One of the themes that moves psychology today is undoubtedly the topic of mindfulness. In general, it can be said that however much creativity and learning are associated with actively grasping and working with the world, the ability to stop and focus is part of the core competency of every person who engages in creative activities.

If we were to define mindfulness, we could say it is "the ability to intentionally pay attention to what is happening in the present moment, without judgment, evaluation or expectation."

Matt Killingsworth's research has focused on what happens to our thoughts when we are happy, in other words, what the dependent variables of happiness are. It turns out that starting from a certain level of wealth, it's not money, education or gender but whether or not people focus on what they are doing. It turns out that 47% of the time, people think about something other than what they are doing. People spend at least a third of their time on distracting thoughts in almost all activities.

His next question was whether this was a general trait or whether people are more focused and happier when they have pleasant thoughts. Again, the result would be pretty surprising - if we think about positive things, our subjective happiness score is slightly lower than if we focus on the present moment. Of course, as the positivity of thoughts decreases, the feeling of happiness decreases.

This research shows that if we want to be happy, we have no choice but to find ways to focus on the present. Interestingly, the ability to move our minds to the future or the past is cognitively challenging, which means it sets us apart from animals. The ability to plan is essential because it allows for learning, evolution, and just about everything we have associated with our civilization. But it turns out that if we desire happiness, we should focus much more on the present moment.

The foundations of mindfulness can be observed as early as the 17th century. For example, the Czech Jesuit Martin Streda had rules similar to the abovementioned principles, such as - "Do not worry prematurely about what will happen; it is enough to worry about the bad that each day brings." Thus, a clear emphasis on focusing on the moment. He also recommended setting aside space for meditation and prayer, in which one would be completely silent and, if possible, not judge or judge others.

In the world, the concept of mindfulness is mainly associated with the names of Daniel Siegel and Jon Kabat-Zinn, who, in the 1970s, launched a program of training or education to combat stress, which was based on ideas derived from Buddhism and at the same time respecting the mentality of lifestyles of people in the Western cultural circle. This was the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, but today, this approach is also found in other modifications or schools of psychology and is particularly strong in cognitive psychology.

The concept of mindfulness has several components that can be focused on - the first is mindfulness of the current situation, of the experience of self. This is a large group of exercises, but perhaps a better mindset, based on the belief that life is happening now - and we should pay due attention to the now.

It can be achieved, for example, by the following exercise:

Turning attention to current experience is essential for many reasons, such as :

• Training improves immune system function and reduces stress levels. Here, it is interesting that the effect on the immune system is also demonstrated by studies in positive psychology, for example.
• Training improves flexibility of thought and reduces the repetition of ruminating over various worries.
• Training improves creativity, concentration and attention, promotes memory, and strengthens self-management skills.

By learning about oneself and one's experience, one can gain more distance and control over situations. From the beginning, one of the main motivations for mindfulness has been working with stress, which is one of the most common creative blocks. Mindfulness is different from other techniques in its focus on working with habits and situations that are important and natural to the person.

As indicated in the exercise, part of the training is meditation. Meditations are part of various religious systems and can be said to have had something of a renaissance in the last ten or twenty years. Mindfulness is typically characterised by a combination of short meditations (or concentration) throughout the day. Different authors differ in their beliefs about whether the fastest blocks should be thirty seconds or three minutes. Still, there seems to be a consensus that these short exercises are good to supplement with longer meditations. What is specific to this approach is the focus of the meditation on the experience of the present moment - the body, the breath, the thoughts, the environment. It is, therefore, not metaphysical but rather phenomenological. In general, however, any prayer or meditation is good for creativity and a particular pause in times of information overload. Mindfulness represents one (and nowadays very popular) way to work with it.

In general, then, mindfulness follows three essential points that form the basis of the whole approach:

• Awareness of the moment - all exercises are designed to support the attention of your "here and now.
• Meditations have more functions, but generally, they are directed to awareness of the present moment, to a specific spiritual development, to alignment with oneself, to the absence of projecting oneself into some other goals, to the development of the ability to better focus on the moment.
• Non-evaluation - the preoccupation with what someone has told us we should or should not do, is very unpleasant and unproductive. The goal of mindfulness (and here, it is similar to Buddhism) is to eliminate this evaluative attitude in life.

Suppose you want to learn more about mindfulness and get some practical advice to get you started. In that case, we especially recommend the Mindful popularisation portal, where you can find basic information, meditation guides and tips, research information, app reviews and much more.

There are a large number of applications that work with mindfulness as a principle of habit design or meditation. Probably the most well-known is Head Space, which teaches people to meditate - there are different themes or series to choose from, and you can be reminded of each exercise throughout the day. Head Space thus leads a person to ideally learn to meditate on their own and get a good battery of different topics. Calm then offers a comprehensive meditation course, and the Insight Timer app can be used as a good repository of teachers and lessons for meditation. Also very interesting is, for example, the relaxing finger exercise Pause. If you want to listen to sounds, such as the sound of the forest or rain, during relaxation exercises or meditations, we recommend the free Noisli. Aura aims to encourage micro-meditations to help focus on the present moment. Smiling Mind offers free meditations focused on sub-aspects of our lives, such as sleep or relationships.

Mindfulness is very closely related to the concept of created by. They have common goals - they follow activities and small exercises to help people be happier. Seligman points out that happiness is crucial to many other areas of our lives. It turns out, for example, that if we have a cold and are happy, we will statistically have a milder experience than if we are grumpy or unhappy. But he also focused, for example, on people's performance on different tasks. Just changing the task assignment from positive to negative resulted in a significant decrease in work productivity. Other research shows that happy and well-adjusted people will learn much better.

In other words, happiness in our post-socialist cultural context (as well as spirituality, for example) is associated with something that does not belong in professional discourse; it is difficult to measure and is too subjective to touch. But it turns out that these aspects of human life are crucial for a life that is supposed to be enjoyable, creative ,or active. In a simple factory job, which will resemble the experience of the early days of the Industrial Revolution, we probably won't notice much difference. However, the more complex and cognitively demanding the tasks are, the more we need to focus on the phenomenon of happiness. We can hardly be unhappy, frustrated and dissatisfied in the long term and still be creative. After all, this is the reason why positions like happiness manager are gradually making their way into large corporations or why you are often ordered to take a two-week vacation at work that you may not even want - they know that if you don't rest, you will be more prone to stress and distractions, and therefore less productive.

Related to this area is the concept of flow. Flow is a state of mind where we are fully immersed in our actions. It is said that a person in flow cannot perceive time, hunger, thirst or other needs. His entire attention is focused on a particular problem in which he is immersed and on which he is trying to concentrate. For example, the famous Finnish education system promotes teaching where students can spend the maximum amount of time in flow. This mental state is associated with the feeling of doing something useful, fun, and meaningful. Thus, if we return to creativity, we are more likely to exhibit more creativity during flow than when our experience of a problem is superficial.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man behind the Flow concept, identifies six factors that can contribute to it:

• Intense and focused concentration on the present moment.
• Merging action and awareness.
• Loss of self-reflection.
• A sense of self-control and perspective over a situation or action.
• Loss of the concept of time and subjective perception of time.
• Work experience is intrinsically enriching, and often, the experience is self-defeating.

As Csikszentmihalyi points out, flow is something pleasant. It is a flow, an ecstasy that everyone would like to be in. So, once again, we are in close contact with the issue of happiness. And experience - flow is a state of actually experienced happiness, which is experienced during a particular activity.