Meditate! If you've done it already this morning, take 120 seconds to close your eyes, to listen, to breathe, to become aware of your body. If you haven't already done it this morning, make between five and twenty minutes to do it now... don't wait until tomorrow. And, if you don't really do it at all, what can I say?

Not meditating is as bizarre as smoking forty cigarettes a day. All the science stacks up in favour of meditation just as it does against smoking. And we're talking about hard science - not just the "experiments" often associated with what I might describe as "old psychology". Modern cognitive psychology and neuroscience abounds with confrimatory scientific evidence as to the beneficial or even transformative effects of meditation.

Is "transformative" too strong a word to use? Well, if we consider that regular meditation restructures the brain through activation of the centre of conscious awareness, "transformative" probably doesn't go quite far enough! And, that's quite apart from the positive effects meditation has on the cardio-vascular and digestive systems, to say nothing of the extent to which the focus that meditation brings will transform your ability to do what you need to do to achieve your objectives... you'll worker smarter rather than harder.

And, yet, I know people who can't find ten minutes in twenty four hours to transform their very lives. I know people who meditate sometimes, people who tell me "Any day that I meditate, I'm more effective" - meaning that, certain days, they actually decide to be less effective! I know people who tell me that they just plain can't meditate. When confronted with this nonsense, I normally resort to Jon Kabat-Zinn's quip "If you can breathe, you can meditate"! Then, there are others that tell me "Meditation doesn't do it for me" - I'm not really sure what "It" they're looking for, but meditation touches and activates the one part of the brain that you most need involved in your everyday life.

The point is that, without meditation which, as things stand is the only scientifically validated way we have of deliberately engaging our brain's centre of conscious awareness, the key parts of our brain are discordant, overwhelmed by internal noise, unfocused and largely ineffective - as a result of which everyday life unnecessarily becomes a struggle. Now, why would anyone deliberately do that to themselves?