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

We re-live past events and re-feel their pain, and we pre-live future disasters and so pre-feel their impact. Meditation trains the mind so

Empathy and feeling genuine compassion and loving-kindness towards yourself and others have hugely beneficial effects on health and wellbeing. The

You are learning how to dissolve the first step in the chain that drives negative spirals. Your body is processing your troubles in a radically different way. By letting go of the need to ‘fix’ things, a more profound healing has the chance to begin.

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

to hold the difficult aspects of your daily life, as well as your beliefs or expectations about them, and to move in closer to them.

So if we feel stressed or in danger, our minds dig up memories of when we felt threatened in the past, and then create scenarios of what might happen in the future if we cannot explain what is going on now. The result is that the brain’s

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

You will eventually be able to see more clearly that some things in life are less important than you had thought, and find it easier to let go of over-caring about them.

Your projects and preoccupations then become adhesive and all-consuming,

Further, Cara realised that she was also compounding her suffering, not only by saying, ‘I must be busy’, but also by repeating to herself, ‘Things used to be different.