By the end of this video you're going to know how to use mindfulness in your life. You're going to experience mindfulness with two quick activities, and you're going to learn how mindfulness can help you calm your body and your mind. The skill of mindfulness shifts your perspective on emotions.
You'll learn how to get better at soothing anxiety, you'll learn to process sad feelings, and you'll learn to quiet negative self-talk. Mindfulness combined with CBT has been shown to work as well as medication at treating depression and anxiety, but without the side effects - and it's more effective in the long-term. Mindfulness actually helps rewire your brain.
It helps improve connectivity between neurons and the part of your brain that processes emotions. In skill number five we looked at how avoidance and struggle with our emotions tends to make us miserable, or at the very least keeps us from living the life we dream of. So what's the alternative?
Is it just suffering? No! Today we'll look at mindful acceptance as a step toward resolving emotions.
When things get stressful, do you find yourself coping in unhealthy ways, like overeating, venting, or just avoiding things altogether? These strategies may work in the short term, but eventually they'll end up causing more problems than they solve. Imagine what'd it be like if you had the skills to work through tough emotions without losing it.
My online course Coping Skills and Self-Care for Mental Health takes you through the process of creating your own healthy coping and self-care routine. You'll learn to identify triggering situations, manage intense emotions; you'll learn to calm your stress response and build your own personalized coping skills list so that you can handle different situations. By the end of the course you'll show stress, anxiety, and depression that they don't run your life because you'll have the skills to manage emotions in healthy ways.
If you want to learn more about coping skills and self-care, just click the link in the description to learn more about this cool course. When we're mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace, and love. Have you ever had an experience where you were intensely aware of the moment?
Maybe it was a beautiful sunrise or even a frightening experience. And suddenly you started noticing the tiny details of each thing around you. Perhaps you noticed the way the light was hitting the trees or the feel of the dirt beneath your feet.
Maybe you heard the sound of the birds or maybe even of your own breath. Everything felt real, crisp; the moment felt magical, you felt alive. Write about that experience in your workbook.
Or if you're on YouTube, you could write about the experience in the comments section below. On the other hand, have you ever felt like you're just numb? You're plowing through the day; you're trying to just not think about your life or just waiting for it to get better.
Maybe you felt that way for weeks and months on end. Now, we often attribute these feelings of joy or misery with the outside circumstances. So for me, I remember a time I felt like the world was alive, when I was hiking in Hawaii.
So we might think, Oh, the beautiful sunrise gave me joy and my daily grind gave me misery. But there is another way to look at that. So what if it was the state of awareness that brought joy and the habit of distraction and avoidance that brought misery?
Our minds, our hearts, and our bodies have an innate healing ability. We have a natural drive to heal and resolve problems, to find joy and to grow. When we stop interfering with that natural drive, when we stop distracting ourselves endlessly and we start acknowledging instead of avoiding all of our feelings, we give ourselves the freedom to come back to ourselves and to find peace and joy.
Our brain has a natural ability to file away our problems and to resolve them in the in the downtime, but if we never give ourselves quiet time then it creates this backlog of issues to file away. So some indications that you might have a problem with distraction are: you have a hard time sleeping - and that could be because your mind is finally getting a chance to sort through your thoughts - or if you always need music on your phone or if when you sit still with nothing to do you feel sad or anxious. This can all be caused by being kind of addicted to distraction and busyness.
On the other hand, we can train our minds to feel joy and vitality by developing our present moment awareness. So instead of needing to escape, right, to feel different experiences to feel happy, like a vacation or winning the lottery, we can create joy in the present moment by waking up and living. Acceptance, in my opinion, is the key to convert momentary happiness to enduring happiness.
It helps you move from feeling happy to actually being happy. So what is mindfulness? Mindfulness is just being aware.
That's it. It's being aware of what we're experiencing in the here and now. So, for example, are you aware of the chair pressing against your legs, right now?
Well, now you are mindful of that. Another way to describe it is to be awake to the present moment. We can practice mindfulness, we can actively work out those mindful muscles, by focusing our awareness on our bodily sensations, our thoughts, and our emotions.
If we do this while actively accepting the present moment, thoughts, sensations, and emotions, we can develop more internal power. Now there's that word again. I actually wish there was a better word in English than acceptance because acceptance has this connotation of giving up or just saying "Well, I'm just gonna accept that life sucks and it always will" or some, you know, crap like that.
