Walking meditation, where you focus on the movement of your body as you take step after step, your feet touching and leaving the ground—an everyday activity we usually take for granted.

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.

Bring your attention to the sensation of air moving into and out of your body. On the inhale, notice it traveling into your nose, your throat, down into your lungs. Notice the rise in your chest and belly. On the exhale, notice how the air leaves your body.

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In one study, people with pre-hypertension were randomly assigned to augment their drug treatment with either a course in mindfulness meditation or a program that taught progressive muscle relaxation.

A 2015 study looked at people who score high on a mindfulness awareness test, and found that they had a healthier cardiovascular risk profile than people with lower scores. One small pilot program also found that mindfulness training helped decrease depression.

Life is sometimes difficult, stressful, and challenging. We can’t control what happens, but we do have the potential to change the way we relate to those things.

As the day moves on and the inevitable back-to-back meetings start, mindfulness can help you lead shorter, more effective meetings. To avoid entering a meeting with a wandering mind, take two minutes to practice mindfulness.

However, social bias isn’t the only kind of mental bias mindfulness appears to reduce. For example, several studies convincingly show that mindfulness probably reduces sunk-cost bias, which is our tendency to stay invested in a losing proposition. Mindfulness also seems to reduce our natural tendency to focus on the negative things in life. In one study, participants reported on their general mindfulness levels, then briefly viewed photos that induced strong positive emotion (like photos of babies), strong negative emotion (like photos of people in pain), or neither, while having their brains scanned. More mindful participants were less reactive to negative photos and showed higher indications of positive feeling when seeing the positive photos. According to the authors, this supports the contention that mindfulness decreases the negativity bias, something other studies meditation support, too.

Doing this helps us become more aware of our thoughts, act more compassionately toward ourselves and others, and connect with the present moment.

(It’s hard, we know.) In the past, research has sometimes led to conflicting findings on whether mindfulness benefits our positive and negative emotions. This study sheds some light on a possible reason why, by illustrating how specific

Begin by taking one or two full, deep breaths, feeling your entire body release on the exhalation. Then gently close your lips and begin breathing at a conterraneo pace through your nose.

Because they’re experts on how the mind works, they offer friendly motivation and practical advice beginners typically need, like tips for using what we learn during meditation in real life.

And for what? Meditation is about befriending yourself. Treat thoughts and other distractions with a friendly curiosity, as you might a passerby in the neighborhood. Maybe give ‘em a wave as they walk by, and then get back to your practice.