Mindfulness
Mindfulness has been gaining traction across the U.S. over the last few years. It’s no wonder considering the long list of benefits; such as, being more productive, reduced emotional turbulence, reduced anxiety, improved attention, and even help with regulating eating habits. Mindfulness is the act of bringing all your attention to the present moment and engaging all attention to the current task and without judgement. Working on mindfulness and improving your practice of it is extremely difficult. When is the last time you sat and focused only on the food you were eating or the work you were completing, without your thoughts wandering away? For many of us, this is a constant in life. Our wandering thoughts, make it difficult for us to stay on task. Mindfulness is simply a way to practice reducing the mind wandering and getting more out of your current activity.
Benefits of practicing mindfulness
While mindfulness is currently trendy, research has been taking place for year. Some practices can even be dated back to early civilization. The common theme is many areas of life are improved with simple, daily mindfulness practice. A few specific improvements with mindfulness are:
- Decreased anxiety
- Decreased emotional reactivity
- Improved attention and maintained attention
- Improved mental and physical energy
- Improved immune functioning
- Improved eating habits
- Successful with those suffering from addiction
- Improved athletic performance
- Decreased depressive symptoms
This is only a short list of benefits. One of the biggest reasons to consider working toward being more mindful is to get more enjoyment out of life. Fear, sadness, shame, guilt, and painful experiences all reside in either the past or the future. Keeping our focus on the present, decreases our thoughts wondering to those unhealthy experiences and expectations. The less often our thoughts visit those negative expectations and experiences, the less they shape our lives. If you are having a bad day, you are more likely to notice negative experiences from that day, day rather than good or pleasant experiences. The reason behind this is you are “primed” for negative experiences. However, mindfulness helps train our brain to move out of this priming effect. This way we do not great a filter that only allows in the negative experiences. Overall, we want to create a filter that allows the positive in to help improve our way of thinking and how we feel about ourselves.