Save Money Experts offer advice and tips on how to spend more mindfully in the new year

Mindfulness and meditation can ease chronic pain, anxiety and depression. Now some money experts say awareness tools such as these can help you avoid impulse purchases and create a spending plan that reflects your values.

Leah Weiss, who teaches leading with mindfulness and compassion at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, says mindfulness can be viewed as “the intentional use of attention.”

Check your spending habits: Financial planner and educator Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz recommends starting with a “financial cleanse. ” Use cash to cover dayto-day expenses for one month. It’s more painful to part with cash than to pull out plastic, so you’ll build awareness. Other ways to resist mindless buying: Wait a day, or a week. Schwab-Pomerantz says taking time to think before you spend is often enough to get past temptation. If you simply cannot wait, she advises buying from a retailer with a good return policy. The Business Books list by the Tattered Cover Bookstore is not available this week.

Develop the skill of paying attention: Money is a limited resource for most of us, and thinking — or thinking twice — can help us make conscious choices. Meditation — sometimes as little as five to 10 minutes a day of focused breathing — has been shown to affect areas of the brain that control attention, emotion and habit, says Cortland Dahl, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds.

Know what you want: Certified financial planner Carrie Van Winkle of Louisville, Ky., gathers photos and words representing her goals for the year into a display on her refrigerator. You can make it a photo of a vacation destination or a snapshot of your kids to remind yourself you want to save for college or improve the world.

The more specific your goals, the more likely you are to act on them, Weiss says. “‘I want to be a conscious consumer’ is vague,” she says. “But, ‘I want to pay attention to the ecological impact of what I buy and choose items that can be recycled’ is more specific.”