This week I decided to research the idea of mindfulness and how did connects to stress. I found Andy Puddicombe’s Ted Talk and decided it would be a good place to start. When he was in his 20s he became a monk as a way to cope with extreme stress. I was really intrigued when he said that meditation can have preventative nature when it comes to stress. He also quoted a study done by Harvard that states “our minds are lost in thought 46% of the time” and this state is also a cause of unhappiness. This stat was terrifying to me because the fact that we are potentially unhappy for half our life just because we do not know when to slow down our mind and stop. It seems so simple to choose ten minutes a day of mindfulness to better our whole life. I think the area I need the most work on is how easily I’m distracted, mostly by anxious thoughts. My biggest take away from this talk was that while we can’t always change how things go we can change how we react and experience the events that unfold. I will try my best this week to explore more mindfulness exercises on the Calm app.