::How To Meditate I - What is Meditation ::

Introduction to Loving-Kindness Meditation

You cannot will yourself into particular feelings toward yourself or anyone else. Rather, you can practice reminding yourself that you deserve happiness and ease and that the same goes for your child, your family, your friends, your neighbors, and everyone else in the world.
This loving-kindness practice involves silently repeating phrases that offer good qualities to oneself and to others.

1. You can start by taking delight in your own goodness—calling to mind things you have done out of good-heartedness, and rejoicing in those memories to celebrate the potential for goodness we all share.
2. Silently recite phrases that reflect what we wish most deeply for ourselves in an enduring way. Traditional phrases are:
   • May I live in safety.
   • May I have mental happiness (peace, joy).
   • May I have physical happiness (health, freedom from pain).
   • May I live with ease.
3. Repeat the phrases with enough space and silence between so they fall into a rhythm that is pleasing to you. Direct your attention to one phrase at a time.
4. Each time you notice your attention has wandered, be kind to yourself and let go of the distraction. Come back to repeating the phrases without judging or disparaging yourself.
5. After some time, visualize yourself in the center of a circle composed of those who have been kind to you, or have inspired you because of their love. Perhaps you’ve met them, or read about them; perhaps they live now, or have existed historically or even mythically. That is the circle. As you visualize yourself in the center of it, experience yourself as the recipient of their love and attention. Keep gently repeating the phrases of loving-kindness for yourself.
6. To close the session, let go of the visualization, and simply keep repeating the phrases for a few more minutes. Each time you do so, you are transforming your old, hurtful relationship to yourself, and are moving forward, sustained by the force of kindness.:- https://www.mindful.org/how-to-meditate/

 

How Meditation Can Help the World—and Not Just You
Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg finished her newest book before the pandemic swept across the world, and before the killing of George Floyd sparked renewed energy around issues of social and racial injustice. Fitting, then, that the book—her eleventh—should be called Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World. In it, Salzberg, one of the three Buddhist teachers who founded the Insight Meditation Society in 1975, uses nearly fifty years of studying and teaching “to explore the intersection between the activity of working toward change in the world and the clarity and compassion arising from mindfulness and lovingkindness practice.”

Of course, when we think of the tremendous efforts it takes to change—let alone heal—the world, practicing mindfulness might not seem like much of a solution. (As Salzberg writes in the book, “Sometimes these practices are seen as promoting the opposite of a commitment to social change; they’re regarded as a sort of soporific we can imbibe so that we can feel good no matter what’s going on around us.”) But Salzberg, wisely, is not advocating for mindfulness in place of action. Instead, she suggests that being mindful is a prerequisite for reclaiming a sense of agency during difficult or strenuous times—and that it’s only with that agency that we can work to enact meaningful, sustainable change.

For instance, there are varying levels of anger right now: anger at our government’s response to the pandemic, anger at people who won’t wear masks, anger that racial equality is still not a reality. “You have to honor that anger,” Salzberg says. “It has a certain wisdom in it.” To Salzberg, that wisdom can serve as an alarm, signaling what’s wrong and what must be changed—but, if you’re completely lost in or blinded by your anger, you won’t be able to hear that wisdom at all.

Mindfulness can provide the clarifying lens, Salzberg believes, allowing us to feel what we feel without becoming overwhelmed by it. It can show us what we can control and what we can’t, sustain us throughout the long arc of change, and help us “bring courage out of rage and resilience out of grief.” It’s acceptance without resignation: understanding how things are in order to respond most constructively.

GQ asked Salzberg to bring her deep reservoir of Buddhist wisdom to bear on some of our current anxieties. Here she talks about dealing with people who won’t wear masks, reckoning with guilt, privilege, and accountability, and understanding why mindfulness doesn’t have to be some hifalutin concept but can mean, simply, “not hitting someone in the mouth.”

GQ: In the Western conception of mindfulness, I think we often think of meditation as an escape from suffering. In the book, though, you talk about meditation as a way to better know our suffering. Why is it a window into suffering?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, there are lots of ways of meditating, and lots of different kinds of experiences. To some degree, we can certainly experience greater rest. That doesn't mean blanking out thoughts or getting rid of feelings. It means having some space. So as the thoughts and feelings are happening, we're not so entangled in them. I've seen so many people through the years feel they’ve failed [at meditation] because they're still thinking, or they have tons of thoughts or painful feelings. We don't believe you can fail because the point isn't to get rid of that stuff, but to develop a different relationship to it. We don't have to take everything to heart. We don't have to be haunted by everything.

There’s a common tendency where if something is difficult physically or emotionally—heartache, disappointment—we start adding right away. What’s it going to feel like tomorrow? What's it going to feel like next week? So now not only do we have the actual difficulty, we have all that anticipation, too. There are lots of habits of mind that don't serve us. That's partly what we're trying to undo in meditation.

So there is a quality of rest that does come, but there's also a lot of insight that comes. Mindfulness is really about being with what's predominant in our experience. It might start with something like the feeling of the breath. And then if something else becomes predominant, we pay attention to that. If we have a strong emotion, we usually are fascinated by the object of that emotion. If I’m angry, it's the provocation. If we're filled with longing, it's the object. We don't so often turn our attention around and say: What does it feel like to want something so badly? What does it feel like to be so angry? What does it feel like to have so much fear? That's the first step.

And then if we can be with the state without so much judgment—“I should be beyond this, I’ve been meditating all these years; why is this still here?”—if I can just be with it, then it opens the door to learning. These emotions are usually pretty complex. It's not just one thing. It's strands of this and strands of that. We may see the feeling of helplessness or resignation in the fear… That’s why we say the ultimate goal of mindfulness is insight. It's understanding. But we can only get there if we’re not freaked out by our experience.

As you point out in the book, meditation allows us to look at what is without any of those additional stories. Why is that helpful when it comes to change, social action, and building a better, more hopeful world?

When we see our own conditioning, some of the patterns that emerge will be a sense of, “I can never do enough. Anything I can contribute is so meager so small.” And so there's a certain sense of [lack of] agency that really holds us back. Sometimes our most common add ons are things around that. “I won't say it right, so I won’t say anything.” Or: “What I have to contribute is so nothing. How could I make a difference?” That just holds us back.

