22 Mar CBS 60 Minutes Spot on Mindfulness Training
Anderson Cooper joins a weekend mindfulness retreat led by Jon Kabat-Zinn. During this weekend retreat Anderson Cooper learns a lot about mindfulness. You can watch the whole video by going to the CBS 60 Minutes website. Here are some excerpts from the video:
Our lives are filled with distractions — email, Twitter, texting we’re constantly connected to technology, rarely alone with just our thoughts. Which is probably why there’s a growing movement in America to train people to get around the stresses of daily life…. It’s a practice called “mindfulness” and it basically means being aware of your thoughts, physical sensations, and surroundings…. After hours of meditating in 30-minute sessions it does get easier. Those waves of thought Kabat-Zinn described – they’re still there but you get less distracted by them…. At breakfast, we spent time relearning some of the very basic things in life – including how to eat food. Eating a meal in complete silence is a little awkward, but without conversation as a distraction…you taste more and eat less…. There have been a number of studies that show mindfulness can lead to those benefits, as well as improvements in memory and attention. Dr. Brewer is trying to understand how mindfulness can alter the functioning of the brain…. [He hooked up Anderson’s brain to 128 electrodes. “When I thought about something stressful, the cells in my brain’s posterior cingulate immediately started firing — shown by the red lines that went off the chart on the computer screen. When I let go of those stressful thoughts, and re-focused on my breath…within seconds the brain cells that had been firing quieted down — shown by the blue lines on the computer.” Dr. Brewer believes everyone can train their brains to reach that blue, mindfulness zone, but he says, all the technology we’re surrounded by makes it difficult.
Judson Brewer: If you look at people out on the street, if you look at people at restaurants, nobody’s having conversations anymore. They’re sitting at dinner looking at their phone, because their brain is so addicted to it. The irony is, many of the people responsible for creating the gadgets that distract us are themselves practicing mindfulness. More than 2,000 people from companies like Google, Facebook and Instagram showed up earlier this year in San Francisco for a mindfulness conference called Wisdom 2.0.
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