How Mindfulness Supports Mental Health
There’s an old story of a man on a horse galloping at full speed down a road. An onlooker shouts at him, “Where are you going?”. The man on the horse answers, “I don’t know. Ask the horse!”
Like the horse, our mind can take us for a ride. Thoughts and emotions come and go. We can replay the past or leap to the future. It’s sometimes difficult to rein in our attention to the present.
Mindfulness is a tool for taming our mind through greater awareness of our inner experience happening now. It provides us insight into our thoughts and feelings in the moment and how they influence what we do.
Practicing mindfulness can help ease symptoms of anxiety and depression and improve focus and mental balance.
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the act of focusing your attention on the present moment. What can we notice in the present moment? We become aware of physical sensations in our body. For example, if we’re anxious we might experience a tightness in our chest or increase in the rate of breathing. We also observe our emotions — perhaps we’re nervous, upset, uneasy, or flustered. And we can notice our thoughts, which is how we interpret those emotions.
Paying attention to the different parts of our experience in the present moment allows you to be more in touch with the emotional states behind our actions. For example, if we notice that we’re reaching for more unhealthy food when upset, we now have better insight into emotional triggers underlying this habit. This can help us start the process of changing those behaviors that aren’t serving us.
Of course, it’s a lot easier to write about mindfulness than practice it. But like any skill, the more you do it, the better you’ll get.
Practicing Acceptance
A key aspect of mindfulness is acceptance. The goal isn’t to avoid how we’re feeling. Mindfulness teaches us to accept uncomfortable thoughts and feelings without judgment. Difficult thoughts and feelings will arise. But we don’t have to react to them.
An acceptance exercise I like to use is identify the feeling, observe it, and commit to allowing it. Allowing an uncomfortable emotion means that it’s okay for things to be how they are, as opposed to the way I think they should be. After giving yourself permission to allow the emotion, breathe into it and make room for it. Accepting how you’re feeling doesn’t mean you have to like the present moment. We’re just noticing the feeling and letting it pass.
When identifying emotions, we’re also not labeling them as positive or negative. We may have many different feelings about a situation — for example, “Why does the traffic have to be so slow? This is so frustrating”. Mindfulness encourages us to reserve those judgments. You may have heard of the quote from Hamlet,
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Our thoughts can magnify stressful situations, making them worse in our mind than in reality. A goal of mindfuless is to observe our experiences and emotions as they are, and avoid interpreting or engaging them.
Everything is Transient
All our emotions, no matter how uncomfortable, are temporary. Sometimes a feeling seems like it will last forever. But even the most painful emotions will pass.
A good metaphor is waves in the ocean. Ocean waves come into the shoreline and then subside. When there’s a storm, the water becomes choppy and can create large swells that crash into the coast. But every wave, like our feelings, is transient. Feelings change and thoughts arise and then leave our mind. When we recognize that emotions always subside, it makes it easier to watch them unfold without acting on them.
Mindfulness can help us better regulate our emotions, reduce stress and rumination, and has promising evidence for treating mood disorders. It may also be a useful tool in recovery from substance use disorders. In a randomized control trial of mindfulness-based relapse prevention for substance use disorders, the practice was associated with a decrease in self-reported cravings. Other studies have found that mindfulness training reduced urges to smoke.
What do you think? Are there areas of your life where mindfulness could be helpful?