I think when a lot of people hear “equanimity” and “non-attachment,” those phrases often translate to resignation and indifference. I'm curious to hear you respond, or explain why that’s maybe a misunderstanding.

It is a misunderstanding, and it's so common. It’s natural in a way. Because I think that’s the way we use the words. Equanimity sounds like indifference to us. It takes a real interest in exploring it for it to be different.

I wrote the book inspired by two different groups. One was the people I was just talking about: maybe they're meditating or they have some quality of compassion, but they don't feel like doing anything meaningful. The other group is people we’d call caregivers: someone taking care of an elderly parent at home or a child; domestic violence shelter workers; international and humanitarian aid workers; people going to the Syrian refugee camps; and, these days, frontline medical personnel. These are people with enormous caring and empathy—and they're burning out. Maybe they have compassion for others way more than themselves. Or they have compassion in doing all this work, but they don't have a balanced sense of limits. They feel they have to do everything or they’ve failed.

So equanimity means balance. It doesn't mean indifference. It’s a balanced understanding: “I will do everything I can to try to make your situation better” and “I'm not in control.” It doesn't actually make us stop or give up. It actually gives us the ability to go through frustration. You can't make your friends change that terrible or self-destructive habit, as much as you would like to. You can't make the system crumble as quickly as you think it should. But we do what we can do. The equanimity is realizing things may take time or I need to take care of myself as well as others. That's not selfish. That’s the way one has an ability to sustain an effort.

There's a woman in the book named Samantha, from the Parkland, Florida community. The first time I went down there, which was some months after the school shooting, and taught for that community, Samantha raised her hand and she said, “I feel really weird because I'm having this incredible day and I'm loving learning these tools and being with you. But I know the only reason it's happening is because that horrible thing happened. And I don't know how to get over it in order to appreciate this.” And I said, “I don't know if we get over it ever so much as we hold the both at once.” And we call that equanimity.

To have a big enough consciousness or heart to hold the joy and sorrow and to see they don't negate one another. We hold the reality of how much suffering there is and also the sense of possibility that things don't always have to be this way. If you're only with the suffering, you'll get exhausted. If you're only with a sense of possibility, you're like totally in la la land. [laughs]... So my current favorite description of equanimity is we learn to hold many things at once with some balance. I'm going to try to do everything I can to help you. It may not happen by tonight, or it may not happen in the way I want to see it happen.

One of the things that's happening right now with regard to social justice is that a lot of people are thinking about their privilege, and recognizing ways in which they’ve been complicit in systems of oppression. How do things like accountability and guilt fit with Buddhist teachings?

 

(cont.)
I was in California for the month of February, doing a program, and a psychologist in the program said, “The brain filled with shame cannot learn.” We need a kind of moral reckoning, even if it's a personal thing in one's past. An acknowledgement of pain caused, and a commitment to do better. And that's a painful understanding. So there's a kind of shame. But then if we’re awash in shame, and we feel fixed in that dreadful feeling—”I am that person, I'm only that person who said that stupid thing or made that assumption”—then we actually don't have the energy to make a change. And what we need is change.

When I think of privilege, on a personal level, I usually think about assumptions. Where do I assume I belong, just as a matter of course? Where do I get lost in a stereotype? That’s a place where I think mindfulness really does a great service. Things that are implicit or unconscious can become conscious. It’s not even that all the assumptions are incorrect. But you don't actually know, you’re just riding on it. If we can slow down the process and see what we're thinking and see what we're assuming, then we can at least ask or recognize, “That’s just an assumption.”

We find ourselves in one another, if we can be that honest. That’s the place where we can genuinely come together and realize how connected we all are.

On that point of coming together, I have an example I wanted to ask you about. I was on a plane in September and the guy in front of me wasn’t wearing a mask, and I found myself really angry, and I’m wondering if you have thoughts on ways to constructively use that anger.

You have to honor the anger. It has a certain wisdom in it. It has a message that is true.

I was about to teach a group of EMT people and ambulance drivers, and I asked the organizer, “What's happening in the community? What would be of most help?” This was some months ago. And she said, “They are so angry. They see people walking around without masks and they’re freaking out.” No wonder! There's a rightfulness to that anger. But there's also a kind of destructiveness to being lost in the anger. So we make a distinction between feeling anger and being overwhelmed by it.

We can have compassion. I'm going to make an assumption now having just decried assumption, but [imagine] the amount of disconnection someone has to feel from others to walk around these days without a mask. The sense of belittling and aloneness. And I think, “That is not a pleasant state. That's not a happy place.” Maybe it’s a sweeping sense, but I think, “What are people's lives about? What do they think it's about?” And I do feel a kind of compassion for that.

I think the statement I've made on Twitter that went the most viral was the quotation for the book: “Compassion doesn't mean we don't fight. It means we don't hate.” So love or compassion doesn't mean we don’t have a sense of principle or we’re not taking a stand. It's just the place we're coming from is different.

I've heard you use a great metaphor about not letting emotions take over our house. How, when we feel things strongly, it’s like emotions are showing up at our house, and we can let them in, but we make clear we're still the owner and running the show. But sometimes it can feel like those emotions aren’t just showing up on the doorstep, but coming with a battering ram and staging a mutiny. How do you instruct someone to handle that situation, if they feel like they’re just being completely overwhelmed by grief or anger?

An important foundation for that is letting yourself feel what you feel. In fact, that's one of my sayings. “We feel what we feel.” Somebody made me a cup with that on it. There’s a difference between feeling it and taking action completely immersed in it. It’s almost letting it wash through you like a weather storm, as intense and overwhelming as it might be. That's different than sending that email. Or severing ties with your difficult uncle. Because we may well regret that particular action. We recognize we're really angry, and we might have enough space to think, what's the most skillful way I can present this?

One of my favorite definitions of mindfulness came from an article in The New York Times, many years ago, about a mindfulness pilot program in a fourth grade classroom in Oakland. They asked one of the kids—he was nine or 10 years old—what is mindfulness? And he said, “Mindfulness means not hitting someone in the mouth.” I thought that was a great definition of mindfulness.

