I’ll be the first to say that patience is not my virtue. I move quickly through the world, and I often expect everyone else to be just as proactive and efficient—whether that means responding to emails within 24 hours, or, like, putting your credit card in the card reader while the cashier is scanning your groceries. (Come on, people! It goes so much faster that way!)

There’s a lot for a parent to get done in a day. There are places to go, meals to prep, work to complete and dishes to wash. In the midst of all of it, it can seem impossible to prioritise actual connection and bonding time with our kids. We want to connect with them, of course we do! But we also have to cook the spaghetti and get the meal on the table before it’s time to leave for lacrosse practice.

We’re learning how to practice true self-compassion this week with renowned psychotherapist and Buddhist meditation teacher Tara Brach. Tara is the author of Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, and most recently Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN. In addition to having delivered hundreds of talks on mindfulness and meditation throughout her career, Tara’s self-titled podcast also receives over 1.5 million downloads per month.

The next time your morning alarm goes off, use your nine minutes of snooze time to stretch, check in with yourself, and reflect on what you hope to get out of the day.

If you’re still thinking about your New Year’s Resolutions, here’s one suggestion that can benefit not only your own life, but also the state of our planet: do less.

We’re told to trust our gut when it comes to decision-making—but we also know that our gut can lead us astray.

Most of us want to spend less time staring at screens and more time interacting with the world around us—which is all very well and good until you realise that you can’t navigate that world without a map, and you can’t meet up with someone without reaching out to them in some way beforehand, and it’s a lot easier to use an app to pay for parking instead of trying to come up with enough quarters to feed the metre, and so on.

This Christmas, give yourself one more thing to be happy about: a day without smartphones.

Most of us already know that if we don’t get enough time to rest and recuperate between stressful tasks, we risk burning ourselves out. But how much rest do we actually need?

Hey there. Having a bad day? Everything’s going to be ok—just breathe in and out.

Everyone knows that being a teacher can be a stressful occupational choice. The app Calm is aiming to make that slightly less so by offering teachers around the world a premium subscription to its meditation app for free.

I obsess over everything, but mostly social faux pas. Did I say the wrong thing? Am I being too quiet? Should I hide in a closet with a plate of food until everyone at the party leaves?

There is a certain scenario that my son liked to play with me when he was four years old. We’d make a house, a train and a ticket booth out of Lego Duplo blocks. A conductor would come to the house, pick up a guy and his Dalmation and take them to the dinosaur museum, which actually housed real dinosaurs and seemed sort of terrifying except that the dinosaurs were always fairly reassuring that they didn’t intended to eat the guy or his dog.

Android/iOS: Keeping track of what you eat can help you make better choices, because you know that whatever you choose, you’ll have to write it down. But that doesn’t mean you need to obsess over every kilojoule or ask an app to run weight loss calculations.

If you just want to look for big-picture patterns in your diet, YouAte (free on iOS and Android) is a low key way to do just that.

When your brain is warped, the easy thing to do is zone out on social media, checking to see what Chrissy Teigen had for dinner last night or finding out which Game of Thrones character you are. You tell yourself, "I need this." Sure, fine. But know that you're not really recharging.

Children need to feel their feelings, but too often, they become overwhelmed by them. When they're visibly upset, that's when parents tend to swoop in and offer comfort, perhaps with words or hugs (or OK, sometimes goldfish crackers and YouTube Kids). But it's even more important to teach them how to calm themselves.

Psychotherapist Amy Morin, who wrote the new book 13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don't Do, says that being able to deal with stress, anger, frustration, and anxiety requires a specific set of skills. And that's where brain training comes in.

Rituals can help us feel more in control of our lives, and more comfortable in situations that would otherwise bother us. One group of researchers now says they have found that a weird, meaningless food ritual might help us eat fewer kilojoules.

Video: Meditation expert and author Dean Sluyter teaches the practice of “natural” meditation. In the video above, he explains how to get into the proper mindset, how often one should meditate, and how to avoid the common problem of “trying” to meditate.

Google has given us the best email service, the best Maps app, one of the best AI assistants and the best search engine. And now, they're getting into the mindfulness game, as well.