Meditating minds

Meditation is widely popular these days and is not only a practice followed by yogis and monks. Meditation is taught in schools, businesses allow employees time to meditate during the day and even footballers are embracing this ancient practice. This is no bad thing because meditation does have some very real and positive effects on your mind and your body.

Healing DAF brains

Every day you are bombarded with information, and some of that information is vital to staying alive, so you must pay attention to all of it. You need to know, for instance, if a car is coming around a corner, and you cannot risk ignoring any signs and indications around you that may tell you if that car, or some other important event, is on its way.

The drain on your brain that results from attending continuously to those stimuli that surround you is called “directed attention fatigue” (DAF). This DAF has been identified at the neurological level as the wearing away of your ability to voluntarily focus while ignoring distractions. The symptoms of DAF include heightened distraction, impatience, forgetfulness, poor judgement and increased stress. In essence, DAF is antithetical to happiness. This