Can You Benefit From Being More Mindful?
It seems that everyone is talking about Mindfulness and with good reason. There have now been countless research studies on the efficacy of mindfulness in improving mental health and wellbeing. The great news is, it’s not hard to learn and with a commitment to practice regularly everyone can experience its benefits.
Mindfulness has its origins in meditation traditions of eastern religions and has been around for 2500 years. There are many types of meditation, mindfulness being just one of them. Mindfulness practice as used as a tool in counselling and psychotherapy has been adapted to remove any religious reference or connotation so that it may be used by anyone no matter what their spiritual beliefs may or may not be.
So What Is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness at its most basic refers to focusing your awareness on the present moment, what you are seeing, hearing, smelling and what you are feeling both emotionally and physically right now. Observing and noticing without judgment what you are experiencing in this moment.
How Can Mindfulness Help Our Mental Health And Wellbeing?
When we learn mindfulness we become more aware and more attuned to what we are thinking about and what we are feeling. Not being aware of what we are doing, what we are feeling or thinking about can be particularly problematic if we suffer from mental health issues (and everyone does from time to time). We can get caught up thinking unhelpful thoughts about past events –regret about what we could have done or said- or anxiety and worry about something in the future that might or might not happen. Ruminating in this way about things that we have no control over only makes us feel worse and is a big part of depression and anxiety. Being present centred means that we are not thinking about the past where a lot of our depression may be focused and not anticipating the future which may cause anxiety. Over time regular mindfulness practice can help us to become aware more quickly when we move into unhelpful thinking and to bring our attention back to the present.
Benefits of Mindful Practice
Learning and practicing mindfulness regularly has been shown to :
- Help manage difficult emotions such as anger and low mood
- Increase concentration, attention and memory
- Reduce overall anxiety and stress
- Increase awareness.
How Can I Become Mindful?
Learning to become mindful is not hard but as with all new skills requires practice and commitment. Learning a ‘mindfulness practice’ is a good place to start.
Using the breath as an anchor to focus your attention is the most common way of learning a mindfulness practice. This means that we focus on our breath, one breath at a time going in and out, without doing anything to it. Just observing. Just watching. You may focus on the air as it goes through your nostrils or of the rise and fall of your chest or abdomen. When I focus on the breath I have a mental image of my lungs as if they were a set of wings going up and down with each breath. What you will notice is that after a very short time your mind will drift off to something else. When you notice that you are no longer focused on your breath bring your attention back to the breath. In this way, the breath becomes a place that you can always return to.
You can expect that when you first start a mindfulness practice you will drift away from the breath many, many times. This is normal and how our minds work. It is not the goal of mindfulness to stop thoughts but rather to not ‘follow’ them. After doing a regular mindfulness practice you can expect that your mind will not wander off quite so quickly and when it does you will notice sooner and be able to bring it back to the breath again.
Purists will say that you should practice for twenty minutes a day. I think this is too long for most people at first and ten minutes is a better place to start. Put your phone on a timer so that you are not continually thinking about whether “ it is time yet’. Sit comfortably with as straight a back as you can manage but you don’t have to sit cross-legged. In a chair with your feet resting on the ground is fine.
To find out more about mindfulness and how it can help improve your mental health ask to speak with Cate at catesimpsoncounselling@gmail.com.
