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The Science

Studies show that attention-focused practices can help improve self-regulation and decrease levels of depression, stress and anxiety. We’ve curated some of the most interesting articles on these subjects below.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness. It’s a pretty straightforward word. It suggests that the mind is fully attending to what’s happening, to what you’re doing, to the space you’re moving through. That might seem trivial, except for the annoying fact that we so often veer from the matter at hand. Our mind takes flight, we lose touch with our body, and pretty soon we’re engrossed in obsessive thoughts about something that just happened or fretting about the future. And that makes us anxious.

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New Research Shows U.S. Students Feel Unprepared Without Social and Emotional Skills

Released today, a report titled Respected: Perspectives of Youth on High School & Social and Emotional Learning, shows that more than three-quarters (77 percent) of recent high school students believe their schools could have done a better job of helping students develop key social and emotional learning (SEL) skills, which are particularly needed at this time of national division, rising violence, anxiety and historic levels of mistrust.

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Mental Hygiene - Madison researcher uses modern neuroscience to study kindness, compassion & happiness

Kindness. It’s one of the earliest things we learn as children. Even though the idea is elementary, people around the globe, including the Dalai Lama, are looking to research being done in Madison to understand the positive qualities of life – kindness, compassion, and happiness.

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Four Ways to Support Teens’ Social-Emotional Development at School

According to a 2018 survey, many high school students don’t believe their schools have done enough to help them deal with stress (51 percent), understand their emotions (49 percent), and solve disagreements (46 percent), and fewer than half of graduates surveyed feel prepared for life after high school.

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Why Teenage Brains Are So Hard to Understand

When Frances Jensen’s eldest son, Andrew, reached high school, he underwent a transformation. Frances’s calm, predictable child changed his hair color from brown to black and started wearing bolder clothing.

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Why We Should Treat Mental Health Like Physical Health

When someone shares that they've been diagnosed with a physical illness like multiple sclerosis, no one says, "You should just think positive if you want to feel better," or "Quit exaggerating. We all have problems in life." But, sadly, those are the types of things that people with mental illness hear.

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Does Short-Term Meditation Work? Here's What Research Found

I regularly encourage the people I work with to practice meditation. It builds a kind of inner "shock absorber" that helps you maintain calm and focus in the midst of daily stress and the multiple demands of living in today's world.

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Do the benefits of social and emotional learning programs last?

Do the beneficial effects, for students, of social and emotional learning programs remain after the programs are gone? Are they really predictors of future success?

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Global Trend: Mindfulness in Schools

Earlier this month, England announced they will begin teaching mindfulness in up to 370 schools nationwide. Damian Hinds, the British secretary of education, said: “Children will start to be introduced gradually to issues around mental health, well-being, and happiness right from the start of primary school.”

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Why Schools in England Are Teaching Mindfulness

Hundreds of children in the UK will be taught mindfulness among a range of innovative techniques with the aim of promoting good mental health, through one of the largest studies of its kind in the world (in terms of participant numbers).

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‘It stops the scary stuff’: pupils thrive with mindfulness lessons

“Children internalise things, but what mindfulness has done is bring a number of quieter children to the surface – children who we’d never have known were going through such anxiety and stress at home. They haven’t wanted to speak to their mum and dad about it but it’s coming out in these sessions.”

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Making Time for Mindfulness

A new study suggests that mindfulness education — lessons on techniques to calm the mind and body — can reduce the negative effects of stress and increase students’ ability to stay engaged, helping them stay on track academically and avoid behavior problems.

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Teachers use meditation apps in class to rewire kids’ brains, improve performance

“It’s amazing to see these kids really tune into themselves and ignore the outside world for a minute,” said Waterman, a teacher at Springbrook Elementary School in Westerly Rhode Island.

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How The Brain Works

With a regular mindfulness practice, you are more likely to strengthen those areas of the brain that build your attention skills and more likely to manage worry and anxiety.

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Stress Affects Your Brain

Chronic stress can affect brain size, structure, and how it functions. Meditation is one of the powerful methods of reversing the impact of continuous or chronic stress.

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Hardwiring Happiness

In this Ted Talk, renowned neuropsychologist Dr. Rick Hanson demonstrates that you actually activate mental states that become lasting neural states when you pay attention and linger in the feelings you experience in positive moments.

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5 Ways To Practice Self-Care At Work

Self-care is having a coming-out, of sorts. It is no longer something that we do in the privacy of our own homes, meditating behind closed doors or slipping off to spas and gyms for a much needed massage or run.

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What Is Neuroplasticity?

“It refers to the physiological changes in the brain that happen as the result of our interactions with our environment. From the time the brain begins to develop in utero until the day we die, the connections among the cells in our brains reorganize in response to our changing needs. This dynamic process allows us to learn from and adapt to different experiences.”

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Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain

The business world is abuzz with mindfulness. But perhaps you haven’t heard that the hype is backed by hard science. Recent research provides strong evidence that practicing non-judgmental, present-moment awareness (a.k.a. mindfulness) changes the brain, and it does so in ways that anyone working in today’s complex business environment, and certainly every leader, should know about.

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How Mindfulness Improves Your Brain and Relationships

Research in the past decade has found multiple benefits of mindfulness, including improvements in immune function, reductions in stress and anxiety, increases in empathy and improvement in relationship satisfaction.

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