What is Mindfulness?

In today’s day and age, mindfulness can be a difficult concept to understand, especially because of how distracted and preoccupied we have become in the modern world. Mindfulness however, can be highly beneficial for living in this disruptive day and age, because it helps you see the things that are truly important. Basically, mindfulness is the ability to be fully present in the moment, although to achieve this is harder than it sounds. 

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is basically the quality of being present and fully engaged with whatever we’re doing at the moment, free from distraction or judgment and aware of our thoughts and feelings without getting caught up in them. Moment-to-moment awareness can be trained for through meditation, and this can allow you to build the skill of mindfulness so that you can apply it to everyday life. Meditation is a training ground for learning mindfulness, but mindfulness is not just a temporary state that you might enter during meditation. Rather, mindfulness allows us to 

become more aware of our own emotions or unpleasant thoughts. By being aware of how we feel, we can be more thoughtful in choosing how to respond to our emotions. 

Benefits of mindfulness

Mindfulness has a wide range of benefits such as diminishing traits such as fear, stress, and anxiety. In addition to this, meditation can build new pathways in the brain for traits like focus and decision-making. Mindfulness meditation actually changes the shape of the brain, in a process known as neuroplasticity. Research has shown that gray matter and cortical thickness both increase with regular meditation practice. 

Some other benefits of mindfulness are that it increased compassion by 23%, and reduced aggression by 57%. Overall mindfulness meditation can increase positivity and well-being, as well as reduce stress by 14%.

Practicing mindfulness meditation is a great way to manage stress and boost compassion, focus, empathy, patience, energy, and happiness.