What is Mindfulness?
The New Oxford American Dictionary defines “Mindfulness” as “A mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.”
Mindfulness carries a range of benefits including reduced anxiety, improved memory and focus, ability to adapt to situations, reduced rumination, greater emotional self-regulation, and improved sense of satisfaction in general. This blog post will give you more information on why doing these things every day helps retrain your brain.
It is important to note that while we often frame it in the context of activities. “Mindfulness” itself is a state of mind. This includes a sense of awareness – noticing thoughts, feelings, and sensations without becoming “lost” in them. Mindfulness also includes a sense of acceptance – that we aren’t necessarily passing judgment or attempting to change our feelings in that moment, but simply noticing them as they happen.
Common Mindfulness Practices
Mindfulness can look vastly different from person to person. I’ll highlight a few common practices that people generally find helpful:
1. Body Scan
A body scan is a type of progressive relaxation exercise. It typically starts at the top of the head and ends at the feet. This typically involves noticing areas of tension in the scalp, face, neck, shoulders, chest, etc. Relaxing these muscles as we find them – all the way to our feet. I use this in sessions every so often and my clients usually say they feel profoundly relaxed by the end of it.
2. Noticing Your Breath
This one involves sitting comfortably and simply paying attention to our breathing. I often encourage people to take slow deep breaths. This, combined with muscle relaxation can trigger a parasympathetic response – making you feel calmer and more centered.
Some brands of smartwatches have pre-loaded apps to help with this. (On Apple Watch, it’s called “Mindfulness”) These apps will typically give you some sort of haptic queues for inhalation and exhalation with the goal of emphasizing and slowing down one’s breath. A lot of people have found them beneficial.
3. Going for a Walk
This one involves going for a walk, but noticing how your body moves and how it feels with each step you take. Expanding awareness outward, we focus on the things we hear, see, smell, and feel around us.
4. The Five Senses
This is a good grounding exercise. It involves making a conscious effort to notice 5 things we can see, 4 things we can hear, 3 things we can feel, 2 things we can smell, and one thing we can taste.
As one can see from the last two especially, part of this is getting out of our heads and into our bodies.
Peace Family Counseling
If you feel disconnected from yourself, it may be time to consider therapy as an option. We have a number of highly skilled clinicians at our office. You can find our bios here. If you decide to reach out, you can find our online intake form in the footer of every page on this website in the section labeled “Let’s talk”. We’d love to hear from you.
