This is classic western scam to get you not to go to vacation :). I wouldn't trust anything.
Meditation is good for you and you will realize that you need to go on vacation during your meditation.
Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation
131–140 of 214 posts
Re: Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you drink coffee? Try 100% cutting out caffeine!
Any strategies to cut? If I don't drink my morning cup, I get bad headaches around the evening and basically stop functioning.
green tea matcha is a good alternative. 1 cup of green tea matcha has 1/3 of caffeine as a coffee cup. Since it is packed with L-theanine, it will also delay ingestion of caffeine, and you will feel less the typical crash
Wrote a quick post about coffee alternatives https://dailyhealthpoints.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/healthy-a...
Re: Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation
#133Mindfulness meditation is one of the pillars on which my life rests. If you have never done it before, realize that it's hard, especially if you fall anywhere on the ADHD spectrum, and it's just brutal for the first few weeks for anyone. As your brain becomes more still and your focus improves you'll notice your productivity improve. As the mental chatter drops you'll also notice the problems in your life, that you'v…
Can you advise an app or site? There are so many resources on the Net, from the crazy to the more esoteric, and it's hard to know which one makes sense.
Re: Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation
#134I've been going through challenging times and have been confronted with somethings I've never had to deal with before. There are a couple of things that trigger anxiety in me on a daily basis now. I wake up in the middle of the night with little anxiety episodes. I'm unfocused at work because of what feels like underlying emotional issues. The only thing that's helped (I am trying to fix without medication) are the t…
I came across this article a few minutes before reading this http://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/neuroscience-says-listenin... 'listening to that one song -- "Weightless" -- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants' overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in _their usual physiological resting rates'
This is even better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo6EkXHu5AI
Re: Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation
#135Now I can show this to my employees when they ask for vacation days. I won't allow anything but the best for them and meditation can be efficiently packed into the lunch break time frame.
HR everywhere should provide quiet rooms for meditation. It would cost almost nothing and be a benefit for attracting talent.
Re: Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation
#136Now I can show this to my employees when they ask for vacation days. I won't allow anything but the best for them and meditation can be efficiently packed into the lunch break time frame.
This is what bothers me about meditation. Sometimes meditation looks like a panacea. Your life s cks, your boss is an ssh*le, your personal relationships a mess, but if you meditate everything will be all right. Better to put some prozac in the water system.
Life doesn't relent. Even young, rich, beautiful people are susceptible to feelings of unsatisfactory-ness that leave them reaching for the booze and hard drugs or just feeling all around unfulfilled and miserable. Humans are built to run on a hedonic treadmill, not to be content in the moment.
Meditation is a tool so that when your life scks, your boss is an ssh*le, and your personal relationships are a mess, THEN someone cuts you off in traffic you take a minute or two of breath awareness and open monitoring instead of running them off the road and karate kicking them in the head.
It helps you relax into feelings of anger, pain, or depression instead of running from them and chasing your addictive behavior of choice to escape. Also like every other tool out there it isn't 100% effective.
Re: Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
__Meditation: the summary for technical people__ Yea I'm making this up. I'm enthusiastic about it, my username even reflects that I meditate ;) .. Introductory Level Witty, scientific book: Search Inside Yourself - Chade-meng Tan (he used to be a software engineer, now he's trying to set up the conditions for world peace) Take any MBCT, MBSR or 5-week or 8-week mindfulness course .. Beginner Level Retreat practice:…
Be quite careful giving advice about meditation. Under your "beginner" heading you suggest Dhamma - the 10 day 9 day silent course (I'm assuming vipassana is an example of this). I did a vipassana course after a similar suggestion. In me it triggered a full blown manic-psychotic (bipolar) episode. There had been no history of this in my family (or myself) before that point. If you're interested, I made a bunch of pod…
I had similar experience myself.
I wouldn't attribute the risk to the retreat itself, however, but to the vipassana method, which tends to evoke insight experiences as quickly as possible, without first calming the mind using single object samatha practice.
If someone were to just use classic anapanasati even for 10 days, I think the results would be somewhat different, as when properly praciced anapanasati calms the body and essentially turns of thinking first, which leads to much calmer and more pleasurable transformation of the mind. Insight experiences with active mind during vipassana practice always feel to me like open brain surgery. With some increasing understanding of not-self, however, it gets less and less scary with time.
Re: Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation
#138I've been going through challenging times and have been confronted with somethings I've never had to deal with before. There are a couple of things that trigger anxiety in me on a daily basis now. I wake up in the middle of the night with little anxiety episodes. I'm unfocused at work because of what feels like underlying emotional issues. The only thing that's helped (I am trying to fix without medication) are the t…
Do you drink coffee? Try 100% cutting out caffeine!
One thing I like to do is with anything addicting/I deem as necessary, every now and then I cut it out of my life for a duration. It helps increase my independence by avoiding decisions based on what I misbelieve are necessary.
I'm not sure if it's applicable to all, just something that I feel helps me a lot.
Re: Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternative viewpoint: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/17/heartmath-considered-in... , "HeartMath Considered Incoherent" Normally I wouldn't attack something that someone else feels is helping (even placebos can be helpful for some people), but this is the top comment.
HeartMath sounds like a good base with a lot of esoteric bullshit thrown on top. Maybe breathing in a consistent rhythm to get a coherent heart rate variability (HRV) is the sole magic behind meditation, HeartMath, etc? Here is a good TEDx talk by Alan Watkins on HRV: https://youtu.be/Q_fFattg8N0 (there is also a part 1, but part 2 has the good demo)
The whole Heartmath thing seems to me like an exotic way to teach and practice consistent slow, regular, deep breathing (which is definitely worthwhile thing to learn!).
I believe the "coherent" HRV curve they claim brings all these benefits is simply the effect of respiratory sinus arrythmia (why your heartrate decreases when you breathe in) while breathing at a very regular interval—the HRV curve just happens to be a good indicator of how regularly you're breathing.
Re: Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation
#140> You say vacation, I say meditation… Beneficial to what? The point of a vacation isn't about being more productivity at work. Productivity is not the goal.
I would argue that productivity is probably a good proxy for mental health on a per-employee basis. It's not the goal, but it's an easily measurable correlated value.