What are the benefits of mindfulness

Think back over the past week or so and ask yourself how much time you spent looking after your body in some way. For example, you might have nourished it with food, done some exercise or perhaps spent some time taking care of how your body looks in some way? Most people look after their bodies in these ways, on a daily basis, usually multiple times in a day.

But what happens if we apply that question to our ‘minds’?

In other words: How much time have you spent looking after your mind in some way in the last week?

We often spend very little time looking after our minds. And yet our minds are our greatest resource. We depend on our minds to build happy relationships, to be creative and efficient in our careers and to feel happy and content within our own mental health. And yet, for a lot of people, it often rarely gets a look in.

How could mindfulness help?

Mindfulness has soured in popularity over the past decade, and there is good reason for it.

Research has shown that Mindfulness can half someone’s risk of depression when they have had a previous episode of being depressed (it has been shown to be at least as effective as antidepressants in this way). People who practice mindfulness have been shown to sleep better, have lower blood pressure, improved concentration and working memory.

I could go on. The list of benefits is a long one, and in recent years there have been more than three papers a day published about mindfulness in academic and scientific journals.

But what actually is mindfulness?

Despite its popularity, mindfulness is often misunderstood. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people say that mindfulness is about ‘clearing your mind’. It’s strange this misconception is still so widespread when mindfulness is in many ways the opposite of this.

Here is a quick look at what mindfulness is:

• Awareness: Through mindfulness exercises we become much more fully aware of what is happening in our minds (our emotions and our thoughts), and our bodies.

  We spend enormous amount of our time going through our lives on autopilot. Mindfulness exercises teach people to come into contact with thoughts, feelings and body sensations and to slow down these processes to become more aware of them.

• Be with experience: Mindfulness teaches people how to stay with the experience (when the usual habit may be to distract ourselves if we feel something unpleasant, for example). Instead, in mindfulness we stay with the experience (pleasant or unpleasant) for longer than we normally would.

• Skilful Choices: By doing A&B (i.e. By becoming aware of our thoughts and feelings and staying with these experiences longer than we normally would) we allow ourselves to jump off the autopilot treadmill and to make more skilful choices about how we respond. So instead of REACTING to difficult thoughts or feelings (e.g. shouting at relative or partner when we feel angry), we are able to take time to RESPOND to the feelings in new ways. This often leads us to make different, and more helpful choices in our lives.

Creating a ‘how to’ for mindfulness in a blog post is a near to impossible task as the only way to really learn mindfulness is to ‘do it’ and experience it and the difference it can make in your life. If you want to hear more about my mindfulness workshops or one-to-one sessions for mindfulness then please do get in touch with me at The Tunbridge Wells Psychologist.

I’ll be doing a blog post in the next few weeks which will give some everyday mindfulness exercises can try out at home, so watch this space…