Mindfulness and psychology: Why it works.

Edwin Selij
May 19, 2016

Mindfulness is a term you hear more and more often and which people increasingly want to shape their lives with. This is not surprising because in the Netherlands we often have busy lives and many worries. This sometimes makes it difficult to live in the moment. While you can get a lot of peace and other benefits from that.

In this article, I discuss what mindfulness is and how the psychology behind it works.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is actually a Buddhist practice and therefore can also be used for more spiritual purposes, but in this article I'm mainly talking about the practical goals you can achieve with mindfulness.

Mindfulness is all about shifting your attention to your internal feelings and what’s happening around you in the moment. How often are you doing something while your attention is completely elsewhere? Mindfulness makes it easier to live in the here and now. Worrying and focusing on symptoms of illness can literally make you sick with anxiety. Mindfulness helps reduce your worries or, at the very least, prevents them from making you sick.

Through mindfulness meditation, you can practice being mindful more often about the moment you are in.

Did you know, for example, that people who incorporate mindfulness into their lives often have a higher quality of life? According to scientific studies, mindfulness has a clear correlation with your happiness and even your health.

That correlation means that the more mindfulness you can apply in your life, the more satisfied you are with your life and the healthier you feel.

There are three ways people can use mindfulness, as it is easier for some than others.

  1. It is a trait: People with this characteristic find it relatively easy to be in the state of mindfulness and do so regularly.

So these people live somewhat more automatically in the here and now than people who unfortunately lack this trait.

  1. A stat: By learning more about mindfulness, people can better turn their mindful moment on and off and are more aware of it.
  2. An exercise: Practicing mindfulness itself.

This practice can be done, for example, with mindfulness meditation.

What can you use mindfulness for?

It actually began as a treatment for people with chronic illnesses who needed to learn to live with their symptoms. At that time, it wasn’t yet clear how to do that, so Jon Kabat-Zinn developed mindfulness to teach people that life can still be enjoyable even with limitations. Mindfulness has been used in psychology since the 1970s to reduce certain symptoms and even eliminate them entirely.

These include:

Mindfulness isn’t just for use in cases of illness, psychological problems, or addictions. You can also practice mindfulness while eating, at work, and even in your family life and relationships. Mindfulness can therefore be applied to nearly every aspect of your life.

Why does mindfulness work?

During a mindfulness exercise or mindful moment, a few things actually happen. First, you focus on the here and now. This also leads to greater awareness of how that moment influences your thoughts. Another aspect of mindfulness is that you open yourself up to your experiences and remain open to whatever happens with curiosity, openness, and acceptance.

By becoming aware of your thought processes, you can do something about them. Mindfulness can therefore cause your personal development to grow, allowing you to better cope with a variety of events in your life. Research also shows that mindfulness is a state of your brain that is linked to well-being and helps you to be more self-aware.

Exercises with subjects and mindfulness show that when mindfulness is applied it has a predictive effect on being able to regulate your own thoughts and positive emotions.

Research with seriously ill people also shows that if you then use mindfulness it takes significantly longer before you get a bad mood because of your illness or you end up in a depressed and stressed state as an ill person.

Mindfulness test

Want to know if you would benefit from mindfulness? Then I have a little test for you:

  • I often worry about the future.
  • If I feel something in my body I am afraid I am sick.
  • Sometimes I don't know why I feel what I feel.
  • It bothers me when things don't go my way.
  • I think it's important to be able to indicate whether something is fun or not.
  • My life takes place mostly in my mind.
  • I'm always busy so I don't have to think or feel.

If you answered Yes to most of these statements, mindfulness can do no harm. For example, because you find it important to like or dislike something, you are actually classifying things in your life all the time and giving them some sort of quality rating. Then when you go through a less enjoyable period you can get a real dip because of this, because it is not enjoyable.

When something isn't fun, things often don't go your way either. Some people can handle this well, but if you find this difficult it can be a problem for you.

Worry is part of life, but worry is not meant to control your life. Of course you want to be healthy, but you should also be able to enjoy pizza day if it comes along once every two weeks. You do need to enjoy exercise and not go biking hard because you fear cardiovascular disease. Then it is still better to choose a sport that suits you.

Worry and other thoughts can also cause you to feel that your life is actually happening mostly in your head. This means that you no longer feel the connection to your body as well. Of course you use your hands and walk somewhere, but this doesn't always happen consciously anymore. This is a shame, because the body you have should be with you all your life.

Being mindful about what you are doing also allows you to rest and become one with yourself and everything around you again. Then it is not scary to feel or think. Your thoughts can then also be better understood and directed allowing you to enjoy the very moments in your life.

Mindfulness Exercise

To give you a taste of what you can experience when you apply mindfulness, I've come up with a mindfulness exercise for you, which you can perform simply at your computer.

For this exercise, we are going to breathe mindfully. As a human being, you can never forget to breathe because it is necessary to live. Therefore, there is an unconscious part of your brain that takes over from you when you are too busy to breathe consciously. While conscious breathing can actually be very relaxing.

Through mindful breathing, it is possible to live directly in this moment and be aware of what you are doing, which is reading this article.

Step 1:

First, sit in a comfortable position. If you're using a laptop or tablet, you can easily walk over to your finest chair to sit there and relax. It doesn't matter if your eyes are open or closed, the important thing is that you have a comfortable posture.

Now go over what you all feel. The seat of the chair (or couch) the backrest that keeps your spine from getting all bulgy. What do you feel?

Step 2:

Observe your breathing. Okay you don't have to literally look at your nose, funny of course, but it's important to feel your breath going in through your nose (or mouth), your chest or abdomen expanding as you inhale, and all the sensations you have as you exhale. What does your breathing feel like?

Step 3:

Don't criticize. This is an exercise that cannot go right or wrong. The goal is to focus on your breathing, but it's not crazy at all if your brain has totally different ideas. There may always be thoughts swirling around or your mind may go somewhere other than to your breathing. This doesn't matter. If you notice this happening just go back to step 2 and focus on your breathing again.

How did this exercise go for you? Were you able to keep it up for long? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter for now, but the more often you do it, the longer you’ll be able to sustain it, and the more you’ll benefit from it. Mindfulness is about so much more than just breathing and is incredibly interesting. Would you like to learn more about it? Then come check out a seminar or take a look at the courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.

Sources: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/84/4/822/