What does it imply? It implies you know you’re feeling angry when you’re starting to feel angry. Not after it’s gotten so intense and explosive. It also implies a certain balanced relationship to anger because if we get overcome and we’re completely swamped or defined by it, then we hit a lot of people in the mouth. At the same time, if you hate what you're feeling and you can't stand it and you push it away, you get tighter and tighter and tighter until you explode. Mindfulness is that place in the middle where you can fully be with what's happening, but you're not kind of leaning into it so much that you're gonna pick up the phone or hit that person in the mouth.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Your Brain Doesn't Work the Way You Think It Does
A conversation with neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett on the counterintuitive ways your mind processes reality—and why understanding that might help you feel a little less anxious.


Originally Appeared on GQ
Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg (born August 5, 1952) is a New York Times bestselling author and teacher of Buddhist meditation practices in the West. In 1974, she co-founded the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Massachusetts with Jack Kornfield
:- https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/meditation-help-world-not-just-183644171.html?fr=yhssrp_catchall

 

10 Minutes of Mindfulness Changes Your Reactions

It’s a one-second lead over your mind, your emotions, your world.

Harvard Business Review

• 
  
  
  • Rasmus Hougaard
  • Jacqueline Carter
  • Gitte Dybkjaer

Read when you’ve got time to spare.


Leaders across the globe feel that the unprecedented busyness of modern-day leadership makes them more reactive and less proactive. There is a solution to this hardwired, reactionary leadership approach: mindfulness.

Having trained thousands of leaders in the techniques of th
is ancient practice, we’ve seen over and over again that a diligent approach to mindfulness can help people create a one-second mental space between an event or stimulus and their response to it. One second may not sound like a lot, but it can be the difference between making a rushed decision that leads to failure and reaching a thoughtful conclusion that leads to increased performance. It’s the difference between acting out of anger and applying due patience. It’s a one-second lead over your mind, your emotions, your world.

Research has found that mindfulness training alters our brains and how we engage with ourselves, others, and our work. When practiced and applied, mindfulness fundamentally alters the operating system of the mind. Through repeated mindfulness practice, brain activity is redirected from ancient, reactionary parts of the brain, including the limbic system, to the newest, rational part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.

In this way mindfulness practice decreases activity in the parts of the brain responsible for fight-or-flight and knee-jerk reactions while increasing activity in the part of the brain responsible for what’s termed our executive functioning. This part of the brain, and the executive functioning skills it supports, is the control center for our thoughts, words, and actions. It’s the center of logical thought and impulse control. Simply put, relying more on our executive functioning puts us firmly in the driver’s seat of our minds, and by extension our lives.

One second can be the difference between achieving desired results or not. One second is all it takes to become less reactive and more in tune with the moment. In that one second lies the opportunity to improve the way you decide and direct, the way you engage and lead. That’s an enormous advantage for leaders in fast-paced, high-pressure jobs.

Here are five easily implemented tips to help you become more mindful:

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  • Practice 10 minutes of mindfulness training each day. Most people find mornings the best time to practice mindfulness, but you can do it any time of day. You can find a 10-minute guided mindfulness training program, a short mindfulness training manual, and a link to a free downloadable mindfulness app here. Try it for four weeks.
  • Avoid reading email first thing in the morning. Our minds are generally most focused, creative, and expansive in the morning. This is the time to do focused, strategic work and have important conversations. If you read your email as you get up, your mind will get sidetracked and you’ll begin the slide toward reactive leadership. Making email your first task of the day wastes the opportunity to use your mind at its highest potential. Try waiting at least 30 minutes, or even an hour, after you get to work before checking your inbox.
  • Turn off all notifications. The notification alarms on your phone, tablet, and laptop are significant contributors to reactive leadership. They keep you mentally busy and put you under pressure, thereby triggering reactionary responses. They cause damage far more than they add value. Try this: For one week turn off all email notifications on all devices. Only check your email once every hour (or as often as responsibly needed for your job), but don’t compulsively check messages as they roll into your inbox.
  • Stop multitasking. It keeps your mind full, busy, and under pressure. It makes you reactive. Try to maintain focus on a single task, and then notice when you find your mind drifting off to another task — a sign that your brain wishes to multitask. When this happens, mentally shut down all the superfluous tasks entering your thoughts while maintaining focus on the task at hand.
  • Put it on your calendar. Schedule a check-in with yourself every two weeks to assess how well you’re doing with the previous four tips, or as a reminder to revisit this article to refresh your memory. Consider engaging one of your peers to do the same thing. This gives you a chance to assess each other, which can be both helpful and motivating.

We encourage you to give these tips a try. Although mindfulness isn’t a magic pill, it will help you more actively select your responses and make calculated choices instead of succumbing to reactionary decisions.
:- https://getpocket.com/explore/item/...anges-your-reactions?utm_source=pocket-newtab

 

What Is Time?


The more closely we observe the present moment, the more amorphous it becomes.


I think the flow of time is not part of the fundamental structure of reality,” theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli tells me. He is currently working on a theory of quantum gravity in which the variable of time plays no part. And throughout our conversation, I’m trying to get my mind around the idea that even though the universe is made up of “events,” as Carlo explains, a single interval between two events can have different values. There is no central clock, its hands ticking a steady beat for the universe to march along to, moving in one direction from the past into the future.

The prospect that our experience of time may not correspond to an underlying reality has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, as the idea connects two of the most intriguing topics—time and consciousness. Inspired by my recent conversations with Carlo and others in the production of my podcast documentary series, I’ve been thinking more about where the two phenomena overlap.

The more closely we observe the present moment, the more amorphous it becomes. It vanishes as we reach out to touch it, transforming into the next moment, and the next … When we look out at the ocean, we naturally perceive the waves while understanding (both intellectually and intuitively) that there is no real “thing” that is a wave. The concept is useful shorthand for a dynamic phenomenon that occurs in nature. So too with the human brain, which is an ever-changing symphony of electrical firing among billions of neurons.

Contrary to our everyday intuition, there isn’t an entity persisting through time in the form of a static “self.” All our conscious experiences are being generated anew by dynamic neuronal activity. Like an ocean wave, your “self” is an endlessly fluctuating process. Memories trail along from the past, and those memories impact your experience in this moment, but each moment of your experience still depends on the exact state of your brain at that particular point in time.

