Hackney your brain through meditation

Today, I want to add one more video in the treasury of articles on the benefits of meditation. In its short three-minute speech, Dan Harris, author of the book 10% Happier, simple words talks about the benefit that we can get from daily meditation, even if it will be just only 5 minutes.

If there is time at the famous athletes (Phil Jackson - one of the greatest coaches in NBA history), managers of companies such as Ford or Twitter, scientists, doctors, lawyers and other people who are always set themselves intractable problem, you too will be able to find a few minutes to take a deep breath and feel the complete silence and calm.

In the video you can include English subtitles. For the rest I brought a literal translation below.

Meditation strengthens your immune system, lowers blood pressure and helps fight a number of other problems, including Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and psoriasis.

Spent at Harvard study showed that a daily meditation short doses can literally increase the number of gray matter in key areas of the brain that are responsible for self-awareness and compassion, and reduce the layer in areas where born stress.

Other studies at Yale scientists have followed the process, which can be called "default mode network" for the brain. This is a series of interconnected parts of the brain that are active during most of the hours we spend awake, when we do what we usually do human beings: think about your hobbies, about the past and the future, that is focused on what you like, but not what is happening here and now. People who practice meditation can turn off this feature, not only during the process, but also during the rest of the "vigorous" time of day. That is, they have a "default mode", during which they focused on what is happening right now. In sports, this is called "to be in the area." And the benefits of simply grand. And that's why meditation is now included in training in the US Marines. That is why many successful people - athletes, managers of companies such as Ford and Twitter, scientists, doctors and lawyers - meditate every day. It became part of the subculture of successful people who are used to solve impossible tasks (so-called achivery), so they are well aware that this will help them to stay focused on the target and disable the interfering voices in head.

Dan Harris, author 10% HappierHe believes that meditation - it's the next big social revolution in health care. If the 40-ies of XX century, you tell people that you are going to run, they were asked about who is chasing you. Now, if you tell people that you are meditating, they will look at you as if you are a little out of it. But this will change. Meditation will join the pantheon of healthy trends, such as exercise, teeth brushing and the adoption of those medications that your doctor has prescribed. These are the things that cause feelings of guilt if they do not perform. And meditation soon as densely enters into your life, as the scientists more and more talk about what wonderful changes will occur with your brain due to this occupation.

Our happiness often depends on external circumstances: what was our childhood, if we won the lottery, how successful we were married and it even got married. But meditation actually makes the happiness of the skill that we can work out as well as we train our bodies in the gym. That is, it is, happiness is self-generated thing. And it really is a radical idea. This does not mean that the external circumstances at all will not affect your happiness. It also does not mean that you will no longer be subject to the capricious, fickle, the entropy of the universe. This means that it will be easier to maneuver between all these events.