Mindful February 2016

How often do you exercise? Fitness SAY THEY EXERCISE AT LEAST THREE TIMES A WEEK (23% work out every single day). Bravo on being mentally and physically fit, people! Why do you exercise? 91% DO IT FOR HEALTH—the clear priority here. After that, just 15% exercise because it’s “fun,” while 6% are in it for the perfect beach bod, and 6% are all about that endorphin rush. POPULAR ANSWERS: • It’s part of my commute • The dog needs a walk! • Stress relief What physical activity do you find most meditative? MOST COMMON ANSWERS: Walking; yoga; swimming SOME ANSWERS WE LIKED: • Washing floors • Cooking • Stretching • Knitting. (Hey, I move my hands!) • Motorcycle riding When you’re getting moving, what do you notice most in your…

Editor-in-Chief barry@mindful.org Our must-read stories this issue: “Let the Game Come To You” offers insight and practical instruction for how to find flow in our lives. On page 46. “How to Stick with Meditation …and Enjoy It” provides examples and lots of advice from teachers on how to keep going when inspiration lags. On page 38. Before he got all serious and entered politics, Senator Al Franken, as you likely know, was a Saturday Night Live comedian. His most unforgettable character was self-help guru Stuart Smalley, whose catch phrase — breathlessly sputtered out—was “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” The skit was funny and wildly popular because, in its desperate plea to be convincing, it captured perfectly the trick and the trap of most…

New photo series shows how phones change face-to-face relationships We wear busyness as a badge of honor. That badge often happens to be our phones. As Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and bestselling author notes, our phones provide us with the sweet promise that we’ll never have to be bored again, but they’re incompatible with being in a sustained relationship. After watching one family at a cafe ignore each other in favour of their screens, photographer Eric Pickersgill created “Removed,” a photo series that captures how we let our phones invade intimate moments. Writing about the cafe experience on his website, Pickersgill describes how the mother stared out the window and looked “sad and alone in the company of her closest family.” And never has being “alone together” looked so haunting.…

mindful The 3,000 euros a day that wish-making tourists toss into Rome’s historic Trevi Fountain helps to subsidize a supermarket for the city’s poor. Tyler Hively noticed fitness apps were ignoring his tribe. So he came up with Free Wheel, a wheelchair fitness app to track caloric burn and plan routes based on slope, altitude, and incline. To protest the US gender wage gap, a pop-up shop, LessThan100, moves around the country selling products made by women— and charges female customers a price that accounts for the pay gap in the locale they’ve set up shop in. Michihiko Iwamoto never forgot the trash-fueled DeLorean in Back to the Future. Now, the 51-year-old CEO of a recycling technology firm is partnering with NBC Universal Entertainment Japan to create a real-life model…

TEACHING MINDFULNESS SKILLS TO KIDS AND TEENS Edited by Christopher Willard and Amy Saltzman • Guilford Two leaders in the movement to educate the whole child offer a comprehensive resource for teachers, parents, administrators, and social workers. And none too soon, since programs bringing mindfulness into schools grow daily, as does interest in the young brain. Here you’ll find lots of practical applications (in settings ranging from art class to the gym to the classroom) and also scientific inquiry into how mindfulness training might work in the adolescent brain. THE HAPPINESS TRACK How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success Emma Seppälä • Harper One Seppälä’s take on our busyness addiction is refreshingly non-punitive—we don’t slave because we’re suckers for stress, it’s because we want to do…

Most of us think women’s brains are geared for empathy while men’s brains play dead when they have to interpret and process emotions. But the truth is, in fact, quite a bit messier—despite what some of the research claims. The ability to feel what others feel and intuit their emotions from their body language, tone of voice, and other indirect clues is not only something that women are supposedly better at than men, but one that reflects (some researchers contend) hardwired sex-based differences in the brain. Among the cadre of scientists who study this, the empathy gap is considered strong evidence for “the essential difference” between female and male brains, namely, that female brains are good at sympathizing and male brains at using logical thinking to classify and analyze the…