We’re always residing in the here and now, yet each moment is instantaneously swept away by a ghostly breeze. There it goes. How long did it last? The more focused our attention is on our experience through time, the faster the moments rush by. A raging river. Yet, a vast, peaceful stillness rides along the never-ending stream. We are eternally racing toward the future—yet not moving at all. There’s no traveling forward when you are the river.

I often wonder if time is our small keyhole into a deeper reality—just a glimpse of the vast structure of the universe. Could time be an illusion of sorts? Through the various attempts to understand the implications of quantum mechanics, many physicists have become convinced that spacetime is emergent—that both space and time are manifestations of a more fundamental reality. In a 2014 lecture at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, the prominent theorist Nima Arkani-Hamed declared it plainly: “Almost all of us very strongly believe that spacetime really doesn’t exist.”

Whatever is true about the fundamental reality, the space we seem to be moving through clearly represents something about the world. However, as we’ve come to understand, the way our brains process incoming information often creates a distorted impression of what’s actually “out there.”

In a 2016 Nautilus essay, “Let’s Rethink Space,” science journalist George Musser uses a musical analogy to show how what appears to us to be spatial distance might in fact be a difference in energy:

Sounds of long and short wavelengths are oblivious to each other; if you sound a deep bass note and a high treble pitch simultaneously, each ripples through the room as though it were the only sound in the world … These waves overlap in the three dimensions of space through which they propagate, yet they’re independent of each other, as if they were located in different places. In a sense, you can think of the sound waves as residing 14 centimeters apart within a fourth spatial dimension.

But harder still is the project of constructing an analogy that helps us wrap our minds around the possible misrepresentation of time in our experience. In my efforts to understand what it would mean for the flow of time to be an illusion, the closest visualization I’ve been able to create is that of a web of nodes in which we experience only one node at a time. At each locus, all the other nodes become inaccessible to us, as if a spotlight were continually traveling across this “web of time,” inch by inch, painting our reality. If you were to experience a structure on this web —such as node a, node a, node f; node a, node a, node f—you might interpret the experience as “two node a’s cause a node f” when, in fact, the whole web of nodes already exists in its entirety. The implicit causality would not apply at a deeper level. Causality through time would still illuminate “connections,” it’s just that the underlying reality of these connections would reveal a structure vastly different from the one we intuit—that is, a universe with a flow of time, where the past is set in stone, the future is undetermined, and the present is the only true “reality.”

In his most recent book, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, physicist Lee Smolin describes the conclusions that his colleague Julian Barbour has reached about the nature of time:

Barbour insists that the passage of time is an illusion and that reality consists of nothing but a vast pile of moments, each a configuration of the whole universe. You now are experiencing a moment. Now you are experiencing a different moment. According to Barbour, both moments exist eternally and timelessly, in the pile of moments. Reality is nothing but this frozen collection of moments outside time … The moments all coexist, and each is a configuration of the whole universe.

Smolin himself holds a different belief, concluding that whereas space is not fundamental, time is still part of the fundamental story. But Smolin’s work, too, reflects the degree to which the true nature of reality is at odds with our day-to-day intuitions. In his book, he depicts the universe this way:

Your view of the world is like a film projected on a two-dimensional sphere, which we call the sky … Hypothesize that all that the universe consists of is these skies—each one the view of some event. Rather than construct the views from the causal relations, reverse things and derive the causal relations and everything else from the views.

In these musings I’m often left wondering to what degree our conscious experience of the flow of time is responsible for our confusion about it. Is it possible that experiencing a deeper structure of the universe is what we’re calling time? Are time and consciousness perhaps two sides of the same coin?

Whatever turns out to be true about the nature of reality, in every moment of our lives we have firsthand knowledge of a simple truth: Circumstances have come together to create an experience of witnessing the universe unfold from within, however limited our perspective. How and why may always remain mysteries—perhaps by definition, as Smolin’s skies suggest—but in the meantime, we can revel in the wondrous view.

Annaka Harris is the New York Times bestselling author of Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. She is an editor and consultant for science writers, specializing in neuroscience and physics, and her work has appeared in The New York Times. Annaka is the author of the children’s book I Wonder, a collaborator on the Mindful Games Activity Cards, by Susan Kaiser Greenland, and a volunteer meditation teacher for the Inner Kids organization.

Lead photo: Replica Of Nature / Shutterstock

By Annaka Harris
May 12, 2022
:- https://nautil.us/what-is-time-17483/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

 

This 10-Minute Mindfulness Hack Is Equivalent of 44 Minutes Extra Sleep, Say Experts
Practicing mindfulness can help us feel less tired, researchers have found.
Sarah Shaffi
Photos by Getty Images

We all know that sleepless nights, insomnia and just plain bad sleep are all too common. And we all know that there is plenty out there to help us and try and get a better night of rest, from podcasts and napping to breathing exercises and sage cleansing.

But we also know we’re pressed for time, and sometimes, we get hit by that mid-afternoon lag, so can’t take a quick nap or switch on a sleep-inducing podcast. That’s when we need something that can help us feel rested and raring to go.

Step in: mindfulness. Practising mindfulness can help us overcome our fears and help us make the most of the quality time we spend with our partner, but new research has shown that it can also help us feel like we’ve got more sleep than we have.

The research found that practising mindfulness – like this breathing exercise – for 10 minutes can help you feel like you’ve got 44 minutes of extra sleep.

Researchers from Oregon State University, the University of Tennessee and Syracuse University examined the “possible benefits of sleep and mindfulness exercises in reducing the exhaustion experienced by entrepreneurs in the course of launching and growing ventures”.

Over the course of two studies, the researchers found that “both sleep and mindfulness exercises provide avenues for entrepreneurs to combat exhaustion”.

Crucially, the study found that sleep and mindfulness go best hand-in-hand. The researchers said that “these two factors compensate for one another; as the usage of one increases, the efficacy of the other decreases”.

Charles Murnieks, the study’s lead author, said: “You can’t replace sleep with mindfulness exercises, but they might help compensate and provide a degree of relief.

“As little as 70 minutes a week, or 10 minutes a day, of mindfulness practice may have the same benefits as an extra 44 minutes of sleep a night.”

However, in both studies the researchers found that mindfulness doesn’t help those who are getting enough sleep but still feeling exhausted.

Murnieks said: “If you’re feeling stressed and not sleeping, you can compensate with mindfulness exercises to a point.

