Tag: meditation and yoga

How to build a habit in 5 steps, according to science | CNN

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Most of us assume those superachievers who are always able to squeeze in their workout, eat healthy foods, ace their exams and pick their kids up on time must have superhuman self-control. But science points to a different answer: What we mistake for willpower is often a hallmark of habit.

People with good habits rarely need to resist the temptation to laze on the couch, order greasy takeout, procrastinate on assignments or watch one more viral video before dashing out the door. That’s because autopilot takes over, eliminating temptation from the equation. Having established good habits, little to no willpower is required to choose wisely.

Sounds great, right? The only catch is that building good habits takes effort and insight. Thankfully, science offers both guidance on how to begin and strategies to lighten your lift. Here are a few research-backed steps sourced from my book, “How to Change,” that can set you on the path from where you are to where you want to be.

The way you define the goal you hope to turn into a habit does matter. Goals such as “meditate regularly” are too abstract, research has shown. You’ll benefit from being more specific about what exactly you aim to do and how often.

Don’t say “I’ll meditate regularly.” Say, “I’ll meditate for 15 minutes each day.”

Having a bite-size objective makes it less daunting to get started and easier to see your progress.

Now that you have established a specific goal, it’s time to think about what will cue you to follow through. Scientists have proven that you’ll make more progress toward your goal if you decide not just what you’ll do, but when you’ll be cued to do it, as well as where you’ll do it and how you’ll get there.

A plan like “I’ll study Spanish for 30 minutes, five days a week” is OK. But a detailed, cue-based plan like “Every workday after my last meeting, I’ll spend 30 minutes studying Spanish in my office” is much more likely to stick as a habit.

Making this kind of plan reduces the chances you’ll forget to follow through because the when and where in your plan will serve as cues to action that jog your memory. Even better: Put your plan on your calendar so you’ll get a digital reminder. An established, hyperspecific plan also forces you to anticipate and maneuver around obstacles and makes procrastination feel more sinful.

When we set out to build a new habit, most of us overestimate our willpower and set a course for the most efficient path to achieving our end goal. Say you hope to get fit by exercising regularly — you’ll likely look for a workout that can generate quick results such as grinding it out on a treadmill. But research has shown you’ll persist longer and ultimately achieve more if you instead focus on finding ways to make goal pursuit fun.

When it comes to exercise, this might mean going to Zumba classes with a friend or learning how to rock climb. If you’re trying to eat more fruits and vegetables, it might mean swapping doughnut breakfasts for tasty smoothies, which can combine multiple servings of fruits and veggies in one delicious drink. Because you are far more likely to stick with something you enjoy and repetition is key to habit formation, making the experience positive is critical, but it’s often overlooked.

One excellent way to make goal pursuit fun is to try what I call “temptation bundling.” Consider only letting yourself enjoy an indulgence you crave while working toward your goal. For example, only let yourself binge-watch your favorite show while at the gym or enjoy a beloved podcast while cooking healthy meals. My own research shows that temptation bundling improves follow-through; it transforms goal pursuit into a source of pleasure, not pain.

By the time we put a behavior on autopilot, a lot of us fall into fairly consistent routines, tending to exercise, study or take our medication at the same time of day and in the same place. But when you’re in the start-up phase of habit building, contrary to popular opinion, my research suggests it’s important to insert some variability deliberately into your routine.

You’ll still want to have a first best plan — maybe an 8 a.m. meditation session if you’re trying to kick-start a mindfulness habit. But you should also experiment with other ways of getting the job done. Try to mix in a noon session and maybe a 5 p.m. meditation, too.

Successful habit building relies on frequently repeating a behavior, and if your routine becomes too brittle, you’ll follow through less often. A flexible habit means you can still do what you need to even when a wrench is thrown in your first best plans — say, a traffic jam on the way to dropping the kids off at school that gets in the way of your morning meditation.

