D74F6C-791E-4160-82CD-B40CD772C3E9_cx0_cy8_cw0_w650_r1.jpg' alt='Voa News Mp3' title='Voa News Mp3' />voa. From VOA Learning English, this is the Health Lifestyle report. A mind filled with fear and bad thoughts is an unquiet mind. When you are worried, it can be hard to. VOA,. Bilingual News Learn A Word Words And Idioms. Collection Note Template. Everyone feels sad from time to time. But what happens when that sadness lasts a long time Is it just a passing feeling or the medical condition known as depressionMeditation May Reduce Stress, Increase Focus. From VOA Learning English, this is the Health Lifestyle report. A mind filled with fear and bad thoughts is an unquiet mind. When you are worried, it can be hard to direct your attention on even a minor problem. For some people, this can interfere with work, sleep and other activities. In others, it could lead to a serious mental disorder. D8H-Nwd7c/hqdefault.jpg' alt='Voa News Mp3' title='Voa News Mp3' />People who suffer from anxiety, a nervous disorder, have unreasonable thoughts and fears about the future. Often they are unable to control these thoughts. They are also less able to deal with stress. Two recent studies found that doing mindful meditation exercises can reduce signs of stress in people suffering from anxiety and make them more productive. The studies also showed that mindful meditation can lower a persons stress levels. What is mindful meditationIf this page isnt working properly, go to http You can hear the most recent VOA news. Text and MP3 Files for ESLEFL Students. You can listen online or download the audio files. English Listening Practice. Give us 5 minutes, and well give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our. Unsv2003. Meditation is a simple, low cost way to help calm an unquiet brain. We can define mindful meditation as thinking quietly about what is going on in the present. You dont think about the past or the future. You think only about your own breathing and what you sense around you. Should you start thinking about a future task or a past mistake, you simply tell your mind to stop and return to the here and now. Another part of mindful meditation is to let yourself experience any thoughts and feelings without judgment. Around the world, the number of people reporting stress and anxiety is increasing. The World Health Organization says that between 1. The WHOs website says this increased the number from 4. This is not just a health issue, but also an economic one. WHO experts estimate that depression and anxiety disorders cost the world economy US1 trillion each year. Stressed and anxious workers who cant stay focused are not productive. University of Waterloo study. In one recent study, Canadian researchers wanted to see how well anxious, stressed people completed an activity. The researchers found that meditating for 1. So, mindful meditation may help people stay on task. Mengran Xu is a clinical psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. He and his colleagues studied with people who showed signs of anxiety. We know that anxious people in general, if you ask them to stay on task, it is hard for them. They tend to wander. They tend to worry. But those people who practiced mindfulness didnt. They were able to stay on task. In this study, 8. Then researchers interrupted them as they performed the work. The researchers studied their ability to stay focused. Then the 8. 2 individuals were divided into two groups. One group listened to an audio book. The other group did mindful meditation for about 1. Finally, researchers asked all the subjects to go back to their computers. Xu says that those who meditated performed much better on the task. The anxious people who listened to the audio books, they performed much worse over time, while the anxious people who practiced mindfulness meditation, they were able to in a way improve and maintain their performance on the task. Codename Panzers Patch. The researchers published their findings in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. Georgetown University study. The other study is from the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC. For this study, researchers looked at 8. The researchers divided the patients into two groups. One group took a mindfulness meditation training program for eight weeks. The other group the control group took a class on Stress Management Education for eight weeks. People from both groups were asked to do something stressful. They had to give a short speech in front of a crowd not once but twice, both before and after their training. During each speech, researchers measured levels of hormones and proteins that the body releases when a person is feeling stressed. The control group, researchers said, showed small increases in stress on the second speech compared to the first. This suggests their stress and anxiety levels increased when they had to give the speech again. However, when making the second speech, those who used mindful meditation produced fewer stress hormones and proteins. Athelas Regular Font there. This suggests that meditation worked to reduce stress. Elizabeth A. Hoge is a doctor and works in the medical centers Department of Psychiatry. She says people who used mindfulness meditation had sharply reduced stress hormone levels and other biological responses to a stressful situation. And those who took the stress management training had poor responses. Hoge and her colleagues reported their findings in the journal Psychiatry Research. And thats the Health Lifestyle report. Im Anna Matteo. Jessica Berman reported on the Canadian study for VOANews. Matt Hillburn reported on the Georgetown University study for VOA. Anna Matteo adapted the stories for Learning English with additional reporting from several sources. Now, test your understanding with this short quiz.