“But when you’re not low on sleep, mindfulness doesn’t improve those feelings of exhaustion.”

The lesson is clear: we need to make sure we’re looking after ourselves by getting enough sleep, and by practising mindfulness.

Sarah Shaffi is a freelance journalist and editor. She reads more books a week than is healthy, and balances this out with copious amounts of TV. She writes regularly about popular culture, particularly how it reflects and represents society.
:- https://getpocket.com/explore/item/...ra-sleep-say-experts?utm_source=pocket-newtab

 

Meditation Music for Positive Energy ➤ Balance & Harmony Music ➤ Relax Mind Body

Meditation Relax Music
82,337 views Jul 30, 2019

 

What to Do When You Can’t Sleep

by Joseph Emet| February 2, 2023
Meditation and mindfulness can help you get the shut-eye you need. Joseph Emet on how to feel more rested.
Consider the comfort of your bed. Are you enjoying it, or are you mentally somewhere else, stressing about something that happened during the day or might happen tomorrow? Mindfulness practices promote being in the here and now over being in the past or the future—being in your senses over being in your thoughts. In helping you to be present, mindfulness meditation can cultivate feelings of contentment, peace, and happiness. When it’s time to go to bed, these feelings translate into a relaxed attitude and better sleep.

Clarity about the difference between meditation and rumination is important for an optimal sleep routine. Meditation is intentional; the intention can be to let go of thoughts instead of following them, or a resolve to focus on the breath.

In contrast, rumination happens spontaneously. Studies show that we spend 30 to 50 percent of our mental activity in thoughts that are neither related to what we’re doing nor to our surroundings. This can be a problem at bedtime as the body has trouble telling thoughts from reality. Thus, if your thoughts are replaying an argument you had earlier in the day, then your heart rate, blood pressure, and level of stress hormones will match those feelings instead of feelings that will foster a peaceful drift into sleep. Meditation can help you go to sleep, whereas rumination can keep you awake.

Although I didn’t start meditating in order to sleep better, a good night’s sleep has been one of the unexpected gifts of meditation. I use the two essential practices of focusing on the breath and letting go of thoughts every night. My personal challenge has been going back to sleep after waking up at night—a problem that affects up to 35 percent of us. Now when I wake up, I sit on the edge of the bed and do a period of meditation. After a short time, my mind is peaceful, and I’m ready to fall back to sleep.

If you find meditation challenging, try the following steps. Do each step for three breaths.

1. Focus on Your Breath
Breathe slowly and deeply from the diaphragm, concentrating on the sensations of breathing.

Always breathe through your nose. The nose makes important contributions to your health. Glands in the sinuses produce nitric oxide, which helps dilate the blood vessels and improve circulation. The nose humidifies and filters the air.

Is one nostril blocked? Lie on the other side. This unblocks it within a few minutes. Are both nostrils blocked? Cup your hand at the faucet and fill your nose with cold water for a few seconds. A blocked nose isn’t necessarily due to mucus, so blowing your nose may not always fix it. Sometimes the cause is the erectile tissue inside the nose. Nasal blockage and mouth-breathing contribute to snoring, which in turn may interfere with sleep.

2. Do a Body Scan

A body scan is systematic. You start at one end, say the feet, and work your way up—focusing on different parts of the body, noticing any tension, and letting it go. Some yoga teachers offer a shortened version of a body scan at the end of a class. That was my first introduction to it, and I’d sometimes notice fellow yoga practitioners falling asleep in class while doing it.

Whether on the yoga mat or in bed, a body scan is effective as a relaxation technique.

When I lead a group through a body scan, I start by asking people to feel if one foot is colder than the other, and I ask them to notice the pressure they feel on the buttocks from sitting. (We are usually sitting in a meditation class.) Then we work our way up. When we come to the neck, I note that the head is ten pounds heavier for each inch it’s leaning forward. I notice a few people straightening up as I say that. Coming to the facial muscles, I usually quote Thich Nhat Hanh: “Sometimes I smile because I’m happy, and sometimes I’m happy because I smile.” I also remind people of the old adage: “The face is the mirror of the mind.”

A body scan is a good practice for body awareness and relaxation. Focusing on the body works as an antidote to being in our thoughts, for the body is always here now, whereas thoughts can be anywhere, anytime. We need that grounding at bedtime.


Photo by iStock.com / Boris Jovanovic

3. Conduct a Scan of Your Emotions

Notice with compassion what’s on your mind. The psychological term “negativity bias” refers to our tendency to think more about negative things and to accord them more importance. This creates anxiety rather than happiness, and discontent rather than contentment. Both can interfere with sleep.

The first step in overcoming the negativity bias is being aware of it. Then with a smile, urge your mind to notice that the glass it sees as half-empty is also half-full. We tend to take what we have for granted, and this gets in the way of contentment. Reach for contentment. Look at all the things you take for granted and appreciate life’s blessings.

4. Focus on What You Want
Thinking doesn’t stop when we go to bed. There’s no “off” button. Forceful directions, such as saying to yourself, “I will stop thinking,” don’t work.

Give yourself positive directions instead. An obvious example of this is what happens when you say, “I will not think of a pink elephant.” You think of a pink elephant! But think of a blue elephant instead, and the pink elephant disappears. Thus, “I will not think of that argument I had with my spouse,” is likely to be counterproductive. It’s better to say to yourself, “I will focus on my breath.”

5. Let Go
The goal of doing your best is more realistic than the goal of being perfect. Keep in mind that we control our intentions and our actions, but not the results of our actions. With hindsight, we may see what we should have done; however, that knowledge wasn’t available during the moment we acted.

“I’ve done my best today; may all people be happy and well” is a soothing evening prayer. It celebrates a compassionate heart while tacitly acknowledging its limits.

If your mind serves you self-bashing thoughts at night, turn them toward self-appreciation. Focus on your motives and your efforts—the things that you do control.

Our culture says, “If at first, you don’t succeed, try harder.” Such messages are valuable in certain areas. For example, if we try harder, we can run faster, at least to a certain extent. But in areas where we don’t have conscious control, trying harder doesn’t work at all; it’s often counterproductive. Instead of helping, the extra effort gets in the way. Sleep is one of those areas.

Striving or worrying about sleep only makes it more difficult to attain. Just focus on your breathing. Let go of everything else.

