But people can learn mindfulness on their own. Simply learning to focus your attention on your breathing in the present moment is a big part of mindfulness. At a new website we’ve created, called Greater Good in Action, we offer several step-by-step guides to mindfulness practices.

Meditation is the practice of lightly holding your attention on an anchor, such as your breath, and gently bringing it back there when it wanders.

If you find yourself ruminating about something that happened, tell yourself: “remembering.” You can come up with your own labels, but the point is to simply acknowledge what’s coming up, give it a nod, and then let it go without engaging any further.

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Continue like this for two minutes. Noticing the breath moving into your body on the inhale, and leaving your body on the exhale.

To develop these skills in everyday life, you can try these exercises used in Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR program and elsewhere:

mindfulness skills might work in different ways. Look for future mindfulness research to follow a similar approach and to generate more fine-grained, actionable insights for us to apply to our lives.

Find “micro-moments” of mindfulness throughout the day to reset your focus and sense of purpose.

This exercise is often practiced walking back and forth along a path 10 paces long, though it can be practiced along most any path.

Body scan, another common practice where you bring attention to different parts of your body in turn, from head to toe.

When trying out these exercises, remember that different types of mindfulness practices have different benefits. It might take some experimentation to find the practice that’s right for you.

Next, when you get to the office, take 10 minutes at your desk or in your car to boost your brain with a short mindfulness practice before you dive into activity. Close your eyes, relax, and sit upright. Place your full mindfulness focus on your breath. Simply maintain an ongoing sound bath flow of attention on the experience of your breathing: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

JM: There are many different approaches, from apps that provide audio of guided meditations to on-sitio workplace training programs run by outside facilitators. A growing number of companies are offering mindfulness workshops. The earliest model, developed by Kabat-Zinn, is an eight-week course run by a trained facilitator, with mindfulness exercises that participants practice on their own.

It’s not surprising that meditation would affect attention, since many practices focus on this very skill. And, in fact, researchers have found that meditation helps deep healing music to counter habituation—the tendency to stop paying attention to new information in our environment. Other studies have found that mindfulness meditation can reduce mind-wandering and improve our ability to solve problems. There’s more good news: Studies have shown that improved attention seems to last up to five years after mindfulness training, again suggesting trait-like changes are possible.