A couple years ago I saw an interview on ABC news with a kid who had been practicing mindfulness in an elementary school in the inner city of Oakland, California and I was blown away.

This 8 year old boy said:

“Before a test, if we’re nervous, we just breathe, calm down and it sends a message to our mind that ‘we can make it!’

Wow, that is powerful.

What if more of our young people today held the belief in their mind, “I can make it!” That is what more and more people are experiencing with the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the act of building awareness by intentionally paying attention to the present moment, while putting aside our programmed biases of the past. It’s training the brain to be in the here and now and data across the coast from Harvard to UCLA is backing up its benefits.

We can help our youth to cultivate these skills, but they don’t live in a vacuum, it starts with the families and professionals too. Cultivating mindfulness in our lives will help all of us regulate our nervous systems in moments of stress, we know there’s plenty of these moments, become more focused in the face of distraction, more flexible in our decision making, open up to the good in life, and literally rewire a stronger and healthier brain. This is what I call The Now Effect and it’s real and powerful.

It starts with you and me, right now. 

Check out his latest book, “The Now Effect,” click here