But that's not what it means at all, at least when it's used in the therapeutic sense. Acceptance as we use it here is simply acknowledging what is here in the present moment, and it's choosing to allow it to be there and choosing to be awake to that. That's it.
It's getting grounded in the here now and noticing what it feels like. Now another way to describe it is willingness - choosing to be willing to feel. It's starting with where we are and going from there.
So with difficult emotions, this can be really hard because we don't necessarily want to feel sad or we don't want to feel anxious. But what's the alternative? I do feel anxious, so I'm going to try and pretend like I'm not?
I do feel anxious, so I'm going to try and make that go away? Well, that makes things worse. In football they start each play where the ball is, not where it could have been or where it should have been or where the team wants it to be.
Willingness is about starting where we're at. So imagine how a football game would go if every play, the players spent time arguing about where the ball ought to be or where they want it to be or wishing they had done better the previous play or worrying about the fourth quarter or trying not to think about where the ball is because they don't like it, right. That would not be a very enjoyable game.
Same thing goes with our emotions. Acceptance or willingness doesn't mean we aren't trying to move forward; it just means we know where we are starting. It's amazing how much of our lives we spend not noticing being mindless.
We regret about the past or we long for the past; we worry about the future or we daydream about the future. All the while we're just trying to escape the now. We keep our minds distracted by music or TV or Facebook or work.
We try not to notice the pain that we feel, all the while not realizing that if we just accept that it exists right now, it tends to not hurt so much Mindfulness is pretty simple to learn and practice, so let's try a little experiment. For this you're going to need a little bit of food, like it could be some trail mix or a raisin a chocolate chip or a piece of bread, whatever, right. Just pause the video.
Go find a little piece of something to eat. Eating is one of those things that we often do while multitasking. We might eat while we watch TV or talk on the phone, or we just keep working while we down a sandwich.
Distracted eating is associated with weight gain, overeating, and decreased enjoyment of food. So go ahead; get out your little piece of food - but don't eat it yet. Just take a moment and look at the food.
Really see it. Pretend that you're an alien who has landed on a strange planet and you get to describe food for the first time ever. What do you see?
Notice the texture, the light on it, its shape, whether it's soft or hard, coarse or smooth. Now feel it in your hand. Is it light, heavy, warm, or cool?
Notice any thoughts that come up, like "Why am I doing this? " and just let those thoughts be there. And then shift your attention back to the food.
What do you notice in your body? Are you starting to salivate? What does that feel like?
Bring the piece of food up to your nose. Does it have any smell? Bring it up to your ear.
Does it make any sound? Bring the piece of food to your mouth. Isn't that interesting that your hand knows exactly where to go?
Now I'm going to ask you to gently place it in your mouth - but don't chew it yet. What do you notice about it? Feel it on your tongue, its weight, its temperature, its size, its texture.
Roll it around in your mouth and explore the sensations of it in there. Now when you're ready, intentionally bite into it. Did you automatically pick a side to chew on?
Notice when you start to taste the food. Slowly slowly chew the food, and notice when you feel a desire to swallow. What does that feel like, the desire to swallow, what does that feel like?
When you swallow, notice what it feels like to swallow. Can you feel the food moving down toward your stomach? Congratulations; you've just had your first taste with mindfulness.
You noticed what it feels like to do something that you often do mindlessly. Now let's talk quickly about the difference between mindfulness and meditation. Meditation is an activity; mindfulness is a state of awareness.
Meditation is when you stop doing what you're doing and you spend a certain amount of time in in mindfulness or in a meditation activity. Now mindfulness can be done by stopping what we're doing and focusing on it, but what I love about mindfulness is that it can also be done while we're in the middle of whatever else we're doing, and it can bring joy and awareness to our task at hand. Now I tend to suck at meditation.
I find it really hard to do, I find it difficult to set apart time to do it, but when I do it, it is beneficial. On the other hand, mindfulness is a practice that's a lot easier for me because I can do it while I'm doing whatever else I'm doing, and it brings vitality to the task at hand. So let's talk about what are the characteristics of mindful acceptance?
