“My orientation at this point is to really lower the bar: to not have any aspirations to crush it.” The more you demand of yourself during difficult periods, the greater the stress. “I’m experiencing depletion, worry, uncertainty,” Jha says. “We can pick up these practices at any moment, and it takes as little as 15 minutes a day to see benefits,” Jha says.Įnduring stressful stretches of time-like the coronavirus pandemic-isn’t easy for anyone, and neither is perfectly adhering to healthy practices during them. Practices that can strengthen attention can be as simple as tracking sensations of the breath, fostering kindness and connection with other people, or imagining a flashlight scanning the entire body and focusing where the light hits. Attention is important because “we need it for everything: focusing, noticing, making decisions, regulating our emotions,” Jha says. Jha’s research has found that mindfulness training tools strengthen attention in people under high-stress circumstances-even for active-duty military service members.
“It’s hijacking the energy and the ability of the prefrontal cortex to stay awake, for the lightbulb to go off.” Thinking of the brain in this way helps kids understand that to calm down, all they have to do is “quiet the dog down in the doghouse for a while.” One way to do this is to take a “brain break”-Hawn’s kid-friendly term for a quick meditation. “The amygdala is like a barking dog, and when he barks, the wise old owl in the prefrontal cortex can’t think, and can’t remember, and can’t do anything,” Hawn says. In MindUP, kids learn nicknames for key parts of the brain involved in regulating emotions.
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