Among its many benefits, mindfulness:

• Increases focus and concentration
• Improves emotional control
• Increases sense of calm and well-being
• Improves overall health
• Decreases stress response, blood pressure, and inflammation
• Slows down the aging processes
• Bolsters immunity
• Improves sleep
• Reduces anxiety
• Improves self-awareness
• Increases empathy and understanding of others
• Helps you meet life’s ups and downs with equanimity
• Helps create a balanced relationship to food
• Reduces self-judgment and judgment of others
• Increases gratitude
• Helps you recognize patterns that aren’t serving you and create new patterns that will serve you better
• Helps you focus energy on what’s actually happening rather than on mental stories
• Helps you flow with life’s current rather than exhausting yourself fighting against it

In the 1970s Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., introduced mindfulness to the mainstream when he created his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School to help patients cope with the pain and stress of illness. Since then, mindfulness has received increasing focus in the medical community. Research continues to study the effects of moment-to-moment awareness on the brain, emotional processing, and the immune system.

Several recent studies that have used MRI technology to scan the brains of long-term meditators have found notably higher concentrations of gray matter in meditators than in control groups. These are regions of the brain linked, according to a 2011 study published in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging,[1] to “learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking.”  A 2009 UCLA study[2] found “significantly larger volumes” of certain regions of the brain linked to regulating emotion in long-term meditators than the control group.  “We know that people who consistently meditate have a singular ability to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability and engage in mindful behavior,” said Eileen Luders, lead author of the study.