One way to be flexible that’s proven useful is by giving yourself “emergency reserves.” Emergency reserves are a limited number of get-out-of-jail-free cards for those days when you really can’t squeeze in your 10 minutes of meditation, regular jog or Spanish practice.

It’s more motivating to set a tough goal for yourself — meditating every day, for instance — than an easy one, according to research. But missing multiple subgoals along the way can be discouraging. A couple of emergency reserves each week give you the flexibility to miss a day when a real emergency arises without getting discouraged and abandoning your objective entirely.

This step is obvious but sometimes overlooked. Seek out social support. Social support isn’t just about having cheerleaders and people to hold you accountable — though both can add value, so I’d suggest telling your friends and family about your goals.

We’re strongly influenced by the behaviors of the people around us, evidence shows. Want to start running regularly? You’re probably better off joining an established running club than asking a few friends who aren’t yet in the habit of jogging to get in shape with you. People in the running club have already built the habits you want. You can learn from them about what works and gain friends who will make you feel like a slouch when you slack off.

Good habits are contagious, so try to catch some by hanging out with people who are a little ahead of you on the learning curve. It’s important not to get too crazy — if you try to train with marathoners when you’re just hoping to work up to a 5K, I’ve found it can be discouraging.

But in general, research by myself and others shows that finding people to socialize with and emulating those who have already accomplished what you want to accomplish can make a world of difference. As an added bonus, when you pursue your goals in tandem with people you like, that makes it more fun!

One last thing to keep in mind is that habits can take some time to form. They don’t click overnight. Despite claims that there’s a “magic number” of days it takes to form a habit, my collaborators and I have disproven this myth in our recent research. We all form habits at our own speed, but for simpler and frequently repeated behaviors such as hand sanitizing, we can expect speedier habit formation than for more complex behaviors such as hitting the gym, which, on average, can take months rather than weeks to put on autopilot.

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Fall asleep faster with mental tricks that calm your racing mind | CNN

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Sign up for CNN’s Sleep, But Better newsletter series. Our seven-part guide has helpful hints to achieve better sleep.



CNN
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You’re exhausted, your body yawning for sleep. Yet once your head hits the pillow, your mind is flooded with worry, making sleep elusive, at times impossible.

Don’t fret, experts say: There are relaxation techniques you can use to calm that racing mind.

“Think of these relaxation exercises as tools in your tool kit for better sleep,” said sleep specialist Rebecca Robbins, an instructor in the division of sleep medicine for Harvard Medical School.

“Practice them, and you’ll get better and better at falling asleep, which is the holy grail, right? No one wants to spend time tossing and turning at night.”

Deep breathing is a science-backed method of calming the body and mind that can be done easily before you get into bed and when you wake during the middle of the night.

Changing the rhythm of your breath slows your heart rate, reduces blood pressure and stimulates the body’s parasympathetic “rest and digest” system, which can take worry and anxiety offline.

“Consciously focusing on the breath can help you separate yourself from the darting thoughts that fly through your brain,” Robbins said.

There are a number of deep breathing techniques you can try. Diaphragmatic breathing, also known as belly breathing, focuses on relaxing the diaphragm, the main muscle of respiration. Start by taking a deep breath through your nose to a slow count of six, making sure that you can feel your stomach rise with your hand as it fills with air. Count to six again as you let the breath slowly escape.

“Strive for effortless inhales that are soft and soundless while treating your exhales like gentle, extended sighs of relief,” suggested CNN contributor Dana Santas, a certified strength and conditioning specialist and mind-body coach.

Stay in the moment, Santas said, by focusing on the sounds and sensations of your breath: “Direct all of your senses to follow the path of air in through your nose, down your throat, into your lungs and out again. If your mind wanders, bring it back to your breath, happening in the here and now.”

Meditation is a centuries-old method of calming the body and the mind. Studies show it can help perfectionists stop judging themselves and can assist in the treatment of smoking, pain, addictive disorders and depression, among others.

