Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world

(Meaningful work, whether paid or unpaid, is a sure-fire way of boosting happiness.) Mindfulness is a ‘coming to your senses’ that

For example, if you try and solve the problem of feeling tired and stressed, you will also keep in mind the ‘places you don’t want to visit’ such as exhaustion, burnout and breakdown. So now, in addition to feeling tired and stressed, you begin conjuring up new fears for yourself, and this only enhances your anxieties and stresses, leading to even

Professor Åsberg suggests that those of us who continue downward furthest are likely to be those who are the most conscientious, those whose level of self-confidence is closely dependent on their performance at work, i.e. those who are often seen as the best workers, not the lazy ones. The diagram also shows the sequence of accumulating

people who are low on a scale of mindfulness – those who rush from one thing to another, who find it difficult to stay in the present and who get so focused on their goal that they lose touch with the outside world – the amygdala (at the heart of the fight/flight system) is chronically overactive.

After years of unhappiness, stress and exhaustion, she’d learned to relax and had begun to live again.

This bullying script may once have helped them get what they wanted in life, but now it simply exhausts them.

You learn to stop wasting time pointlessly running through the same old habits of thinking and doing that have long since stopped serving any useful purpose. It also means that you are less likely to end up striving for too long towards goals that it might be wiser to let go of for a while. You become fully alive and aware again

friend. If you simply accept life as it is, you will be a lot more fulfilled and increasingly worry free.

When mood is low, motivation follows action, rather than the other way around. When you put the action first, motivation follows.