Mindfulness
We’ve all had the experience of being too caught up in our daily lives to remember to stop and smell the roses. With the many obligations and stresses of everyday life, it can feel nearly impossible to slow down and check in on our thoughts and emotions. Mindfulness is essentially the opposite of this hurried, stressed state, and practicing it has been shown to improve one’s physical health, mental health, and quality of life.
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the awareness of one’s internal experience and outward environment. It involves observing your thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the moment without having a reaction to them. When using mindfulness, you don’t allow yourself to analyze and judge your emotions or experience, instead simply noticing them.
Mindfulness helps you to disengage from stress, planning, or destructive thoughts, directing your attention to your emotions and surroundings. The main principles of mindfulness are awareness, being present in the moment, acceptance without judgment, and observation of yourself and environment.
This practice often uses breathing techniques or body awareness to bring your attention to the present moment, helping you to release all thoughts of the past and future. It commonly includes focusing on sensory stimuli, like your breathing or the ground beneath you. Mindfulness is a useful part of a number of therapeutic interventions, like cognitive behavioral therapy, stress reduction, and meditation. Although this practice originates with Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, it has now become a popular term in Western culture.
Benefits of Mindfulness
Mindfulness has been shown to increase one’s health and well-being in myriad ways, from physical ailments to emotional states. Some ways that mindfulness can positively impact your life include:
● Decrease in anxiety
● Improvement of depression symptoms
● Lower blood pressure
● Reduce in burnout
● Improvement of sleep
● Pain reduction
● Lower stress levels
● Improvement of interpersonal relationships
● Improvement in attention span and concentration
● Increased self-compassion
One way that mindfulness can be so helpful for stress, anxiety and depression is that it teaches you to be grounded in the present moment, with no attention on the past or future. This helps people to stop replaying past negative experiences and worrying about everything they need to get done or what may or may not happen in the future.
Along with this, mindfulness allows you to disengage from difficult thoughts. Rather than being sucked into a destructive spiral or thought pattern, you can develop the ability to observe and acknowledge these thoughts without letting them control you. Mindfulness may also be helpful for a range of mental health conditions like eating disorders, addiction, and PTSD.
Types of Mindfulness Exercises
Practicing mindfulness can look different depending on your preferences. Although the most well-known mindfulness exercise is meditation, this practice can also be done through activities and thought exercises. Some people may struggle to sit still or get bored with meditation, so it’s best to try different mindfulness techniques until you find what works for you.
Mindfulness can also be achieved in daily life, through how you think and what you focus your attention on. If you don’t want to meditate, it can be achieved through gardening, art, eating, taking a walk, listening to music, or any other activity that allows you to calm your mind and focus on your surroundings. Here are some mindfulness exercises to try:
● Focus on the moment- try to live in the moment, giving attention to what’s happening in the present rather than daydreaming, planning your week or analyzing a recent conversation. Focus on what’s happening right now and let other thoughts fade away.
● Pay attention- one way to be mindful is to notice your immediate environment. Using your five senses, take a moment to observe what you see, smell, hear, touch and taste.
● Observe your thoughts- let your mind wander, observing your thought patterns, and letting ideas pop up and fade away. Don’t allow yourself to focus on any thought in particular. A very helpful mindfulness meditation for this is Leaves on a Stream.
Mindfulness in Meditation
One can practice mindfulness in many ways, but meditation is the first technique that comes to mind for most people. Meditation typically involves centering one’s focus and awareness on physical stimuli like breathing, a specific thought, or an activity, with the goal of reaching a calm, clear internal state. Some types of meditation include:
● Breathing-focused meditation- this involves controlling one’s breath by holding it in and breathing out for a set amount of time.
● Sitting meditation- in this meditation, you sit comfortably and focus on physical stimuli, like the ground beneath you, the breath coming in and out of your nose, and the air on your skin.
● Observing-thought meditation- this involves paying attention to your thoughts, noticing, and accepting them without having a reaction or judgment about them.
● Loving-kindness meditation- this may be beneficial for those struggling with negative thoughts. This technique involves using mantras to send positivity and love to yourself and others.
● Body scan meditation- this is when you systematically focus your attention on different parts of your body, observing any sensations and feelings that arise. This is especially helpful for those looking to improve their mind-body connection.
● Walking meditation- slowly walk back and forth across a small area, focusing on the experience of walking and all the movements it entails.
Therapy Interventions that Use Mindfulness
Mindfulness can also be a focus of therapy. A mental health professional can guide you through different mindfulness techniques, helping you to find what works for you. Some types of therapy that use mindfulness include:
● Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)- this type of psychotherapy involves coming to terms with your feelings and reactions, and then committing to making the changes necessary in your life.
● Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)- this type of therapy integrates mindfulness as a way of gathering information about your experience and helping you to calm your body and make behavioral changes in line with your long-term goals.
● Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)- DBT involves learning the skills to manage your emotions.
● Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT)- this therapeutic technique focuses on controlling one’s mindset through mindfulness exercises like awareness, meditation and breathing exercises.
● Mindfulness-based art therapy (MBAT)- this intervention uses a combination of art therapy and mindfulness techniques.
● Mindfulness-based pain management (MBPM)- this involves using mindfulness exercises and meditation to manage one’s pain symptoms.
● Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MSBR)- this technique uses mindfulness meditation and yoga to deal with stress..