The single biggest challenge our students face during meditation is their wandering minds.

Our response? We congratulate them, because noticing that their mind wanders is the first step in achieving mindfulness – that present moment awareness we strive to bring into every facet of our lives. Our suggestion to them is to notice their thoughts, to let them fade – and they do fade as evidenced in a new Microsoft study that reveals our average attention span is 16 seconds – and return to their breath.

We also let them know that every person who meditates, even those who have logged thousands of hours of meditation, has wandering mind. Monkey mind. Leaping frogs. Hopping kangaroos. Whatever you call it, our thoughts have minds of their own.

But the really terrific thing we all need to keep in mind: We are not our thoughts. Thank goodness, because sometimes we are not very nice to ourselves.

The cure explained

Not only is a wandering mind normal, it is actually beneficial for the neural development and training of our minds. Every time we remember a thought, and return to our breath, we set new neural pathways and then develop them.

If we do this once or twice, we will get no results. But by practicing mindfulness meditation regularly, we are consistently thinking, noticing, and returning to our breath, and this pattern begins to lay down thousands of new neural connections.

So what does this mean? People who have practiced mindfulness meditation for eight weeks have increased gray matter density in the areas connected with sustained attention, emotional regulations and cognitive control.

That’s huge!

And there’s more good news. A study was conducted of Marines who were about to deploy to the Middle East and taught mindfulness meditation. Those who did more than 12 minutes a day of mindfulness practice had an increase in their working memory capacity than those who did less than 12 minutes of mindfulness practice daily.

Working memory is where information first comes into the mind and where it gets immediately processed, ready for later, more developed processing. Working memory is essential for effective emotional regulation, decision-making, innovation and creativity, and cognitive control. And the fastest way to degrade working memory is with stress, one of the basic reasons why we meditate.

Our advice? Set your meditation timer for at least 12 minutes each day and get ready for big results. Your brain will thank you.