Mindfulness and Meditation

Mindfulness allows you to relax, incorporates breathwork, mental imagery, and also mind and body awareness. By using meditation, you can improve your executive attention because the practice allows increased activation in areas of the brain that are related to attention.

Below are some other benefits of meditation:

• Improved attention

• Emotional regulation

• Social relationships

• Decreased anxiety

• Decreased depression

• Interoceptive awareness

• Increased self-compassion

• Improved management of chronic disease

Unfortunately, this is not a quick fix. This is a habit that needs to be formed with consistency, frequency, and quality. Reaching out to an occupational therapist for an intervention plan will assist you in generating an individualized program that can provide techniques, length, frequency, and environment suggestions to allow you obtain this activity as a part of your daily regimen and not become overwhelmed. By adding this into your lifestyle, not only will you feel better but you will also impact your entire body including your nervous system, mental state, and overall health and well-being.

References:

Gawande, R., To, M. N., Pine, E., Griswold, T., Creedon, T. B., Brunel, A., Lozada, A., Loucks, E. B., & Schuman-Olivier, Z. (2019). Mindfulness Training Enhances Self-Regulation and Facilitates Health Behavior Change for Primary Care Patients: a Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of general internal medicine, 34(2), 293–302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-018-4739-5

Tang, Y. Y., Posner, M. I., & Rothbart, M. K. (2014). Meditation improves self-regulation over the life span. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1307, 104–111. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12227