Once you’ve cycled through these five steps, extend the meditation period by continuing with conscious breathing, or try repeating the steps from the beginning.

If you don’t fall asleep after a reasonable time of meditating, get out of bed. Put yourself to work doing something that needs to be done. Do this with a positive mindset, considering the extra time as a gift. Use up your energy. You’ll check off an item or two from your to-do list, and you may feel more inclined to sleep afterward.

Finally, be aware that pairing meditation with certain lifestyle choices is particularly effective for nurturing healthy sleep patterns. Thich Nhat Hanh once said, “Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest—whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me.” So, a sleep problem also has the nature of interbeing—it doesn’t exist alone. Our lifestyle, including our caffeine consumption and the amount of exercise we do, has a bearing on how well we sleep.

Caffeine doesn’t affect everyone the same way. For some people, it can stay in the blood for more than nine hours. It turns out that 40 percent of us are fast caffeine metabolizers; 15 percent of us are particularly slow at it; and the rest fall somewhere in between. If you know someone who drinks cup after cup and then sleeps peacefully, don’t try to imitate them. It may not work for you. A good way to find out how coffee affects your sleep is to go without it or only drink the decaffeinated stuff for a week.

Studies show that regular exercise correlates with better sleep. These days, over half of all work is done while sitting at a desk, so this makes intentionally finding ways to exercise all the more necessary. Bike to work if you can, find a gym close by, or run. Do what you need to do to get a daily dose of exercise. You’ll appreciate it at bedtime.

Sweet dreams, my friends!
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Why You Should Take a Minute to Meditate (Almost) Every Day
Dan Harris

Photo by Matthias Clamer/Getty Images

Let me propose an eminently doable habit, that you can start any time of year: Try meditating for one minute on most days—for just one month.

Forming healthy habits is hard, and there’s a reason most of our goals ultimately go down in flames. We may be wired to fail. Evolution has bequeathed us a brain that optimizes for survival, not long-term health planning. Natural selection primed us for detecting threats and finding food and sexual partners, not for flossing our teeth. The fact that we are up against this evolutionary challenge is why I like this modest, monthlong proposal.

How to Make Meditation Easy
Two aspects make it easy to adopt:

First, aiming to meditate most days, rather than every day, is a good goal. Consistency counts—the more often you meditate, the easier it gets and the deeper and more enduring the benefits—but if you miss a day, your inner critic won’t have a chance to call you a failure. I call this approach “daily-ish.” It has elasticity, or “psychological flexibility,”
a key concept from behavior-change research, which can help lead to an
abiding habit, be it a meditation practice, a new gym routine, or a commitment to learn Esperanto.


Photo by Dan Kenyon/Getty Images

Second, one minute is a supremely low bar. The proposition of a single minute is uniquely unintimidating. What’s more, it’s scalable. After one minute of meditation, people often think to themselves: I’m already here; might as well keep going a bit. As the meditation teacher Cory Muscara explains, this is a key moment, because you’re moving from “extrinsic” motivation (that is, meditating because you feel like you have to) to the more powerful “intrinsic” motivation (that is, meditating because you want to). And the second you opt in for more meditation, you’re doing it out of actual interest, which makes it much more likely to have a lasting effect.

How to Make Meditation Consistent
Even with that low threshold, there are more strategic ways to make a new meditation habit stick:

Think strategically about your schedule
Some people find that having a set time every day—right before bed, first thing in the morning, just after a workout—helps establish a habit. Scientists who study habit formation talk about “cue, routine, reward.” You can experiment with constructing a cue-routine-reward loop that gets you to meditate.

For example, “After I park my car [cue], I will meditate for five minutes [routine], and I’ll feel a little calmer and more mindful [reward].” Repeat this loop to ingrain the habit. You can even put your daily meditation session in your calendar, which you may find helpful. That said, if, like me, you have an unpredictable schedule, thinking strategically might mean trying to fit your meditation in whenever and wherever you can.

Make yourself accountable

Photo by Gregory Costanzo/Getty Images

Some people may not institute a healthy habit on their own, but they will do it when other people are holding them accountable. One way to create that kind of accountability is to join a community of some sort. It can be as simple as just getting a few of your friends together and starting.

Another option is to join a regular sitting group at your local meditation center. Many major cities have meditation centers where you can drop in, such as MNDFL in New York City or Unplug in L.A. There are also Buddhist centers, which may be a bit scary for some, but in my experience they go light on the religion and tend to give good meditation instruction. Check it out for yourself, however. Or form your own sitting group. I’ve found that hanging out with other meditators sets up a kind of HOV-lane effect.

Being around people who take the meditative principles seriously and are endeavoring to apply these concepts in their own lives can create positive peer pressure. Or as meditation teacher Jeff Warren says, “It sort of normalizes the whole weird thing.”

Focus on the benefits

Photo by Brandon Tabiolo/Getty Images

In many ways, we are all like rats in a maze, constantly pressing the levers that deliver food pellets to us. Behavior-change sci-ence strongly suggests that the best way to ensure a consistent meditation habit is to identify where and how the practice is giving you pellets. Just like rats, we are much more likely to keep doing something if it feels good and we get something out of it. There are at least two levels to this. The first level is to pay atten-tion to how the act of meditating in itself can be pleasurable. The other level is to notice the benefits as they arise in the rest of your life, in terms of both inner weather and outer com-portment. I’ve found meditation can make me feel better and act better.

I believe that meditation is the über resolution—the healthy habit par excellence—because a regular dose of mindfulness can give you the clarity and sanity to figure out which other resolutions to pursue, and how best to do so.

Give it a try. For the past few years, whenever I’ve spoken publicly about meditation, I have been issuing the following challenge: Try meditation for a month, and if it does nothing for you, hit me up on Twitter and tell me I’m a moron. During this time, lots of people have called me a moron on Twitter—but never for this.

Dan Harris is a coanchor of ABC’s Nightline and the weekend editions of Good Morning America. He’s the author of 10% Happier and Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics.
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7 Meditation Tips for People Who've Never Meditated in Their Lives
You don’t need to totally clear your mind, FYI.
Elizabeth Bacharach



stellalevi/Getty Images

In theory, meditation sounds easy — you sit in one place for a while, not doing anything (even thinking).

