Rise to the occasion with the right meditation
technique
Relaxnews
(AFP) 17 hrs
ago
A
first-of-its-kind study has identified meditation techniques that
could put you in the mindset to adapt from moment to moment
depending on your goals.
The team set out to assess whether meditation
creates immediate changes in behavior, even for first-time
meditators.
"There are two fundamental types of meditation
that affect us differently," says co-author Lorenza Colzato of
Leiden University in the Netherlands.
The first Colzato describes as Open Monitor
Meditation, likewise referred to as OMM, which involves being
receptive to every thought and sensation.
On
the flipside, Focused Attention Meditation (FAM) entails
concentrating on a specific thought or objective.
In
the study, 36 first time meditators were divided into two groups,
one of which practiced FAM, the other practiced OMM.
After their 20-minute séances, they were asked
to perform a task that required them to constantly adjust their
behavior.
The exercise also required them to
discriminate between important and irrelevant information quickly
as it flowed in.
The FAM group performed significantly better
at the task, according to the study.
"Even if preliminary, these results provide
the first evidence that meditation instantly affects behavior and
that this impact does not require practice," says Colzato. "As
such, our findings shed an interesting new light on the potential
of meditation for optimizing adaptive behavior."
The study was
published in the journal Consciousness and
Cognition.
In
2014, the same research team studied the effect of the techniqes in
question on creativity and concluded that OMM is the best choice to
hone that talent.
Working with 40 participants, they divided
them into groups of OMM and FAM practitioners and gave them a
thinking task after their 25 minute séance.
Those who had practiced OMM showed more
divergent thinking, indicating higher creativity levels than their
FAM-practicing counterparts.
That study was published
in the journal Mindfulness.
What's more, mindfulness meditation could
improve your decision-making skills, according to a recent paper
about an experiment in which participants practiced for just 15
minutes.
"We found that a brief period of mindfulness
meditation can encourage people to make more rational decisions by
considering the information available in the present moment, while
ignoring some of the other concerns that typically exacerbate the
'sunk cost bias,'" says Andrew Hafenbrack, a doctoral candidate at
the INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France.