Using direct measures of brain function and structure, one study found it only took 30 minutes a day of meditation practice over the course of two weeks to produce a measurable change in the brain.

“When these kinds of mental exercises are taught to people, it actually changes the function and the structure of their brain,” neuroscientist Richard Davidson, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds, told CNN in an earlier interview.

There are many resources on the internet to help someone begin to meditate. Davidson and his colleagues have created a free, science-based app designed to help people practice meditation and mindfulness.

Visualization is another sleep aid. Picture a calm and peaceful spot in your mind’s eye and fill it with specific objects, colors and sounds. Researchers have found that people who visualize in detail were able to push unwelcome thoughts more successfully from their minds.

If you have trouble populating the scene, the researchers suggest asking yourself questions about smell, touch and light, such as “Can I feel the sun on my skin? What do I smell in the air?”

You can also visualize your body relaxing, experts say. While breathing deeply and slowly, imagine your breath is a wind coursing through the body, easing stress and relaxing tension as it moves through each part of the body and then escapes.

“I like to think of the breath as a light in your mind’s eye that grows when you inhale and gets smaller as you exhale,” Robbins said. “Those tangible strategies where you visualize something and match that to a breath are really powerful.”

Most of us aren’t even aware of how much tension we carry in our muscles until it shows up in backaches and headaches.

Progressive muscle relaxation is a way of relaxing those muscles, thus making it easier to fall asleep, experts say. You tense and release muscle groups in the body in a certain order, starting at the head and working your way down to the toes and feet.

Each section of the body is tightly tensed and held for 10 seconds as you breathe in. Strive to squeeze each muscle hard, but not to the point of cramping or pain. Then, as you breathe out, relax the muscle suddenly and all at once. University of Michigan Health recommends you do the exercises in a systematic order that you can find here.

There’s an added benefit to the exercise, experts say: There’s no room in your brain for anxious thoughts.

Here’s a way to stop your mind from repetitively listing all the things you need to do (or haven’t done), but it only works if you do it before you hit the sack.

“Don’t worry in bed. Schedule a ‘worry time’ – a period of time outside of the bedroom, outside of sleep, to worry about the things that naturally creep in your mind at night,” said sleep specialist Dr. Raj Dasgupta, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.

“Write down a list of things you need to do tomorrow,” suggested Dr. Vsevolod Polotsky, a professor of medicine and director of sleep research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“You can even email it to yourself. It gives you satisfaction and the realization that it is night and there’s nothing you can do with your list, but you can attend to it tomorrow,” Polotsky said.

All these mental tricks and relaxation tips serve a purpose beyond that night’s sleep, experts say.

“They are extremely beneficial from a classical conditioning standpoint,” Robbins said. “If your body knows what comes after the end of these activities is sleep, then you start to condition yourself, and after a bit of time, your body will more easily slip into a state of relaxation, which increases your chances of sleep.”

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Go ahead and sigh. It’s good for you | CNN

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Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Stress, But Less newsletter. Our six-part mindfulness guide will inform and inspire you to reduce stress while learning how to harness it.



CNN
 — 

Sighs — those long, exhales of breath often accompanied with a bit of a whimper — have long been seen as a sigh of melancholy, frustration or even despair, leading us to ask the sighing person, “What’s wrong?”

A recent study turns that notion on its head. Instead of seeing sighs as sadness or exasperation, recognize them for what they accomplish — stress relief, said Dr. David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Center on Stress and Health at Stanford University School of Medicine.

“People think taking a deep breath is the way to ease stress,” he said. “But it turns out that exhaling slowly is a better way to calm yourself.”

You breathe without thinking, but what’s the best way to inhale and exhale while you’re thinking about it — especially if the goal is better health?

To find out, Spiegel and his team conducted a study, published earlier this year in Cell Reports Medicine, comparing three different types of deep breathing with mindfulness meditation. The goal was to see whether a breathing technique might be as effective as meditation in reducing stress.

