You Can Be Mindful and Lower Your Stress Without Meditation, too
And quite frankly, I’m glad that you can, because as a person living with ADD, pure meditation is enough to drive me NUTS! In fact, sometimes it’s just as hard to meditate as it used to be for me to study in the library in total silence…virtually impossible.
That’s not to say that I don’t like meditation. To tell the truth, I absolutely LOVE guided meditation. But just pure, silent meditation? Please, just beat me with a stick instead.
Of course, if you follow someone like Thich Nhat Han, you’ll know that mindfulness can and should be practiced during your daily life, so it’s not really meditation anyway.
But as someone who has transformed my own way of thinking about stress through a number of means, one of which happens to be meditation, I’m glad to see that this topic is being approached from more than 1 point of view, and meditation isn’t the be-all-and-end-all.
Vincent Messina Cherie Manifest Sanjiv Manifest Gina Fiedel David Amerland Mark Traphagen
#mindfulness #zen #meditation #stressrelief
Originally shared by Russ Abbott
Interesting piece by Adam Grant about how meditation isn’t the universal answer. In short, meditation is good for you because it reduces stress. Bu there are lots of ways to reduce stress, for example, quality sleep and exercise. And you can reduce stress simply by changing the way you think about it. When you’re feeling anxious, it’s a signal that you care about the outcome of an upcoming event — and it can motivate you to prepare.
In an experiment led by the Stanford psychologist Alia Crum, when people had only 10 minutes to prepare a charismatic speech, simply reframing the stress response as healthy was enough to relax them and reduce their physiological responses, if they tended to be highly reactive.
Meditation also increases mindfulness, awareness of the present. But you don’t need to meditate to achieve mindfulness either.
After spending the past four decades studying mindfulness without meditation, the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer has identified plenty of other techniques for raising our conscious awareness of the present. For example, it turns out that you can become more mindful by thinking in conditionals instead of absolutes. In one experiment, when people made a mistake with a pencil, they had one of several different objects, like a rubber band, sitting on the table. When they were told, “This is a rubber band,” only 3 percent realized it could also be used as an eraser. When they had been told “This could be a rubber band,” 40 percent figured out that it could erase their mistake.
Change “is” to “could be,” and you become more mindful. The same is true when you look for an answer rather than the answer.
In summary, If you don’t meditate, there’s no need to stress out about it.