Mind Time: How ten mindful minutes can enhance your work, health and happiness. Michael Chaskalson

      

       Copyright

      Thorsons

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      This edition published by Thorsons 2018

      FIRST EDITION

      Text © Michael Chaskalson and Megan Reitz 2018

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

      A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

      Michael Chaskalson and Megan Reitz assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

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      Source ISBN: 9780008252809

      Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008252816

      Version: 2018-01-12

       Dedication

      Michael

      For Annette –

      and for Ellie, Chloe, Ollie and Scarlett

      Megan

      For Steve, Mia and Lottie –

      and John, Rachel and Doug Goodge

       AIM

      Allowing

      Inquiry

      Meta-awareness

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       AIM

       Introduction

       Chapter 1: Why AIM?

       Chapter 2: Learning to AIM

       Chapter 3: AIM for Better Relationships

       Chapter 4: AIM for Happiness

       Chapter 5: AIM for Effective Work

       Chapter 6: AIM for Better Health

       Chapter 7: AIM for Better Work–Life Balance

       Chapter 8: AIMing When Times Are Tough

       The Beginning

       About Our Research

       About the Authors

       Acknowledgements

       Further Resources

       References

       Index of Searchable Terms

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      Your mind is extraordinary. Your mind. The mind that, right now, sees black marks on white paper and effortlessly turns them into bundles of meaning. The same mind that sees the word ‘sunset’ and fluently converts it into an inner vision of colours and shades. Without even trying.

      How extraordinary. How miraculous.

      To perform its amazing feats, your mind has an information-processing capacity greater than the combined power of all the computers, routers and Internet connections on Earth. Did you know, for example, that a tiny piece of your brain, the size of a grain of sand, contains 100,000 neurons and 1 billion synapses all communicating with each other.1 The brain is the mind’s supercomputer. It can connect 100 trillion bits of information.

      So with this amazing capacity available to us, how do we use our minds?

      The simple answer is, not as well as we might. For a start, about half the time we are awake we are thinking about something other than what is going on at the time.2 And we keep trying to multitask – ordering a pizza while walking the dog and Skyping a cousin in Australia. Recent research, however, shows multitasking significantly reduces our overall performance.3

      Then there are all the things our minds do on autopilot. Do you wake up in the morning and reach for your phone, blearily checking your emails while still lying in bed? Do you sit in traffic on your way to work scowling when someone beeps their horn, without even considering that they might be trying to tell you something useful?

      The