25 Minutes of Meditation Will Get Rid of Your Stress

 

 

In just half an hour, by focusing on your breathing, you can start to relax and melt away your cares.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University investigated how effective mindfulness meditation can be in countering the body’s stress response. For that type of meditation, you need a laser-like focus on your breathing, and, some advocates say that as your body fills up with air, your muscles contract. That helps you to push out other distractions — like deadlines or your to-do list — and start to relax.

The Mindful Revolution

They randomly assigned 66 volunteers to either participate in mindful meditation for 25 minutes for three days, or go through a cognitive training program in which they learned how to analyze poetry passages. The people who meditated reported less stress, and even showed that they were better at coping with stress compared to those who relied on their behavior training.

 

Finding peace in a stressed-out, digitally dependent culture may just be a matter of thinking differently:

 

The raisins sitting in my sweaty palm are getting stickier by the minute. They don’t look particularly appealing, but when instructed by my teacher, I take one in my fingers and examine it. I notice that the raisin’s skin glistens. Looking closer, I see a small indentation where it once hung from the vine. Eventually, I place the raisin in my mouth and roll the wrinkly little shape over and over with my tongue, feeling its texture. After a while, I push it up against my teeth and slice it open. Then, finally, I chew–very slowly.

I’m eating a raisin.

 

 Burnt Out? 7 Mindfulness Apps To Help You Refocus

The new study, published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, is not the first to show the positive effects of mediation. An analysis from February showed that Transcendental Meditation (TM)–a 20 minute mediation that simply requires closing your eyes and quieting down outside thoughts — sometimes by repeating a mantra — significantly lowered teacher stress and burnout. Fans of TM include chef Mario Batali, music mogul Russell Brand, Paul McCartney, Arianna Huffington, and Dr. Mehmet Oz. Now it looks as if there’s some promising science to back them up.

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Your smartphone doesn't always have to be a distraction:

I kind of want to marry my iPhone, day planner, and computer. But, as with any relationship, sometimes I need a break. The other night I decided to leave my to-do list and phone upstairs for the night, and I had trouble sleeping. I worried about the incoming emails and Tweets that would go unanswered until morning. And, I fondly thought about a time when my phone was anchored to the wall with a cord and my sleep was uninterrupted by thoughts of hashtags, @ symbols, and perfectly crafted subject lines. Yes, life was simple then. My nights were spent reading a good book, or with my mom doing a guided meditation to help me snooze. As I thought about her telling me to inhale the spirit of the universe and to exhale stress, my mind flashed to my app store: I bet there was an app that could do that! I quickly jumped out of bed and began searching for relaxation apps and videos. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the thing that usually makes me super-productive and connected with the world could also help me meditate and block out the business (that could wait) around me. So here you go — my top 10 apps, videos, and tools for you to just be you.

·         Calm.com

Calm.com boasts a seven-step meditation process that can help you reduce anxiety, feel better, and create great ideas. The website and app are both really minimal and have beautiful imagery, music, and narration for you to find your happy place. You can choose different backgrounds to suit your mood, as well as different mediation lengths. By focusing on your breath and posture, Calm.com can help you escape the chaos around you and focus on your well-being. The yearly pro-access is available for $9.99, but the beginners edition is free.

·         Omvana

Omvana is the life coach of meditation websites and apps. Not only will you learn how to relax and meditate, you’ll sharpen your ability to focus on your work, develop a goal-oriented mindset, and feel inspired to live in the moment. It has downloadable tracks for hypnosis, guided meditation, and sleep. There is also a huge library of inspirational speaking, poetry, and music tracks to choose from. Although the app is free, the tracks are not, so your mindfulness may cost you.

·         MINDBODY Connect

MINDBODY Connect is the best app to help you find a physical place to block out the world around you. This app locates yoga classes, day spas, and meditation centers in your vicinity, and lets you book and pay for it right there on your phone. To boot, it has a user-friendly design and incorporates Google maps functionality to help you find your way to nirvana.

·         YouTube — RainBirdHD

Whether you’re trying to fall asleep or need to drown out the audible chaos of your office, the RainBirdHD YouTube channel has a ton of sounds for you to choose from. You can get up to 10 hours of thunder and heavy rain fall, airplane cabin white noise, arctic wind, winter snow, classical music, and more. But, don’t forget to pack your headphones if you’re going to listen to this at work. (I’m sure your boss doesn’t want to hear “rain on a metal roof” while conducting a budget meeting.)

·         Mindfulness Daily

The Mindfulness Daily app allows you to set specific times that you’d like to practice your meditation: once in the morning, once in the afternoon and once at night. The app sends you a notification message at your specified time to start your meditation. It features a “lifelog” that will track your daily patterns, which allows you to reflect and make changes to make you more productive and less stressed. And of course, like most of the other meditation apps, Mindfulness Daily has relaxing sounds, breathing guides and imagery to help you block out the world around you.