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• Don’t down your breakfast while getting the news or launching into your daily routine.
• DO… Start your day with mindfulness. Savor your tea, coffee or breakfast without doing anything else.

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

Omar Khayyam

For a segment on 60 Minutes, newsman Anderson Cooper met with mindfulness advocate and author Jon Kabat-Zinn. Cooper described his mindfulness retreat weekend — training to learn to meditate, explore and discover the benefits of mindfulness. Like many of us, he had his doubts, questions and bouts of resistance.

For starters, Cooper struggled on giving up his cell phone, laptop, and access to television. “I miss my cell phone. I’m having withdrawal,” he reported.

He and participants practiced mindful awareness most of the day, including mindful sitting, mindful walking, and mindful eating. During their mindful breakfast, Cooper re-learned how to eat food — to simply taste, and experience eating. No conversation, no devices, no newspaper — no distractions.

Resting in awareness, Cooper explained, “wasn’t restful and I worried I wasn’t doing it right. I kept thinking about work.”

But Kabat-Zinn reminded him that as the mind wanders, and you simply bring it back, gently and without judgment, returning focus to the breath flowing in and out.

The benefits, shown with scientific evidence, include the ability to calm the mind on demand. For instance, “the middle of stress, when everything is falling apart. You can take one breath,” explained a participant from Google. The ability to calm an agitated frame of mind helps people become more focused, more productive, and better able to solve problems.

Cooper tested his newfound skills with a cap that measured the brain’s response to stress — the posterior cingulate. When asked to think of a highly stressful event, signals from Cooper’s brain sent red lines off the chart. Then, when asked to “drop into meditation,” he re-focused on his breath, as he had learned since attending the mindfulness retreat. The activity in the posterior cingulate dropped into the “blue zone” and quieted down within seconds, similar to the resting level before the test began.

So often during holiday preparations, we wake up, and anxieties flood in before we even get out of bed. Our brain frantically tries to sort out all we have to do, where we have to be, all we want to accomplish.

Mindfulness need not be one more thing to crammed into a day already overflowing with plans. Mindful meditation is “not a doing at all, in fact, it’s a being. And being doesn’t take any time,” explains Kabat-Zinn.

When you next start your day, take a sip, breathe, and take time to acknowledge being aware and alive in the moment. Be open to calming worries and stress with mindfulness. I wish for you the gift of being present to yourself as you start your day, and to enjoy the experience of being alive.