. They end the paper calling for “truth in advertising by contemplative neuroscience.”

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.

Like Loving-Kindness Meditation, this technique involves invoking feelings of compassion and kindness toward yourself, and specifically for difficult situations or feelings.

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!

Next, when you get to the office, take 10 minutes at your desk or in your car to boost your brain with a short mindfulness practice before you dive into activity. Close your eyes, relax, and sit upright. Place your full focus on your breath. Simply maintain an ongoing flow of attention on the experience of your breathing: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

, Jared Lindahl and colleagues deep healing music interviewed cem meditators about “challenging” experiences. They found that many of them experienced fear, anxiety, panic, numbness, or extreme sensitivity to light and sound that they attributed to meditation. Crucially, they found that these experiences weren’t restricted to people with “pre-existing” conditions, like trauma or mental illness; they could happen to anyone at any time. In this new domain of research, there is still a lot we do not understand. Future research needs to explore the relationship between case histories and meditation experiences, how the type of practice relates to challenging experiences, and the meditative mind influence of other factors like social support. What kind of meditation is right for you? That depends. “Mindfulness” is a big umbrella that covers many different kinds of practice. A 2016 study compared four different types of meditation, and found that they each have their own unique benefits.

According to neuroscience research, mindfulness practices dampen activity in our amygdala and increase the connections tibetan healing sounds between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. Both of these parts of the brain help us to be less reactive to stressors and to recover better from stress when we experience it. As Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson write in their new book,