Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn

What people said

spodek · 2012-12 · Strong recommendation

Jon Kabat-Zinn gave an hour-long talk at Google I found excellent too (they talk about it in this interview). Both restful and thought-provoking. If you're mildly interested, I recommend watching the video. I think this is the link -- [VIDEO] -- but I'm in China, which blocks YouTube, so please correct if it's wrong. Edit: his Wikipedia page -- [LINK] -- links to a bunch of talks he's given -- [LINK]

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vidar · 2010-06 · Strong recommendation

As engineers we should be looking at root cause, not fixing the superficial symptoms. The root cause here is that we don't have 100% control over the decisions that we make. The way to gain that control is not via willpower or superdiscipline, but rather through meditation which trains our brains to recognize the moment where we are about to fly off to Facebook/HN/Twitter. Mindfulness is the key word, see [VIDEO] Its almost embarrassing how much that video changed my perception of my decisionmaking.

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audiometry · 2017-08 · Recommendation

It's not the role or the job. Changing those offers a moment's escape, but then those thought and habit-patterns will return. I'm a commodity trader who's been fighting these issues for twenty years. I recommend that you investigate mindfulness first. This gives your mind/awareness the opportunity to recognize these unhelpful thought patterns being created by your brain-organ. Over time you can better balance your sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous systems, so you're not terrorized by your own amygdala. Jon Kabat-Zinn as a fantastic lecture at Google that explains mindfulness. [VIDEO] The mindfulness ability gives me the "fleeting moment of volition" where I can avoid immediate reaction to amygdala-terror. What I'm working on now is what Kabat-Zinn calls an "orthogonal rotation of thought" and what psychologists call "cognitive reappraisal training." The idea is to look at whatever problem you're traumatized by and intentionally choosing other ways to view it with different conclusions, and also to be able to observe the fear/problem without being stung so badly. This is a new skill I'm working on, and I think it's bearing fruit. I've been experimenting with some simple software to prod more of the orthogonal-type thinking, rather than suffering endless cycles of the same unskilled patterns. Good Luck. Feel free to DM me.

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