Our mind will wander. Even the pros get distracted by thoughts during meditation and forget to follow their breath, because no matter how practiced we are, the mind is always going to think.

Meditation is a highly personal activity, with everyone finding their best own way to practice. Some find guided meditations to be useful, especially when starting out, to help focus their attention.

Ideally, you should meditate when you feel calm but alert, and when you won’t be distracted. If you’re a morning person, then meditating in the morning might be perfect for you.

Fascinating though it is, we shouldn’t overplay meditation’s effects on physical health at the expense of its importance to emotional health. In fact, it may be difficult to separate out the two, as a key impact of mindfulness is stress reduction, and psychological stress has been tied to heart health, immune response, and telomere length.

Teachers trained in mindfulness also show lower blood pressure, less negative emotion and symptoms of depression, less distress and urgency, greater compassion and empathy, and more effective teaching.

Jon Kabat-Zinn emphasizes that although mindfulness can be cultivated through formal meditation, that’s not the only way. “It’s not really about sitting in the full lotus, like pretending you’re a statue in a British museum,” he says in this Greater Good video.

Soften your gaze and lower your eyes, not focused on anything in particular. You may also close your eyes, if that’s more comfortable.

Let go of any thoughts that arise. Attend to your breath. Doing so will allow you to let go of the stresses of the day so you can return home and be fully present with your family.

The researchers write that in the future, interventions could place a more explicit focus on approaching relationships with mindfulness. This focus could reinforce the benefit of MBCT, and perhaps lead to even better outcomes in reducing the risk of relapse for people with chronic depression.

This exercise is intended to help you focus on the present moment, and can be tried with different foods.

To help your focus stay on your breathing, count silently at each exhalation. Any time you find your mind distracted, simply release the distraction by returning your focus to your breath. Most important, allow yourself to enjoy these minutes. Throughout the rest of the day, other people and competing urgencies will fight for your attention. But for these 10 minutes, your attention is all your own.

Mindful working means applying focus and awareness to everything you do from the moment you enter the office. Focus on the task at hand and recognize and release internal and external distractions as they arise. In this way, mindfulness helps increase effectiveness, decrease mistakes, and even enhance creativity.

, Jared Lindahl and colleagues 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 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 tibetan healing sounds different types of meditation, and found that they each have their own unique benefits.

Mindfulness training for families may lead to less-stressed parents who pay more attention to their kids.