“Take a deep breath.” It’s what your mom told you when you were hyperventilating about some disastrous situation as a kid—maybe a fall off a bike or worse, your brother stealing your toys. Like all things in life, your mom was right; taking a deep breath can be one of the most important things you do all day.
Meditative and mindful practices have been around for centuries, but like so many ancient and esoteric practices, we’re only now getting around to learning what’s truly behind them.
Simply open a magazine or click over to Facebook and you’ll likely be inundated with headlines reading, “Yoga Reduces Stress,” or “The Stress-Busting, Mood-Lifting Effects of Mindfulness.” But beyond these headlines is the real story: We have the control to heal ourselves in ways we’ve not previously imagined.
And it’s not just California hippies taking advantage of the healing power of thought.
For more than 17 years, George Mumford, a sports psychologist and mindfulness expert, has worked with some of the world’s top-performing athletes, including Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, teaching them that meditation is a key ingredient for winning championships.
“George helped me understand the art of mindfulness,” Bryant told The Huffington Post. “To be neither distracted or focused, rigid or flexible, passive or aggressive. I learned just to be.”
Politicians are also joining the meditation movement in droves. Tim Ryan, a Democratic Congressman from Ohio, makes it a part of his daily routine to take time and introspect. “If this can help me, a half-Irish, half-Italian quarterback from Northeast Ohio, it’s for everybody,” Ryan told Salon in a 2013 interview. He’s also sharing his love of mindfulness and meditation with his constituents. In 2015, Ryan introduced the Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Act.
[quote position="right" is_quote="true"]To be neither distracted or focused, rigid or flexible, passive or aggressive. I learned just to be.[/quote]
The act will help to financially support teacher training in SEL, which is proven to boost student’s academic performance. “I have seen firsthand what teaching social and emotional learning can do for students and their classrooms in Ohio and across the nation,” Ryan shared in a statement. “These programs are scientifically proven to help students increase skills in problem solving, conflict resolution, responsible decision making and relationship building – these are the skills that will build the foundation for students to better perform academically and throughout their lives. Now is the time to promote programs that create a safer and more secure school culture in America.”
And it’s not just the rich, famous, and powerful using mindful meditation. Groups including the Prison Yoga Project and the Prison Mindfulness Institute are bringing the power of internal reflection to incarcerated individuals across the country.
“Yoga really allowed me to work on core issues,” Adam Verdoux, a 45-year-old ex-con told Epoch Times. “It played a huge part in my change. It really facilitated that process.” There remains a year waitlist to join the yoga program at San Quentin State Prison, where Verdoux served his time. Additionally, Epoch Times reports, more than 15,000 prisoners have requested yoga guidebooks to assist in self-guided meditation.
At the root of much of this is the simple act of focusing on one’s breath—an act that is core to so many meditative traditions. “Breathe in. Breathe out. Pay attention to your breath. Repeat.” Modern science is showing us that this doesn’t just calm us in the moment, if practiced over time, it can actually make real changes to the workings and shape of our brains—changes that actually help us heal from traumas and become more resilient to the stresses we all endure. In one study, researchers at Harvard University found that just eight weeks of mindfulness meditation made measurable and impactful differences in the brain.
“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” the study’s senior author Sara Lazar, a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology, said in a statement. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”
As explained in GOOD’s new video above, this type of meditative practice and the associated changes to our brain can even help us live more in the present moment and overcome that feeling of life speeding by like a freight train. It’s getting more obvious all the time: Soon meditation will be as common sense and as common practice as brushing your teeth. So, if you can build a habit to keep your teeth clean, how can you also take care of your brain in the same way? We created a few quick, illustrated tips to help you bring very simple mindful practices to some unexpected parts of your day:
And for real, you should probably give yourself two minutes and try that last tip before you move on to the next link on the internet.
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The video above was made possible with the support of Here To Be, a new social impact initiative from lululemon.
Ladder leads out of darkness.Photo credit 
Woman's reflection in shadow.Photo credit 
Young woman frazzled.Photo credit 
Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
Gif of Robin Williams via
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.