Researchers sorted 114 people into four groups and asked them to practice mindful meditation or one breathing exercise — box breathing, cyclic hyperventilation or cyclic sighing — for five minutes a day for 28 days.

Box breathing requires a person to breathe in, hold, breathe out, and pause equally (like the sides of a box) to the count of four. In cyclic hyperventilation, a person breathes in deeply and out quickly — the inhalations are much longer than the exhalations.

In cyclic sighing, a person inhales through the nose until the lungs are halfway full, then pauses briefly. The lungs are then filled completely with another breath, and then the breath is slowly exhaled out the mouth.

“You want the exhalation to be like twice as long as the inhalation,” said Spiegel, who is also the medical director of Stanford’s Center for Integrative Medicine.

The team then assessed mood, anxiety levels and sleep behavior after each breathing or meditation session, as well as respiratory and heart rate variability.

Sleep was not affected, the study found. All forms of breathing and meditation increased positive mood and improved anxiety. However, breathing was more effective than meditation, with cyclic sighing making the most difference, the study found.

“Cyclic sighing is a pretty rapid way to calm yourself,” Spiegel said. “Many people can do it about three times in a row and see immediate relief from anxious feelings and stress.”

While interesting, the study was small, and doesn’t take away from all the work in progress on the benefits of any form of breath work or meditation, said stress management expert Dr. Cynthia Ackrill, former editor for Contentment Magazine, produced by the American Institute of Stress.

“We know that bringing your attention to any form of breath work starts the process of awareness that feeds mindfulness and its benefits,” she said in an email. “As long as we are all experimenting with mind-body connections with open minds and finding something that calms us, yay!”

Deliberately taking a slow, deep breath, holding it, and then letting it out slowly activates the parasympathetic nervous system, responsible for controlling how the body rests and digests, Spiegel said. Heart rate slows, blood pressure drops, digestion is improved and the mind begins to wind down and relax.

Contrast that to a sharp inhale of breath, which you might take when you’re afraid or in danger. That triggers the sympathetic nervous system, responsible for getting us ready to fight or flee.

“The brake works more healthfully than the accelerator here,” Spiegel said. “By slowing your heart when you do this cyclic sighing you’re immediately soothing yourself in a rather rapid way.”

“We believe breathing is a pathway into mind-body control,” he added. “It’s part of the autonomic system like digestion and your heartbeat, but unlike those body functions, you can easily regulate breathing.”

This isn’t the first study on the topic. Researchers have been busy trying out different methods to see which calms the body the quickest, longest, or most deeply, and which gives the most health benefits.

Many breathing methods are borrowed from ancient yoga, martial arts and meditation practices. For example, the 4-7-8 method, in which you breathe in while counting to four counts, hold the breath for seven counts and exhale while counting to eight, is based on pranayama, an ancient form of breath regulation practiced in Hinduism and Buddhism.

There are all sorts of variations: The 4-4 method, in which you breathe in and out for a count of four; the 6-6 method, in which you breathe in and out to the count of six; alternate nostril breathing and many more.

Diaphragmatic breathing, also known as belly breathing, has been practiced for millennia by practitioners of tai chi and yoga. It requires the breath to be inhaled so deeply that it fills the abdomen — you can tell if you’re doing it right by watching your stomach rise and fall.

A 2020 meta-analysis found diaphragmatic breathing is especially beneficial for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and might be helpful in reducing stress and anxiety and treating constipation, eating disorders, high blood pressure and migraines.

You don’t have to sigh or breathe loudly to get the benefits of any forms of breathing, Ackrill said.

“These don’t need to be audible sighs, you can just change the rate quietly,” she said. “And you just might get the people around you to slow down their breathing as well.”

So go ahead. Take a deep breath and let it out in a huge, long, slow sigh. And if anyone does ask what’s wrong, you can smile and say, “Absolutely nothing! I’m just releasing my stress.”

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