By Nelson Binggeli, PhD
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is mental process characterized by two qualities: (1) Observing the contents of the mind in the present moment (e.g., thoughts, feelings, sensations); and (2) Maintaining an accepting and non-judgmental attitude: Not avoiding, not amplifying, just noticing and directly experiencing. When you hear “mindfulness,” think “observing and accepting.” Mindfulness is being increasingly incorporated into healthcare, psychotherapy, and education.
What are the benefits of mindfulness?
Research has demonstrated that developing mindfulness skills can help to maintain well-being, reduce stress, manage anxiety, and overcome depression.
Several mental processes are strongly associated with stress, anxiety, and depression, including: Ruminating about the past, worrying about the future, making negative judgments, and attempting to avoid emotions. These thought processes can become what people habitually do to cope with difficult emotions, but in the end they make the problem worse. They often amplify emotions and lead to a sense that the emotions are uncontrollable and overwhelming.
Mindfulness provides an alternative with many benefits. Mindfulness interrupts the thought processes that amplify negative emotions, it helps to increases one’s tolerance for experiencing painful emotions without avoiding them, and often results in a sense of calm, focus, and control. Through mindfulness, we can observe the ways in which our own thought process increase our distress, and do something different.
Practicing mindfulness does not mean that any of the following are bad and should be avoided: remembering the past, planning for the future, clarifying your values, or making judgments or decisions. Each of those mental processes are valuable and necessary, and are quite different than habitual rumination, worry, and what are often negatively biased judgments. Mindfulness can help us to recognize the difference.
In the past decade or so, a considerable amount of research has demonstrated the benefits of mindfulness. For example, it has been shown that that practicing mindfulness reduces stress and anxiety, helps to prevent the reoccurrence of depression, reduces the tendency to binge eat, and reduces distress in people with chronic pain.
How do I learn mindfulness?
Mindfulness concepts and practice are typically learned from reading, listening to guided recordings or watching video demonstrations, and/or participating in a training seminar. Follow the links on my main mindfulness page for learning resources. Mindfulness requires practice, just like any other skill. Without practice, it remains an unrealized ideal. Through regular practice, we are much more likely to shift into mindfulness when we notice we are engaging in mental processes that are counterproductive.
There are several psychotherapeutic approaches that incorporate mindfulness, and that have methods for teaching and learning the skill. These include Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).
What does mindfulness practice look like?
Practicing mindfulness can involve focusing on sensory experiences, emotions, and thoughts.
With sensory experiences (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, movement), we bring our awareness into the present moment and observe and accept without judgment what we are experiencing. It helps to begin practicing with stimuli that are pleasant, or at least neutral. But to increase our capacity for mindfulness, it also helps to practice with sensory experiences that are unpleasant or even painful. This practice will help us to better tolerate these experiences without amplifying them or attempting to avoid them.
With emotions, mindfulness involves allowing yourself to experience an emotion directly without elaborating on it with words or attempting to suppress it. For example, we can directly experience an emotion such as sadness or hurt without simultaneously spinning an elaborate story about why we are sad or hurt. Getting caught up in the story often leads to amplifying the emotion, becoming overwhelmed, and then trying to make the emotion go away. In fact, engaging in such storytelling often is motivated by a desire to control and suppress the emotion. Unfortunately, this often backfires. In contrast, accepting the emotion non-judgmentally allows it to run its natural course though our psyche. Paradoxically, by not attempting to control the emotion, we end up feeling more in control. We then are in a better position to make valid conclusions and good decisions regarding the meaning of the emotion.
With thoughts, mindfulness involves observing a thought without judging, suppressing, or amplifying it. Mindfulness helps us to step outside of our thoughts to observe them from a more objective perspective. It helps us to realize that our thoughts are just thoughts, and are not necessarily reflections of absolute truth. We come to better understand that our thoughts can change depending on our mood, and that at times they may be biased and not helpful. A useful technique when practicing mindfulness with your thoughts is to preface your focus on the thought with the phrase “I am having the thought that…”. This will facilitate a more objective perspective on the contents of your mind.
Mindfulness vs Non-Mindfulness
In the table below, I have attempted to contrast mindfulness with what often is our habitual state of mind.
Last updated 11.11.14