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Are You Mindful or Mindless? A Neuroscientist’s Perspective
Powerful scientific evidence from an addict turned brain scientist.
I spent most of my life mindlessly obsessing about the past and the future. I was consumed by anxiety and tormented by my mind, but completely unaware of the source of my suffering.
To escape my pain, I used drugs, resulting in 15 years of chronic heroin addiction. Heroin brought me to the very edge, but I was lucky. Pounded into submission by the most painful night of my life, I was forced to look at the world from a completely new perspective.
That was in October 2013, when I was first introduced to mindfulness. Since then, I’ve become a PhD student, an author, a life change strategist, and a lecturer at the top two universities in Ireland, all in the area of the neuroscience of mindfulness.
Understanding the science underlying mindfulness and meditation can be a powerful motivation for anyone building these habits. But it’s especially helpful if you’re the kind of person who wants evidence of efficacy before embarking on a new goal.
How the Brain Works
Neurons
Neurons are the basic building blocks of your brain, and there are about 86 billion of them. A single…
