【Big Think】The immediate benefits of mindful meditation

According to Goleman, a remedy for our fast-paced lives can be found in a simple, ten-minute exercise. He explains how a daily mindfulness practice can significantly enhance attention span, reduce the negative effects of multitasking, and help individuals remain concentrated and productive.

People on average look at their email about 50 times a day, they look at their Facebook 20 some times a day, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s Instagram, there’s your phone calls, there’s whatever it is you have to do. And what this means for attention is that we’re challenged, that focused attention is an endangered species. However, we need that focus to get work done well. So it’s a real problem.

The brain actually does not do multitasking, doesn’t do several things at once in parallel, rather it works in serial and it switches very rapidly from one thing to the next. Then when you go back to that project or that whatever it was you were so focused on, your concentration had been at a very high level before you started doing the other things, now it’s much lower and it takes a while to ramp up to that same level.

And this works, for example, for people who might do mindfulness in the morning, it will wane during the course of the day but if you do 10 more minutes at lunch, 10 more minutes at a break in the mid-afternoon, it helps you through the day stay concentrated. So that is a very palpable concrete payoff from daily meditation that works for beginners.

There are many others too for example, in terms of handling stress. I mean, we’re all stressed out these days. Beginners in mindfulness or other meditations it turns out right from the get-go have a better reaction to stress. What that means is that, and we see this in brain function, the area of the brain which reacts to stress called the ‘amygdala,’ it’s the trigger point for the fight or flight or freeze response. It’s what makes us angry all of a sudden or anxious all of a sudden.