MINDFULNESS

What is Mindfulness?

Have you ever noticed that when you are doing quite familiar and repetitive tasks, like driving, that your mind is often miles away, thinking about something else? You may be fantasising about going on a holiday, worrying about some upcoming event, or thinking about any number of other things.

In either case you are not ‘present’ and focusing on your current experience. This way of operating is often referred to as automatic pilot.

Mindfulness is the opposite of automatic pilot. It is about being in the ‘here and now’ and can free you from habitual and unhelpful ways of thinking and responding.

Benefits of Mindfulness and Letting Go

By learning to be in ‘mindful’ more often, it is possible to develop a new habit that helps to weaken old, unhelpful behaviours. For people with emotional problems, these old patterns can involve being overly pre-occupied with thinking about the future, the past, themselves, or their emotions in a negative way.

Mindfulness doesn’t immediately control, remove, or fix these issues. Instead mindfulness is one way of skilfully letting go of negative thinking preventing positive action.

Core Features of Mindfulness

  • Observing A natural tendency of the mind is to try analyse things rather than directly experience it. Mindfulness thus aims to shift one’s focus of attention away from thinking to simply gently observing thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations (e.g., touch, sight, sound, smell, taste).
  • Describing relates to noticing the very fine details of what you are sensing. For example, use descriptive words to describe your emotions (e.g. “heavy” and “tense”)
  • Participating Fully consider the whole of your experience, without excluding anything.
  • Being Non-Judgemental Trying to control or avoid worries or other negative thinking can sometimes make things worse rather than reduce your distress. When being more mindful, try not to label what you notice as good, bad, right, or wrong. Simply accept what you perceive. This is one of the most challenging aspects of mindfulness, and takes time and practice to develop.
  • Focusing on One Thing at a Time requires a certain level of effort, from moment to moment. It is natural for distracting thoughts to emerge, and there is a tendency to follow and ’chase’ these thoughts. The art of ‘being present’ is to develop the skill of catching when you have drifted away into negative thinking. It is perfectly natural when this happens at first just gently redirect your attention back to the ‘here and now’.

It may be helpful to think of this approach in terms of a radio. That is, imagine that the negative thoughts that drift into your mind as coming from a loud radio that is tuned to a station where the thoughts are very negative and seem to be shouting at you.

The skill in mindfulness is not so much about trying to turn the radio off, but changing the way you listen. In this way the volume of the radio station can be reduced, and therefore seem less disruptive and distressing.

However, the important thing to remember is this is not a quick fix, it is not easy, and requires regular practice. The thoughts may still shout at you, but you are changing the way you listen. By practicing daily, you may eventually become better at letting go, and be able to do things in a more informal way. To begin, it may be best to start by practicing with minor concerns before moving onto major worries or negative thoughts.

There are plenty of classes, app and websites that can teach you mindfulness techniques, one of the key being meditation. It is useful to try several in order to find the best fit for you. Currently one of the most popular is HeadSpace. This is a free app found on Google Play or Apple Store.