Why should we bother with mindfulness?
There has been a lot of talk about mindfulness and meditation in the last decades. Many apps and so much content have been created to help us with practicing different forms of meditation. One of the reasons why mindfulness and meditation have gained significance is that a large number of researches have been done on the topic and the effects of short and long term meditation on mental and physical health as well as increased mental control (Grossmann et al., 2004; Van Vugt, 2015; Singh et al., 2019; Medvedev et al., 2022 and many more). The majority of the research on this topic shows significant improvement in all the mentioned areas, after periods of practicing mindfulness and meditation, confirming their benefits.
Here, I am going to share why I have practiced mindfulness on a daily basis for over a year and half now (as of February 2024), and why you could be interested in it too.
Keep in mind, in the following section, I am giving a brief, simple definition of mindfulness. In the next long posts, I will gradually complete this definition, building as complete of a picture as my knowledge and understanding of it allows.
Mindfulness is hard
Mindfulness is the practice of becoming present, in this moment, as life happens. Before practice, our mind is easily distracted. It runs wild and takes us to one thought at this moment, and another thought at the next one, rather than us guiding it and directing it toward our intended destination. Mindfulness helps us take control of the mind, to become the master of our mind, and to use its immense power to lead the life that we want.
If we observe one day of our life from beginning to end, we will realize how most of it is led automatically, without much conscious effort on our side. We eat automatically, drive automatically, drink several cups of coffee or tea automatically and many times respond or react automatically. We may have caught ourselves answering a question and while answering it, realizing that we didn’t want to say something, or we wanted to say it differently, but because we didn’t think ahead, the message came out automatically, without us really choosing it. These moments of lapse are clear signs of our unconscious and reactive behaviors.
The goal is to tame the mind, and be able to tell it where to go, and when to stop, but allow it to run. This in theory sounds easy, but can be quite challenging and tricky once we start taking action.
Mindfulness is expensive
When we encounter a new situation, our brain doesn’t have prior experience and knowledge as to how to react to it. In this first encounter, we need conscious processing of the situation to make a new decision about how to respond.
Now, we either get positive feedback for our response or a negative one. In either case, we learn something about that situation, and it is no longer new.
In the next encounter with a similar situation, our brain refers back to the previous time, how we responded to it, and what feedback we have received. Then it either repeats the previous response, or chooses a new one, depending on the feedback.
Eventually, when we find the response that works for us, even moderately, we continue using it on the next encounters with that similar situation. This repeated response will gradually become an unconscious pattern that is automatically activated whenever we find ourselves in a similar situation, freeing our mind from one more conscious decision making.
Now this can be a good quality. It allows us to respond quickly, many times with acceptable accuracy, and with much less conscious effort. This reactivity is one of the features that makes our mental processing efficient, enabling us to lead complicated actions simultaneously and without much effort. If we were to behave attentively and intentionally all the time, our conscious mind would not be able to handle every little decision that our unconscious mind normally makes. We would quickly get decision-fatigue and become dysfunctional. Our computational resources are limited, and there is so much to be done in this body, mentally and physically. As a result, our brain is wired to use its resources as optimally as possible.
These expensive processes, like focused attention and heightened awareness are reserved for the times when something new or unknown happens that we don’t know how to respond to, or there is a threat to our survival that we should tackle. For mundane, daily tasks, they are too expensive to activate.
Like any other quality, this one is also on a spectrum. We don’t want to be conscious and intentional with every single behavior, reaction, or decision. We want to have the option to make nonreactive, intentional decisions and responses at will.
For that, we need to practice and learn how to bring our attention back to the present moment in ordinary circumstances, so that when we need to do that in a specific situation, we know how to do it.
Hard and expensive, why do need Mindfulness?
Mindfulness lets us see our unconscious patterns
Sometimes our unconscious patterns or reactions are not the optimal behavior we could have. Some of them are even destructive in the long-term.
For example, as children, we might have learned to react submissively to our parents’ orders, and we continue doing that with our partner or colleague that does not have our best interest at heart, only because this has become a reactive pattern in us.
This can lead to serious relationship problems at home or work, keeping us from the success and happiness that we deserve. That’s why we need to recognize our unconscious patterns, and then when there is room for improvement, change them.
Mindfulness gives us a chance to transform ourselves
By acting mindfully, we distance from our doer-self and sit on the seat of our observer-self and this allows us to see our actions and reactions, evaluate them, and when we don’t like the way we react, or we don’t find it as the best reaction we could have given, we have the option to change it into a new response, one that we choose with our current knowledge and wisdom (I will explore this in another post in more details). We can practice mindfulness every once in a while with an ordinary task and evaluate and optimize our response to it.
Mindfulness allows us to truly live
Now is the time of our life. Past and future are not where life happens. To live means to be here, in the present moment.
When we do things unconsciously, we are not living through the experience, we skip now by ruminating in the past and future while our unconscious mind is leading a certain behavior in the present. We don’t experience that behavior as it happens. We may review it afterwards. But sometimes, we forget the action completely.
You know what I mean if you have ever lost your keys (or another object) that you unconsciously left somewhere and later didn’t remember where. Being present lets us live through our experiences.
Mindfulness help us know ourselves better
Many of our reactions are rooted in our old, unresolved issues that have piled up through years and we have not addressed.
Being mindful enables us to follow back a reaction down to its root, to the triggers and beliefs that have caused them. Then, we get a chance to see how a simple unresolved emotional issue is wreaking havoc in our relationships, work, or other aspects of our life.
Recognizing and understanding the root problem gives us a chance to find more effective solutions and free ourselves not only from that initial issue, but also from the chain reaction they have initiated in our lives.
Mindfulness and more specifically meditation are exercises for the mind. One key goal for practicing mindfulness is to master the mind.
Our mind is like an untamed horse that rebelliously takes us everywhere. We are used to this distraction from one topic to the next, to the next, especially in the super fast-paced short-attention-span era of the internet and social media.
Now, the outside world is not helping us in taming our mind, but we have the power in us to tame it. One way to discipline the mind is by bringing it back to the present moment again and again, until one day, it gets used to coming back to the present on its own and stays here, without getting distracted (at least for some time).
Meditation is a great exercise for this purpose. The longer the sessions, and the more consistent the practice, the more benefit we can get from it. Cultivating mindfulness during our daily activities is another great exercise for taming our mind, and taking control and mastering our minds.
Mindfulness is a journey. We are doing that for our personal purposes. But we remember:
It’s not only about the destination. The journey matters more. We don’t want to only focus on mastering our mind at some later age in life. We want to live each day of this journey with intention, with presence, and with the unshakable quality of equanimity.
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References
- Grossman, P., Niemann, L., Schmidt, S., & Walach, H. (2004). Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefits: A meta-analysis. Journal of psychosomatic research, 57(1), 35–43.
- Van Vugt, M. K. (2015). Cognitive benefits of mindfulness meditation. Handbook of mindfulness: Theory, research, and practice, 190–207.
- Singh, D., Raj, A., & Tripathi, J. S. (2019). The benefits of mindfulness in improving mental health and well-being. IAHRW International Journal of Social Sciences Review, 7(3).
- Manna, A., Raffone, A., Perrucci, M. G., Nardo, D., Ferretti, A., Tartaro, A., … & Romani, G. L. (2010). Neural correlates of focused attention and cognitive monitoring in meditation. Brain research bulletin, 82(1–2), 46–56.