But when you realize you have no idea how TF to magically make your mind go black—cue anxiety, which is basically the opposite of how meditation's supposed to make you feel.

Before you give up and turn on another episode of "Riverdale", know that meditation for beginners does exist — you're not expected to be a guru from the get-go. To ease into getting your "om" on, just remember:

1. You don't need to to meditate for hours.
You don't even have to last 20 minutes, tbh. For many first-time meditators, doing nothing other than sitting quietly with your thoughts can feel (and sound) totally strange. So, go ahead and toss any “go big or go home” mentality.

Instead, aim for shorter chunks of time and build from there: Try three to five minutes if using a guided app, says Andy Puddicombe, meditation and mindfulness expert and co-founder of meditation app Headspace. Better yet, if you're going at it solo, try just 60 seconds at a time.

2. Practice focusing on different areas of your body.
For those who get easily distracted and have a “restless” or anxious mind, doing a body scan — focusing on different sensations from head to toes — can help redirect your attention away from your thoughts. Counting breaths — like, breathing in for five seconds, holding for five seconds, then breathing out for five seconds, can also do the trick, says Puddicombe.

3. Do it while you're drinking your morning coffee.

Puddicombe’s fave way to make meditation fit more naturally into your routine: couple it with something you already do daily, like drinking coffee. (You never forget to caffeinnate, so you won’t forget to meditate when the two are linked.)

Practicing in the a.m. also guarantees you won't "forget" to meditate later in the day. Plus, it doesn't hurt to start your day off on the right (read: calmer, more centered) foot, says Puddicombe.

4. Find a spot and just sit there for a while.
You can practice on the floor, on a cushion, or, hey, cross-legged under a tree like a traditional monk — all that matters is that you’re in a position that is comfortable and will help you remain attentive (read: your bed might not be the most productive meditation space).

Once you find a location that works, make it your go-to zen zone, so that your body and mind start to associate it with meditation time. But this isn’t an excuse to avoid meditating on the days you can’t practice in your place. Remember, you can meditate anywhere from your bedroom to the bus, so it's important to be flexible, too, says Puddicombe

5. Definitely don't force it.
You know how when you're really trying hard to fall asleep, it's pretty much impossible to do so? Same goes for meditation. “When you try really hard to go to sleep, you only move further away from sleeping. So, if you try to make, say, relaxation happen when you meditate, you will get anxious and frustrated,” Puddicombe says.

The more you practice, the less you’ll feel compelled to force yourself to chill—it will just happen.

6. Don't expect to completely clear your mind.
Contrary to popular belief, meditation is not about clearing your mind or stopping your thoughts. Sure, your mind might be calmer at some sessions than others. But, let's be real, there will be times when your mind just won’t stop buzzing.

When you notice your mind has wandered (ahem, when last night's date pops into your head), don’t panic or beat yourself up. Instead, just shift your focus back to your current exercise, be it breathing or body scan, or just tune back into your guided meditation.

7. Don't necessarily search for silent spaces.
Yes, being in a quieter space is typically easier for beginners, but some people actually prefer meditating in busier places (like maybe waiting in line at Starbucks) — so don't be afraid to try different things out to see which one works for you.

I know what you're thinking: But shouldn't meditation be quiet? That's a myth, says Puddicombe. "Never be put off from meditation with the amount of noise around you, even when you're a beginner," he says. That's because — not to sound super-corny or anything — meditation is all about what's going on inside of you, not your surroundings.
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Why More Psychiatrists Think Mindfulness Can Help Treat ADHD
A 1-minute mindfulness practice helped settle my ADHD-addled mind.
Tasha Eichenseher


Photo by Christina Animashaun/Vox

One morning this summer, I sat at my desk feeling restlessness boil inside me. I’d recently moved from a chaotic and deadline-driven job to one with a lot of downtime and zero pressure. On paper it sounded amazing, but I was putting off projects for weeks.

The tasks were either overwhelmingly big or mind-numbingly boring. And I was starting to feel guilty about not getting them done.

So what did I do? Water the plants, start a to-do list, respond to a few emails, check social media, buy my sister a gift, check social media, add to my to-do list, turn on music, leave and go to the gym — everything but the most important tasks.

Then, in a panic, I’d pull an all-nighter, relying on a caffeine-fueled crunch to get me to the finish line. The next day, feeling deflated, depleted, and embarrassed by the quality of my work, I’d crash.

Desperately seeking focus
After a few of these vicious cycles, I worried that I was either too burned out to muster any strength or discipline, or that decades of multitasking had broken my brain. Trying to focus and prioritize was like listening to a symphony in which all of the instruments were always center stage, all playing at the same volume at the same time.

So I scheduled an appointment with a psychiatric nurse, who, after an hour and a half phone session, diagnosed me with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

ADHD — a neurodevelopmental disorder marked by varying degrees of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity — is more common in children, affecting more than 9 percent of kids under the age of 18 in the US, according to 2016 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Estimates of the prevalence of ADHD in adults vary significantly, but a 2016 study published in the journal Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders found that nearly 3 percent of adults globally have received the diagnosis. Another study of US cases reported a 123 percent increase in adult ADHD diagnoses from 2007 to 2016, four times the increase in ADHD diagnoses among children.

My diagnosis was both a blow and a relief.

I left the appointment with a prescription for Adderall, a stimulant that increases dopamine and norepinephrine levels in the brain to improve motivation and focus. (Doctors also often prescribe cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of psychotherapy that can help challenge negative thought patterns that can lead to anxiety or addictions.)

Discovering mindfulness for the ADHD brain
The Adderall worked like a charm. I felt calmer, my attention only pulled in a few directions, rather than 100. But it also felt like a temporary fix. Adderall works on a day-to-day basis and doesn’t help rewire your brain to help build focus over time.

I’d heard mindfulness practices could be useful for attention training and longer-term emotional regulation, and were backed by a strong body of scientific evidence. Could they work for ADHD too? I ended up on a website called MindfullyADD.

Developed by educators, nurses, and doctors who’ve worked with ADHD patients, the platform offers short breath-, attention-, and movement-based practices designed to help people find focus and feel more settled and in control.

I tried something called a “1-Minute Do-Nothing Practice,” described as a way to build tolerance to boredom. There was near-constant narration to help hold my focus, but it was still agony: I wanted to check my phone, straighten up my desk, pick up my matcha.