The first one is present moment awareness - you keep bringing yourself back to the here and now. Number two is a non-judgmental approach - you don't label your initial thoughts, emotions, or sensations as good or bad. Mindfulness is not having a blank mind, making your mind go blank; it's allowing yourself to keep shifting your focus to what you choose to focus on instead of letting your focus be pulled away by whatever your mind wants or whatever's going on around you.
The third characteristic of mindfulness is non-striving. We aren't trying to force change; we're not trying to make our thoughts, emotions, or sensations go away. This activity is about being where you're at while you are there.
Another characteristic of mindfulness is to have a beginner's mind, to be curious about your experience as if it's the first time you've ever felt that. You ask questions like, "What does it feel like to feel this? " And then another aspect of mindfulness is expanding awareness.
So you might be noticing that you're feeling anxious or sad, and then you expand your awareness and you say, "What else am I feeling? " So an example of this is when maybe an elderly person who was suffering has died, you might feel super sad - but you might also feel grateful that they aren't in pain anymore. So mindfulness gives you a chance to explore the subtle emotions in addition to the loud ones.
Often mindfulness helps us feel a sense of calm or increased joy in the moment, but that's not the goal of mindfulness. Sometimes mindfulness makes us feel worse, especially when we've been chronically avoiding or distracting ourselves. The goal is not to make you feel better; the goal is to get better at feeling - to, like a weight lifter to increase your emotional muscles so that heavy things seem light, not because the nature of the weight or the emotion has changed but because our ability to lift it has increased.
Mindfulness is also not a relaxation technique. We can do tons of relaxation techniques later, but that won't bring us happiness if we're just using them to attempt to escape or avoid our emotions. So as you practice mindfulness, focus your attention on what you are feeling instead of what you want to be feeling.
When we're feeling distracted or detached from the present moment, we can quickly return to the present by utilizing our senses. So here comes exercise number two. So for our second activity we're going to try a very short mindful breathing activity.
So for a moment now just bring your attention to your breath. Notice what it feels like for your breath to come in, your breath to go out. Now the purpose of this activity is not to change your breathing; it's to notice it as it is.
But there's something about noticing that leads to feeling a more relaxed sense of whatever you're experiencing. So for a lot of people, their breathing starts to get slower and deeper. But again, that's not the goal of the activity; it's just to notice your breath.
What does it feel like for the air to come in your nose? What does it feel like for the air to go out? Now, it's normal for your mind to wander.
Like I said before, the goal of mindfulness is not that your mind goes completely blank but that you practice returning your attention to what you choose to pay attention to. So for this activity, your mind might wander. When you notice that your mind has wandered, just gently bring it back to noticing what it feels like to breathe.
Does the air change temperature as it comes in and out? Pretend like you've never experienced breathing before or like you're an alien from a planet where breathing doesn't happen. Be curious about the experience of breathing.
What does it feel like to breathe? If your mind wanders, just bring it back to the present moment. And you've just practiced mindfulness.
That's the second way to do it. The breath can be an anchor for our attention and our focus. When you find yourself feeling distracted or irritated or agitated, you can bring yourself back to the present moment by simply paying attention to your breathing.
And this is one of the most simple, basic ways to practice mindfulness throughout your day. So now that you understand the basics of mindfulness you can practice this throughout the day or when experiencing a strong emotion. So take a minute to be mindful.
As you scan your body, allow those emotions or sensations to be there, and then check for what else is there. What else is going on? Check in with your body, your mind, and your emotions as if you were a curious scientist exploring and describing the experience for the first time.
The full course has many more mindfulness activities. Choose at least one of the following activities to practice mindfulness while doing one of your daily activities. You can also check out my grounding skills playlist if you'd like to try a couple of meditations.
The practice of mindfulness can help you reduce anxiety and depression, can help you get better at feeling your emotions, and it can help you relax and feel more centered and more rich and more connected to your life. Thank you for watching, and take care. This video is one skill from my 30-skill course: How to Process Your Emotions, where I teach 30 of the most essential skills for resolving depression, anxiety, and improving mental health.
Emotion processing is an essential skill for working through intense emotions, but most people have never been taught how to do it. I'm putting every single main video lesson on YouTube for the world to access for free. You watching these videos, sharing them, contributing to my Patreon and my sponsors make this possible.
If you would like to access the entire course in one place ad free with its workbook, exercises, downloads, extra videos, live Q&A's, additional short readings and links to extended resources, the link to buy the course is in the description below.
