Meditation has proven benefits, but the style that works best depends on a person's habits and preferences. In this episode of The Science of Happiness, we explore walking meditation, a powerful practice for feeling more centered and grounded. Dan Harris, host of the award-winning 10% Happier podcast, shares how walking meditation helps him manage the residual stress and anxiety from years of war reporting and high-pressure TV anchoring.

One kind of meditation technique that’s good for beginners is a body scan meditation, which helps us check in with our bodies by mentally scanning each part.

Acting with awareness: The ability to focus your attention on your own activities rather than doing things mindlessly or automatically.

When the timer rings, cease your current activity and do one minute of mindfulness practice. These mindful performance breaks will help keep you from resorting to autopilot and lapsing into action addiction.

You’ll want to fidget. You’ll want to shift around in your seat. You’ll notice weird twinges and feel itchy in the strangest of places. You’ll be bored and wonder how much time is left until you can stop. You’ll daydream. You’ll think about all the other things you need to attend to.

’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good

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That said, some types of meditation, including guided meditation and yoga nidra, are often done lying down. You’re less likely to drift into sleep when following someone’s voice.

Not bad for a self-knowledge few minutes of sitting in silence, right? And it just gets better from here. Read on to learn more about meditation and how to start meditating yourself.

The more we practice, the more we can see thoughts for what they are: just thoughts. It’ll get easier to let them go and “get out of our heads” to be more engaged in what we’re doing, whether we’re spending time with family, making time for self-care, or working against a deadline.

JM: Here in the San Francisco Bay area, we’re seeing growing interest. Initially, that was among tech and social media companies. Google has been a pioneer in providing mindfulness practice training for its employees. In fact, an engineer at Google first instituted a mindfulness training program there, which has now become the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, offering mindfulness training for companies around the world.

In another study, people with heart disease were randomly assigned to either an on-line program to help them practice meditation or to a waitlist for the program while undergoing normal treatment for heart disease.

, Jared Lindahl and colleagues interviewed cem meditators about “challenging” experiences. They found that many of them experienced fear, anxiety, relaxing sounds panic, numbness, or extreme sensitivity to light and sound that they attributed to meditation. Crucially, they found that these experiences weren’t restricted to people with “pre-existing” conditions, like trauma or mental illness; they could happen to anyone at any time. In this new domain of research, there is still a lot we do not understand. Future research needs to explore the relationship between case histories and meditation experiences, how the type of practice relates to challenging experiences, and the influence of other factors like social support. What kind of meditation is right for you? That depends. “Mindfulness” is a big umbrella that covers many different kinds of practice. A 2016 study compared four different types of meditation, and found that they each have their own unique benefits.

You’ll be surprised how fast it goes by. Add a minute or two with each successive session until you find the ideal duration for your daily practice.