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  • Essay / Debiasing the mind through meditation: mindfulness and...

    Mindfulness meditation is a growth in the person's perception at the moment and some people think it is a way unique way to overcome anxiety and discover greater wisdom within our minds. A person who practices this meditation tries to get rid of all unwanted thoughts, focus on present thoughts, concentrate on his attention and breathing. Some contemporary psychotherapists suggest that we can train our minds by practicing mindfulness meditation. Often, almost everyone finds themselves thinking thoughts that move from the present to the past and the future. This is called mind wandering. This can be very distracting when a person is trying to focus on certain tasks. Naturally, people who experienced less mind wandering demonstrated greater mindfulness, and previous studies have shown that practicing mindfulness meditation, even for eight minutes, can increase and mind wandering will decrease (Hafenbrack, 2013). In the study Debiasing the Mind Through Meditation: Mindfulness and the Sunk -Cost Bias, researchers study how mindfulness meditation affects our sunk cost biases, meaning people tend to continue investing money , time or effort into something only because they have already invested a lot of money, time or effort (Hafenbrack, 2013). ). By definition, a sunk cost situation is an event that occurred in the past. So when we don't return to the past in our thoughts, according to the law of balance, our thoughts are more focused on the present time, which positively affects our attention and decision-making. . Recent studies have also shown that thinking about future events (that might not even happen) can negatively affect people's attention in the present moment, because they "are influenced by the emotions they expect to feel in the future” (Hafenbrack, 2013)... .... middle of article...... according to Dr. Jonathan Schooler, of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Santa Barbara in California, “Mind wandering seems to be very useful for planning and creative thinking” (Gargiulo, 2013). Additionally, Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman (Professor of Psychology at New York University) said that problem solving, creativity, goal-oriented thinking, future planning, and another person's perspective have need space in our brain to happen. To support this, in the article The Costs and Benefits of Mind-Wandering: A Review, a study was conducted that reveals the crucial role of mind-wandering in problem solving, planning and creativity (Mooneyham, 2013). In this article, the author asks whether mind wandering is the real cause of the big mistakes we make. It is clear that phenomena such as mind wandering deserve further analysis and study..