Next, I tried a “1-Minute Elevator Practice,” a narrated exercise that asks you to bring your hands together at your belly button, and then move the top hand up with your inhalations and back down with your exhalations. This was remarkably more effective at helping me focus, as I had something to track: my breath.

I started adding these practices to my day, randomly, whenever they fit in. And I began to see how fast and furiously my brain switched from one task or thought to the next.

I went through moments of self-loathing, thinking, “mindfulness should be easy for me.” (I had a meditation practice, but sitting for 30 minutes, focused on a single object, had been, if I was honest with myself, overwhelming.)

Often, I felt too tired or busy to practice even the short mindfulness practices on MindfullyADD. The growing awareness of my distracted and disjointed mind became really uncomfortable. But I was starting to find pauses between the distractions and thoughts, which felt empowering.

Casey Dixon, the strategist behind MindfullyADD and the founder of a program called Live Well ADHD, told me that my situation was not unusual. “Right now, most people who are getting diagnosed are women who are not in their 20s anymore and who are learning suddenly that a lot of their lifestyle habits are related to ADHD.” (I’m 46.) And one of the biggest obstacles her clients face is following through on work and life plans.

The ADHD brain
After experiencing some of the benefits of mindfulness firsthand, I called up Lidia Zylowska, a psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota Medical School and the author of The Mindfulness Prescription for Adult ADHD, to find out how the brains of people with ADHD are different from other people who feel distracted.

Many people, she said, have ADHD-like symptoms, including difficulty focusing and organizing, when we’re faced with stressful situations, inadequate sleep, burnout, and unrelenting bad news in the media. “But if you have actual ADHD, you have these symptoms even when you’re not stressed.”

Studies that track what’s happening in ADHD brains through imaging, or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have shown atypical activity in neural networks associated with cognitive control, attention, and working memory. In addition, parts of the brain related to emotional regulation and motivation may look different in people with ADHD. Imaging also shows that the default mode network (DMN) — which is linked to mind wandering — is more active in people with ADHD when they are attending to tasks.

 

(cont.)
Some people with ADHD have enough coping strategies and support to mask it. But then the context changes and their symptoms can become less manageable.

A couple of common pain points are when people move into jobs with less structure and they are expected to self-manage throughout the day (aha!), and when people become parents and have to manage more than just themselves. For women specifically, hormonal changes, particularly during perimenopause, can bring ADHD to the surface.

Some of the psychiatric nurse’s questions made me realize that constant triaging at work had become my coping strategy. I also started thinking about patterns of procrastination that went as far back as elementary school. I started to see that I’d always been paralyzed by the fear of not completing something perfectly. I’d set myself up, over and over, for failure.

How mindfulness works to help treat ADHD
Mindfulness, the practice of present-moment awareness without judgment, has a nearly 5,000-year history with roots in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions and philosophies. It has been studied in the US since the 1970s for various mental health issues, including stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, and pain management.

One of the first major research studies to look at mindfulness as a treatment for ADHD was done by Zylowska, when she was working at the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California Los Angeles. Her original study, published in 2007 in the Journal of Attention Disorders, looked at the effects of a mindfulness program on adolescents and adults with ADHD.

The 24 adults and eight adolescents in the study were asked to practice sitting meditation, body and breath awareness, mindful listening and speaking, and self-compassion on a daily basis for eight weeks. Afterward, they reported improvements in their symptoms, tested better on attention tasks, and even saw reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression. Zylowska and her colleagues concluded that mindfulness could be an effective intervention in some adults and adolescents with ADHD — yielding improvements in overall ADHD symptoms — but that a controlled clinical study was needed.

Since 2007, there have been dozens of other studies, some with small sample sizes and no controls, others with larger sample sizes and active controls that support the use of mindfulness for ADHD, says John Mitchell, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine.

A 2021 research review of 31 studies on mindfulness for ADHD, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, concluded that mindfulness is just as effective as, if not slightly more than, education and life skills training for treating adults with inattentiveness. The evidence isn’t in for mindfulness and children with ADHD.

Both Zylowska and Mitchell agree that more research would help determine which mindfulness practices are best for different folks with ADHD. “The research is in early stages, compared to other interventions for ADHD,” says Zylowska. Based on the existing data, if symptoms of ADHD are mild to moderate, mindfulness may be a great stand-alone treatment, says Zylowska. But if symptoms are severe, people with ADHD may want to use mindfulness as a complement to other treatments

How to adapt mindfulness practices for ADHD
Meditation and mindfulness may not at first seem like a good fit for chronically restless ADHD people, says Mitchell.

That’s why Zylowska’s eight-week program includes both “formal” seated or walking meditation and “informal” mindfulness, like being present with tastes, sounds, textures, and sounds while you eat. You start with practicing for five minutes and work your way up to 15. If five minutes is still too much, Zylowska says, start with three.

“When you have ADHD, you have to find solutions that are easy enough to fit into your life,” explains Dixon. “If they create a lot of friction, they won’t get done.”

Zylowska agrees: “These are not new practices, but we are making them more accessible to people who have difficulty sustaining attention.” They are shorter, are introduced more gradually, and have more variety, so you can experiment with what works for you.

You can also tailor the practice depending on the type of distractibility or ADHD you have. If you have more hyperactivity and impulsivity, you may want to focus on mindful movement. If this is all overwhelming, just think of an activity that already helps you calm down, like cooking or gardening, and do more of that, with awareness, advises Zylowska.

One minute at a time
As I continue with the practices from MindfullyADD, I start to feel more space in my brain and my life. I try to practice daily, even if just for a minute. While I can still procrastinate and overcommit, this one-minute-at-a-time approach has ultimately translated into a one-step-at-a-time effort at work. (I still take Adderall, but infrequently.)

I can now better tolerate mind-numbing spreadsheets, and I can read for more than five minutes at a time. I don’t beat myself up about not accomplishing more. Instead, I celebrate the small wins, take conscious breaks that help me reset and feel less enmeshed with work, and I feel perfectionism and black-and-white thinking losing their hold.

Dixon reminds me to keep it simple: “You don’t need to have the perfect mindfulness set-up and practice, just pick something and try it.”

Tasha Eichenseher is a science and wellness writer based in Boulder, Colorado.
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