Incorporating Mindfulness into our Daily Lives: One Breath at a Time
Today I am going to write about mindfulness and why it
should be a part of all of our
lives. This is a special post because it
is the first blog post we’ve had in about 11 months! (Whoa) It is time to get re+think rolling again, and
why not start the year off with something that will help us really experience
each moment of the year that we are lucky enough to have? :)
Lately, there is a lot of buzz around “mindfulness” and how
we should all incorporate this into our daily lives. Mindfulness is not a new concept. It has been around for thousands of years,
but our culture has only recently begun to accept and embrace it. Researchers have been increasing their focus
on mindfulness to determine how it may impact our lives and performance in
work, school, and relationships. We live
in a world that expects us to be connected 24 hours per day and makes us feel
that if we are not keeping up we will be left behind. I'm going to get personal here. I began exploring mindfulness more out of a
necessity than a desire. I was demanding
more and more of myself and subsequently feeling that I could never keep up
with all that needed to be accomplished (let’s say the blog fell somewhere in
this category!). Moving at this pace
affected my sleep, productivity, relationships, self-esteem and mood. I knew I had to find a way out of this
destructive path before it took me down.
As I have been discovering, the way off of this bullet train is simple,
however, it is not easy. All you need to
do is breathe. The caveat is that you
have to pay attention as you breathe
(this is the “mindfulness” part), which we seldom do. Being mindful of your breath is one way to
meditate. Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of the
book Full Catastrophe Living, states
meditation involves “being and not doing.”
He describes how so often we are trying to do so much that we never take the chance to just be.
Our thoughts are constantly streaming through our minds taking us back into
the past or forward into the future but they rarely allow us to just experience
the present moment. Being and letting
ourselves experience a moment is counter to what our culture values at present.
Arianna Huffington calls attention to the values of our
current culture in her book Thrive
where she notes that those who are the most over-worked, over-stressed,
sleep-deprived, and uber-connected are admired and idolized. Our society views these practices as the keys
to “success” as it is currently defined.
She proposes that we redefine “success” to include another metric beyond
money and power to include wellbeing.
This metric encompasses happiness, caring for ourselves, giving, and
work-life-balance so that we may thrive
versus merely survive. All in favor?!
Huffington notes in Thrive
that burnout is currently at an all time high in our society, and as we reduce
the things that help take care of ourselves we risk pushing ourselves closer to
it. One of the first sacrifices we often
make without realizing the consequences is sleep. Huffington notes that sleep deprivation
results in a decrease in productivity, creativity and decision-making. Another factor leading to burnout is
stress. The risks of being under chronic
stress are real. She notes in that women
in stressful jobs have a 40% greater risk of heart disease and a 60% greater
risk of diabetes than their less-stressed counterparts. Other studies have also shown that stress is
neurodegenerative and can play a role in the acquisition of neurodegenerative
diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.
Kabat-Zinn proclaims that in meditation and mindfulness
training, we strengthen our ability to be in the present so that we don’t
become overtaken by the anxiety and worry or ruminate over things needlessly. Our perceptions of woulda, shoulda, coulda create
a new reality for us that make us feel unnecessary pressure. These worries are just thoughts but they
become our reality and thus make an impact on our actions, mood, state of mind,
and also body functioning. In Thrive, Huffington pulls from numerous
studies and expert reports that meditation has been linked to more positive
effects than I can even list here.
Meditation results an improvement in focus, attention, immunity,
anxiety, diabetes, chronic pain, high blood pressure, post-traumatic stress
disorder, and depression. Meditation
increases positive emotions, brain functioning and emotional processing. It physically changes your brain and thus
changes the way you interpret and react to the world. Thus, mindfulness and meditation become
helpful tools in resetting our minds and bodies and helping us to recognize our
thoughts for what they are – thoughts.
Since initiating meditation into my daily life I too can
testify to the differences I feel. I started off small, doing 5 or 10 minutes
per day of just sitting and being with my breath. Later, I attended some workshops in this to
get a little deeper into the practice and understand it more. UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center has
workshops weekly with well-regarded speakers involved in research on this topic
for the skeptics in us, and I found several topics that resonated with me. The next big step I took was taking the
8-week class based on John Kabat-Zinn’s book Full Catastrophe Living: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. That class really transformed my life and
helped to very much solidify the mindfulness practice into my daily habit. We refer patients and colleague alike to
this course and I would do it again in a heartbeat!
I have seen such a difference that I was able to make the behavior
change to do this everyday; at least 10 minutes at the start of my day. Just these 10 minutes helps me start my day feeling
more relaxed and ready to take on whatever is actually going to come versus
feeling like I have to take on what actually will happen and my fears of what could happen!
For those who have a hard time just sitting and quietly
breathing, one advantage of living in a hyper-connected world is that we can
use our devices to help us un-connect and break into a daily meditation
practice. Apps such as Headspace,
transcendent toolbox, butify, opra 21 day meditation challenges, calm.com,
mental workout mindfulness meditation app can help you ease into it!
It's going to be a great year. I intend to be in every moment of it, and you should too!
Resources:
UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center group meditation
and workshops – get on their mailing list - http://marc.ucla.edu
Insight LA Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) http://www.insightla.org/mbsr/
Jon Kabat-Zinn Full
Catastrophe Living
Comments
Post a Comment