A Q&A with Jack Kornfield about giving feedback at work, using social media wisely, and the poetry in his teachings.

Heart disease is the leading killer in the United States, accounting for about 1 in 4 deaths every year. So, whatever decreases the risks or symptoms of heart disease would significantly impact society’s health. Mindfulness may help with that.

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Instead, try this: When you wake up, spend two minutes in your bed simply noticing your breath. As thoughts about the day pop into your mind, let them go and return to your breath.

The best way to to set ourselves up to keep meditating is knowing our intention. Why do we want to meditate? Being clear about what we want to get out of our practice — whether it’s to feel happier, feel calmer, be more focused, or be less stressed — will be a big help in creating the right attitude going into it.

Set a timer on your phone to remind you to meditate, or subscribe to a meditation app that sends you notifications.

Once you finish this practice and get ready to start working, mindfulness can help increase your effectiveness. Two skills define a mindful mind: focus

In this meditation, you bring your awareness to different parts of your body, commonly starting at your feet and traveling to the top of your head.

Being present to others enabled people to bring more attention to relationships and to appreciate their time with others. They talked about how being present to others increase your vibration helped them let go of distressing histories, allowing them to relate to others in new ways. Disagreements also became more constructive, as participants were able to identify their communication problems, and were better able to take on another’s perspective and focus on potential solutions. Study participants also described having more energy, feeling less overwhelmed by negative emotion, and being in a better position to cope with and support others.

Meditation does have an impact on physical health—but it’s modest. Many claims have been made about mindfulness and physical health, but sometimes these claims are hard to substantiate or may be mixed up with other effects. That said, there is some good evidence that meditation affects physiological indices of health. We’ve already mentioned that long-term meditation seems to buffer people from the inflammatory response to stress. In addition, meditators seem to have increased activity of telomerase, an enzyme implicated in longer cell life and, therefore, longevity. But there’s a catch. “The differences found [between meditators and non-meditators] could be due to factors like education or exercise, each of which has its own buffering effect on brains,” write Goleman and Davidson in

It helps people have a break with whatever they were doing before the meeting, and to focus their thoughts and respond to one another in a way that’s more thoughtful and respectful.

In another study, people with heart disease were randomly assigned to either an online program to help them practice meditation or to a waitlist for the program while undergoing normal treatment for heart disease.

Because they’re experts on how the mind works, they offer friendly motivation and practical advice beginners typically need, like tips for using what we learn during meditation in real life.

According to neuroscience research, mindfulness practices dampen activity in our amygdala and increase the connections between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. Both of these parts of the brain help us to be less reactive to stressors and to recover better from stress when we experience it. As Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson write in their new book,