4 Things to Encourage You With Your Mindfulness
Who knew that sitting and doing nothing was so damn hard?
Mindfulness articles are littered across Medium. It’s not hard to learn about how mindfulness can improve your health, your anxiety, and rewire your brain. It’s easy to see the potential of becoming a different person. One capable of being able to manage stress, balance your schedule, and be at peace. Mindfulness is the miracle drug.
What seems to be missing are the articles that talk about how difficult mindfulness really is. Unlike pills, the impacts of mindfulness are slow to develop. It’s easy to become discouraged and to quit.
If you are new to mindfulness, here are the things that I’ve learned as I’ve started this practice:
1) It Takes Practice
Over the last 6 months, I have been practicing daily meditation. From 15 to 30 minutes of my day, I become aware of my internal thoughts and let them all pass by. I try to focus on one center — which for me is God. I observe all my other thoughts and let them move on. Sounds simple right?
I assumed that since I’m good at sitting on the couch and doing nothing all day, that mindfulness would come naturally. It’s essentially doing nothing, right? What I didn’t realize is that I think about a lot of useless things all the time. Ideas bounce through my brain relentlessly. And when they aren’t ideas, old thoughts of anxiety, anger, and past hurts come up.
Mindfulness has exposed a secret world of thoughts that I didn’t know existed. Each thought comes into my mind like a fishing hook seeing if my consciousness will take the bait. More often than not, it does. I lose focus and lose awareness.
Thomas Keating, the author of Centering Prayer, writes:
“We need to develop a certain joyful acceptance of our thoughts. We can’t avoid them all. If we could, we would already be perfect in contemplation…If you are like 99.9 percent of the human race, this is a process that is going to take some time and may not even be completed in this lifetime.”
One of my values is mastering skills. I want to be an expert at everything I do, including mindfulness. Like the burning monk, I want absolute control over myself and how I am wired. Keating reminds me, that I’m human and that my focus is misplaced.
If you are wanting another skill to be good at, this isn’t the one for you. Unless you’re able to devote all your time to it, you most likely will struggle to rein yourself in. You aren’t going to be an expert and that needs to be okay. This is a practice where you can’t judge yourself.
Instead, the practice of mindfulness is about taking time to be. To connect to your core and your values. This can bring a measure of peace that you won’t find elsewhere in life. The practice of mindfulness is all about slow meaningful changes that could take a lifetime to achieve. In short: It’s about the journey, not the destination.
2) Results Aren’t Easily Noticeable
I can’t tell you how many days where I practiced mindfulness and walked away feeling the same as when I started. Some days I feel at peace. Other days, I feel like I wasted 30 minutes sitting. My thoughts still race and past hurt still seems present. Discouraged, I wonder what the point is.
Yet, I have noticed a change over time. Over the last 6 months, I haven’t always been consistent with my mindfulness. Occasionally there would be a day or two that I missed. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. But I have observed a peculiar pattern on days that I have missed: I tend to have less control over my emotions.
I’ve found myself getting more easily frustrated with my spouse and my job on days where I didn’t meditate. I felt more easily triggered and the words that came out of my mouth surprised me. I found it easier to fall into unhelpful patterns of behavior and addiction as well.
It was on the days that I haven’t been practicing mindfulness that I finally realized that I was changing. On normal days, I didn’t see the change because the results were minimal. However, over time the culmination of changes was substantial.
If you are new to mindfulness, know that you might not see results for a while. This is a practice. Which means you practice at it. Some days, it’ll seem like nothing happens. But under the surface, you’re literally changing the way your brain is wired. You are growing new neuropathways that help you think and respond differently. Think of this process like road construction. It seemingly takes forever and many days you won’t see any changes. However, the construction company is working and the road — someday or some year — will be finished.
3) Titration is Helpful for Anxiety
One of my goals for mindfulness has been to help manage my anxiety. Although I’m rarely anxious, when I get anxious I go all out. Most things in life don’t cause me to panic. But put me on an airplane or tell me how deadly the Coronavirus is and I start to spiral out of control. I started mindfulness to help me calm down and manage my panic around flying.
It hasn’t worked.
Recently, with the Coronavirus circulating, my dread and panic have increased ten-fold. When I became sick with a stomach bug that mimicked some of the symptoms of Coronavirus, I was convinced I had it. I started having panic attacks and couldn’t sleep. I knew my anxiety was ridiculous but I couldn’t stop it. I tried mindfulness and it did nothing but help me become more aware of my internal symptoms. I observed how terrible I physically felt — not helpful.
What mindfulness articles rarely teach is the skill of oscillation. For mindfulness to help manage panic, you need to learn to manage low doses of anxiety first. As you get better at the small stressors, you’ll become more prepared for bigger anxieties.
As a way of working through PTSD, therapists teach this technique to trauma victims. First, you think of something that causes a tiny bit of anxiety. On a scale of 1 to 10, pick something that is a 2 or a 3. Think about it for a minute and notice your response. Then practice your mindfulness until your anxiety becomes neutral again. Rinse and repeat.
Evy Poumpouras, the author of Becoming Bulletproof, writes:
“We need a certain amount of stress to give us the tools to respond to the bigger unknowns that life will inevitably throw at us. Think of your mind like a muscle of adaptability. If you train it, it will get stronger. If you let it lay on the couch in sweatpants while stuffing your face with nacho chips and binge-watching Netflix, not so much.”
You must train your brain to deal with anxiety, which means you need to feel anxiety first. I get stronger by actually lifting weights, not by thinking about it. If you want to be better at managing anxiety, then you must practice oscillating.
4) Old Habits Are Hard to Break
As previously mentioned, I fell out of the habit of mindfulness when I became sick. My anxiety spiked and I couldn’t focus on anything but my illness. With that, I stopped mindfulness for a week. Without realizing it, I started falling back into my less effective ways. I stopped writing, I stopped reading, and I began filling my time with mental fast-food (AKA TV and Video Games). I became more easily frustrated and turned to less helpful ways to cope with my emotions. I found myself back at the beginning.
For mindfulness to be fully effective, you must be committed to it for the long haul. It must be a life change. You can’t date it, you must marry it. You have to do it consistently or you will fall back into your old routines.
Meditation is about rewiring the way you think and process. For your brain to physically change, you have to be consistent. This might come as a shock, but brains are lazy. They don’t want to change. They don’t want to rewire. If left alone they will do the same thing over and over and over. As they do, they reinforce those neuropathways, making it easier to continue to do the same things over and over and over.
For mindfulness to work, you must be more committed to change than your brain is to laziness. You must practice over and over and over.
After 6 months of doing mindfulness, I see a change within myself. It’s not magic and I’m not a whole new person. But it’s peaceful. Something I need more of. I know that I’m better for it and it brings out the best version of me.
To summarize, here are the takeaways that I gained from the last 6-months:
1) Be patient with yourself- Mindfulness takes a long time to develop.
2) Results aren’t instant but are noticeable over a long period.
3) Titrating between anxiety and mindfulness helps rewire the way you cope with stress.
4) Be committed and enjoy the results.
