Fully Present summary

Habits are hard to shake once they become ingrained. That can be a problem. Whether it’s smoking, overeating or spending too much time online, many of contemporary society’s problems are the result of negative behavioral patterns. There’s a good reason for that – changing your habits is tough! Why? Well, as economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner suggest, it all comes down to incentives and consequences.

Take the example they use in their bestseller Freakonomics. In what soon became a famous study, researchers looked at the hand-washing habits of medical staff working at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.

We’ve all been there. You’re already running late when the traffic in front of you suddenly grinds to an agonizing halt. As your frustration mounts, you can feel your breathing and heart rate increase, and your blood pressure shoots through the roof. How do you calm down?

A great place to start is to focus on your breathing. In fact, that’s pretty much where most meditation practices begin. Here’s how to do it.

Mindfulness is like a key to a new world of experiences. Mastering it can transform the most mundane chore in the world into something deeply satisfying and pleasurable. Sounds good, right? Stay tuned to find out how to unlock those doors of perception!

Meditation conjures images of remote monasteries and monks, but it’s actually deeply rooted in everyday life. In fact, one of the best ways to practice mindfulness is to take a walk. You don’t even need to go far. Find yourself a quiet room with enough space to walk 10 or 15 paces in a straight line, and you’re set. Here’s how it works.

There’s an old saying that pain can’t be avoided but suffering can. That might sound pretty counterintuitive. After all, the two can’t be separated. Pain leads to suffering, right?

Well, not quite. We often make unavoidable pain a lot worse by turning it into suffering. Think of childbirth. It’s undoubtedly rife with pain, but different women experience that pain in all sorts of different ways. Some suffer terribly and remember it as a horrific experience. Others perceive it as more of a transformative experience, rather than a traumatic one.

Negative emotions are part and parcel of being a human. All of us feel angry, sad, jealous or depressed from time to time. The problem, however, is that we’re often not very good at dealing with those emotions. In fact, most of us have downright unhealthy responses to negative feelings.

That’s usually because nobody teaches us how to deal with our emotions as children. After all, there’s no special emotional intelligence class in schools. That leaves it up to our parents, but they often don’t teach us about emotions, either. In the end, lots of us unconsciously adopt our parents’ dysfunctional strategies for coping with difficult emotions.

One of the most dispiriting phenomena in contemporary American society is the fact that so many people are filled with self-hatred and self-doubt. Even Meryl Streep, a fantastically successful actress who’s racked up a record 21 Academy Award nominations over the course of her career, once admitted that she still has doubts about whether or not she’s any good at her job!

So, what’s the answer? Well, the most effective antidote to self-hatred is loving-kindness. That’s a meditation practice drawn from Buddhist traditions. In this blink, we’ll take a look at how it works.

Imagine a park bench next to a busy playground. The sound of children screaming, squabbling and shouting is deafening. There’s no way on earth you’d be able to meditate here, right? Well, you can! It all comes down to what kind of mindfulness you’re practicing.

There are two basic types of mindfulness – let’s call them focused mindfulness and open mindfulness. As the names suggest, the former is about paying attention to one particular thing like your breathing. The latter, by contrast, is a way of being attentive to the whole world of sounds, sights and smells around you.