Mindful or mind full?

I’ve touched on mindfulness in one of my earlier blogs, but felt that it deserved an entry all of its own. Mindfulness has become, I suppose you could say, somewhat ‘fashionable’ over the past year or so. With mindfulness meditation classes popping up all over the place and mindfulness colouring books being sold in every bookshop, it’s pretty hard to escape it. And yet, so many people have the wrong sort of pre conceived ideas about what mindfulness actually means.

There’s no concrete definition of mindfulness, but it generally relates to living in the moment or focusing on the present day (as opposed to living in the past, a common complaint among depression sufferers, or worrying about the future, an equally shared side effect of most types of anxiety.) This can be developed through meditation by focusing on the breath, but it doesn’t have to go any further than concentrating on the pressure points on your feet as you walk, or simply paying more attention to your surroundings. It all comes down to personal preference and you only have to click in to one of Google’s 40 million search results on the subject to explore what might work for you.

To me, mindfulness means listening to my own thoughts. I am prone to having conversations in my head before meetings, interviews etc., playing out all possible scenarios in my mind. I didn’t realise exactly how often I did this until I started really paying attention to the thoughts that popped in to my head. And what I found were two things: 1) My thoughts were so terribly negative, and 2) the thoughts were also completely transient – as quickly as they appeared, they were gone again. Mindfulness made me realise that I had a choice – I could let those thoughts take over, sending me in to a spiral of unhappiness and unease, or I could try to let them go (visualisation helps – I like popping ‘thought balloons.’)

Anxiety suffers are extremely prone to negative thinking. We have hundreds of thousands of thoughts every day and yet no one really knows why the negative ones stick with us. We’re always imagining the worst case scenario, and the way we feel on any given day will impact how we interpret different situations. The logic of mindfulness is that if we learn to recognise the negative thoughts, we can, in time, start to distinguish these from facts and work at letting the negative thoughts go. Less negative thinking equals less anxiety. Simples right?

Well, not quite. Mindfulness is hard work. You can’t really do it wrong but that doesn’t mean you start seeing the benefits straight away. It takes some practice and it’s often very difficult to find time away from our busy lives to just take a minute to notice what we’re thinking! I find that small steps to a mindful life are the easiest ones to make. Just start noticing more. Look up. Look around. When you step away from the negative hovel that is your brain, and really see the world around you, you somehow start to find a new appreciation for the beauty in the world, amidst all the darkness and horror.