Mindfulness, meditation for the busy programmer.

I only got into mindfulness meditation after listening to this interview to Mark Williams on NPR‘s Science Friday a few winters ago.

Mark Williams is professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oxford in England

During the interview, Mr. Williams mentioned multiple studies done in various Universities on how meditation can help reducing depression, migraines, mood swims and reduce stress.

It may sound silly, but knowing that there were actual scientific studies on the effects of meditation was a convincing factor for me.

I decided to get the book, Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World download the audio guides and get ready to start the program.

At the beginning I had to restart the program a few times. After a while I was able to establish a daily routine and was able to meditate at least once or twice a day. I will say that the key is in understanding the process and don’t get frustrated when things are more difficult that you thought.

The use of the recordings really helped me to keep focus and don’t blame myself every time my mind decided to start thinking on some of the problems of the day. Establishing the routine and taking it easy was the key to stay with it.

I’m so far very happy with the process and the results. It only requires a minimum commitment and once I worked a way to make it part of the daily work-flow is not very difficult to keep it going.
It has helped me to cope and brush off frustrations easily. I still have lots of work ahead of me, for example using some of the meditation techniques to avoid getting frustrated in the first place.

I’m ending up this post with the video of Jon Kabat-Zinn talking about Mindfulness at Google.