Mindfulness is a quality of mind that can be strengthened through meditation, but it, by itself, is not meditation. It is a way of being, of experiencing life, that is alert, awake, and present.

Meditation is a practice that cultivates mindfulness. It’s sometimes described as a workout that strengthens your mindfulness muscle.

Importantly, and why it’s been taught for thousands of years, Mindfulness Meditation enables us to more clearly see the underlying mechanisms of our minds, and it simultaneously builds and grows our capacity to hold more parts of ourselves and our experience. In this way, mindfulness meditation allows us to live the full depth and beauty of our life and to experience greater fulfillment.

Mindfulness is the quality or trait of being aware of what’s happening, in the present moment, without judging your experience or needing to change it.  When you’re being mindful, you’ve stepped outside the constant chatter of your thoughts and into greater awareness of what’s actually going on, both within you and around you.

This may seem obvious, but the truth is that we spend the majority of our time with our physical bodies in one place and our thoughts in another. It’s difficult to keep our busy minds steady. Before we know it, we’re off daydreaming, planning, remembering, rehashing, anticipating, comparing—we follow thought after thought down mental rabbit holes without even realizing we’re doing it.

Even when we are able to focus on one thing, we rarely do. We are master multitaskers, which is often touted as a desirable skill. Yet it turns out that diverting your attention, and flipping back and forth between mental tasks, drains the brain’s ability to do any one thing as well. Social media, in particular, has been criticized for its role in contributing to the unprecedented level of multitasking distraction in our lives.

In the same way that mindfulness supports emotional and mental well-being, another of the many benefits of mindfulness is that it translates to our daily choices and actions.

Mindfulness helps us become more aware of our habits and to work toward changing those that don’t serve us. By increasing our self-awareness, we more clearly recognize triggers that lead to unwanted behaviors. We are also better able to explore those triggers and our reactions with a curiosity that deflates their power over us.

Mindfulness also helps us to “be” with our experience instead of defaulting to our habitual reactions. Called urge surfing, being present in this way can be especially useful when habits are born from avoidance—trying to push away discomfort with a distraction, such as overeating, drinking alcohol, doing drugs, addiction of any kind, or engaging in other risky or unhelpful behavior.

Combined with Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), these skills can be powerful tools for helping us let go of behaviors that aren’t serving us and adopting new habits that bring joy, contentment, and healing.

Mindfulness interventions for school-age children support kids in numerous ways, including: attention and focus, cognitive skills, confidence, emotional regulation, and well-being. Mindfulness is also linked to greater self-awareness, awareness of others, and empathy among both children and adolescents. Perhaps the most important benefit of mindfulness for children is in its ability to help kids deal with strong emotions that, unchecked, can lead to feelings of stress,  worry, depression, or social anxiety that can interfere with learning and daily functioning.

Most of the benefits attributed to mindfulness—mental, emotional, physical—can be linked to how it affects your brain. Research shows, for example, that the brains of long-time meditators have a larger volume of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls the executive functions of decision-making, attention, and sensory processing.

Even short-term mindfulness interventions produce changes. In one study, participants in an 8-week Mindfulness Meditation program showed less activation of the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for emotional response. This correlates to mindfulness’s ability to improve emotional regulation and to choose how we respond to situations instead of simply reacting.

These changes in the brain seem to be related to how mindfulness alters the way we process information.