We’re admittedly biased, but the primary goal at Mindfulness.com is to help people develop a daily practice of meditation. The most common feedback we receive for our app is how useful it is for beginners to start and sustain a meditation practice.

Meditation is the practice of lightly holding your attention on an anchor, such as your breath, and gently bringing it back there when it wanders.

Bring your attention to the sensation of air moving into and out of your body. On the inhale, notice it traveling into your nose, your throat, down into your lungs. Notice the rise in your chest and belly. On the exhale, notice how the air leaves your body.

PJ: What advice would you offer someone who works in a company that doesn’t offer mindfulness training?

The best way to to set ourselves up to keep meditating is knowing our intention. Why do we want to meditate? Being clear about what we want to get out of our practice — whether it’s to feel happier, feel calmer, be more focused, or be less stressed — will be a big help in creating the right attitude going into it.

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Life is sometimes difficult, stressful, and challenging. We can’t control what happens, but we do have the potential to change the way we relate to those things.

Tune into your body’s physical sensations, from the water hitting your skin in the shower to the way your body rests in your office chair.

This exercise is often practiced walking back and forth along a path 10 paces long, though it can be practiced along most any path.

JM: There are many. Some of the earliest studies, which involved the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, showed that mindfulness can help ease stress. Mindfulness fosters positive emotions and helps provide resilience against negative experiences. There’s also evidence that the practice of mindfulness promotes empathy and a sense of compassion. Indeed, brain imaging solfeggio frequency research shows that a half hour of mindfulness meditation a day increases the density of gray matter in parts of the brain associated with memory, stress, and empathy.

As long as our back is straight, our neck and shoulders are relaxed, and our chin is slightly tucked, we can sit wherever we feel comfortable for the length of the meditation. We can sit on our couch, a dining or office chair, propped up by pillows on the bed, or on a cushion.

The Headspace app has hundreds of guided exercises to help you build your practice. Start by searching these three meditations to help you start a meditation practice. A happier, healthier you is a few breaths away.

In that spirit, here’s a rundown of questions that seem fairly settled, for the time being, and questions researchers are still exploring.

It’s not surprising that meditation would affect attention, since many practices focus on this very skill. And, in fact, researchers have found that meditation helps to counter habituation—the tendency to stop paying attention to new information in our environment. Other studies have found that mindfulness meditation can reduce mind-wandering and improve our ability to solve problems. There’s more good news: Studies have shown that improved attention seems to last up to five years after mindfulness training, again suggesting trait-like changes are possible.