You don’t need a big chunk of time to reap the benefits of meditation: Mindfulness is the no-nonsense method for taking control of your thoughts and cutting through your day cool, collected, and ready for the unexpected. It means “being with whatever is in your face at any particular moment, and not pushing away things that we don’t want to deal with,” says Judson Brewer, Director of Research at the University of Massachusetts’s Center for Mindfulness. The good news is that you can practice it any time of the day, almost anywhere, for just a few seconds. “Mindfulness is to be present with experience with open curiosity, therefore anything can be an object of that practice,” Susan Smalley, a psychiatry professor at UCLA says. So whether you’re working out, going for a walk, or even eating lunch, you can transform the activity into a meditative practice. Here, Brewer and Smalley share their tricks for incorporating bouts of mindfulness into your day without having to shuffle your schedule.
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