Mindful August 2016

What’s your ideal vacation? 35% PREFER TO EXPLORE NEW CULTURES by getting to know locals, and 19% just want to lounge on the beach with unlimited food and drink. 11% choose the best of both worlds, exploring new cultures while staying at a fancy hotel. 8% like to trek through mountains with only a backpack. 3% opt for the staycation, complete with PJs, TV, blankets, and snacks. So many great options! Where do you go when you eat out on vacation? 84% EAT WHERE THE LOCALS EAT, while 9% seek out fine dining whenever possible. 3% opt for an all-inclusive resort so they don’t have to think about it, 2% look for a recognizable chain restaurant, and 2% go the adventurous route, grabbing something from a street cart. What continent…

Our must-read story this issue: “The Upside of Envy” digs into what makes us want what others have, and how that can teach us about ourselves. On page 58. Rushing to catch a plane, I lost my hat, a cherished hat, in an airport lounge. And now my hat is a file number in the Lost and Found system. And ever it shall remain. Maybe someone somewhere is wearing it. I hope so. I want them to enjoy it as much as I did. Once again I was confronted by the silliness of how upset I was by losing some little possession. It’s not a crime to love a hat. But it’s doubly annoying to lose a trifling thing and be annoyed by losing it. It’s like Russian nesting dolls…

At the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Manhattan, in addition to having fresh linens and toiletries, rooms now come with a meditation cushion, so guests can “enjoy a meditative moment looking out onto the city.” Each cushion comes with a tag offering basic meditation instructions. Happy Birthday, MARC! Ten years ago, mindfulness was not a word jumping out of every other article in the paper, so starting the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA was a landmark event. With justifiable pride, the center is celebrating 10 years of helping students and the public synchronize their minds and bodies. With a community-centered, research-based approach, MARC offers year-round, six-week-long programs open to everyone, for-credit courses for students, retreats, workshops, free classes, and online recordings. MARC also conducts studies of mindfulness through its affiliation…

Two University of Washington students invented gloves that convert American Sign Language to written and spoken text. Aetna pays employees to get more sleep. If a worker can prove (with a Fitbit) they’ve gone 20 nights sleeping 7 hours or more, they’ll be paid $25 a night, up to $500 a year. Talk about a “dream” job. When Judge Lou Olivera sentenced Joseph Serna, a veteran with PTSD, to 24 hours in jail for driving while intoxicated, Olivera was worried the isolation would negatively affect Serna’s PTSD, so Olivera served the time with him. The city of Grenoble, France, set up short-story dispensers in public areas—so instead of gazing mindlessly into your phone, you can read quality literature for free while waiting for the bus or your chronically late friend.…

ON THE VERGE Wake Up, Show Up, and Shine Cara Bradley • New World A business coach, a basketball coach, and a congressman endorse this book, which gives you a good idea of whom it’s aimed for. Bradley is a former professional figure skater—think of many long cold mornings of practice and thousands of trips and falls—who now teaches yoga and mindfulness, to develop what athletes call “mental strength” or agility. Bradley’s upbeat spirit jumps off the page in a book that is both practical and inspirational for active people who want to synchronize their body and mind to perform at their best. EAT RIGHT: NOW! Judson Brewer • Claritas MindSciences Stress-eating is like scratching an itch. “We get a momentary distraction because our brain gets a spritz of dopamine,”…

Researchers often find that after several weeks of compassion meditation practice, people perform more acts of kindness and caring outside the lab, such as visiting a retirement home or telling a coworker what they appreciate about her. They also report more feelings of compassion toward suffering people. They act more kindly toward strangers. They become less subject to the “bystander effect,” whereby everyone assumes that someone else will step up and come to the aid of a stranger in need. They more readily offer an exhausted woman a chair, as occurred in a 2015 study at Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. Good news, right? Sharon Begley is senior science writer with The Boston Globe Media Group, author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, and…