How Mindfulness May Help to Get Closer to Where You Want to Be

Using Mindfulness Can Help You Get Closer to Your Goals

First, in order to utilize mindfulness to get closer to where we want to be, we have to understand what mindfulness is. According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the preeminent experts on mindfulness, mindfulness can best be described as an exercise of noticing. He says, “Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?” (Kabat-Zinn, 2009). Mindfulness, sometimes called mindfulness meditation, is not about trying to “make your mind go blank” or needing to “calm down”. Mindfulness is simply about connecting to this moment and everything in it, without judgment. Mindfulness-based therapy has long been utilized as an important psychological tool for dealing with a wide variety of presenting complaints. In fact, a 2013 meta-analysis of mindfulness-based stress reduction found that after looking at 29 studies which enrolled 2,668 participants (!!!), the authors found, “large effects on stress, moderate effects on anxiety, depression, distress, and quality of life, and small effects on burnout. When combined, changes in mindfulness and compassion measures correlated with changes in clinical measures at post-treatment and at follow-up” (Khoury et al., 2015, p.519).

Why is mindfulness useful?

So why, you may ask, is this useful? Let’s consider this example in understanding why mindfulness is so helpful. Imagine you don’t usually work out and you slowly start doing a little weightlifting. You start small, with a 2lb dumbbell, doing just 10 reps a few times a week. Then gradually you increase to 5lb dumbbell, doing a few more reps a few times more times a week. Before you know it, you’re up to 30lbs doing 30 reps a few days each week. Each week you feel a little stronger and you find that you’re able to manage a little more weight. Then one day, you’re walking down the street when BAM! Someone throws a 50lb medicine ball right at you. You catch it, thankfully, and although it doesn’t feel great you manage to hand it back to that person and go about the rest of your day. Now imagine you never worked out at all. Imagine anytime you have to lift anything you have someone else do it, or you just don’t do it at all. And then one day, you walk down the street, and out of nowhere someone throws a 50lb medicine ball at you. It knocks you back and you fall down, spraining your wrist in the process. You’re bruised, shocked, and in pain. Going about the rest of your day is difficult now with the pain and not being able to have full use of your hand. These two scenarios highlight the importance of not avoiding things and slowly working up to finding manageable ways to navigate uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, and situations.

Avoidance and mindfulness

What does avoidance have to do with mindfulness, though? Everything. Avoidance is our natural human tendency, how we deal with uncomfortable things in order to survive. Our ancestors didn’t exactly have the time to sit down and actively process their thoughts and feelings regarding every little uncomfortable experience, because they were often presented with life-or-death scenarios which required immediate action and if they were constantly processing everything, they would not have survived emergent threats. In the short-term, it is adaptive to avoid things—that’s why we do it. However, in the long-term, it’s a lot like never working out. It might work short-term, but sometimes in life you get hit randomly by a 50lb medicine ball when walking down the street. And if you’re not prepared and equipped to handle it—if you haven’t been actively working on NOT avoiding—then it’s going to be a lot harder to recover from that throw. Mindfulness, then, is the antidote to avoidance, if you will. The more that you are mindful and connected to the present moment, the less that you avoid and the better equipped you are to handle when someone throws you that medicine ball, or whatever other curveball life may throw you.

Simple mindfulness tips

Some simple tips for how to do mindfulness is to follow Jon Kabat-Zinn’s advice and to notice without judgment. I love to have client’s pick an activity that they already do each day—ideally one they do every day, like brushing their teeth—and commit to doing that mindfully. That means slowing down the process and noticing what this activity is like. You may open the tube of toothpaste and just listen to the sound that the cap makes as you open it. Then slowly smell the tube of toothpaste. Just notice that minty smell, and what it feels like as that minty smell flows into your nostrils. Take a second to notice the sensations of the tube in your hands, noticing how smooth it is. Slowly squeeze some of the toothpaste onto the toothbrush, noticing any sounds you hear as you do. Notice what it looks like as the toothpaste sits on the toothbrush. Maybe you notice some stripes in your toothpaste, or maybe it’s all one color. Maybe it’s shiny, or sparkly, or maybe it’s gritty. And when your mind wanders—as is the natural tendency of the mind—just come back to noticing that toothpaste on your toothbrush. Then slowly notice the texture of the toothbrush in your hands, noticing that some places might be smooth and shiny plastic while others are a more rough grip. Then slowly bring the toothbrush to your mouth, and just open your mouth wide as though you’re going to place it up to your teeth. Notice any sensations or urges as you do. And again, when your mind wanders, come back. You can continue doing this exercise, noticing each of the 5 senses, as you slowly and mindfully brush your teeth. Making sure to notice any thoughts that you have or any emotions you might be experiencing and coming back to the physical sensations of brushing your teeth.

Get closer to your values and goals with mindfulness

Now that you’re armed with why mindfulness is so useful and how to do mindfulness, how do you use it to get you closer to where you want to be? The first step is becoming conscious of when you avoid, and actively taking little steps to not avoid. This is very often a focus of our work in therapy—to identify the unhelpful avoidance strategies you utilize and replace them with more adaptive ones that are more values-consistent. One small and manageable way that you can start doing this work and practicing mindfulness next time in lieu of an avoidance strategy. For instance, next time you get stressed about something at work and decide you don’t want to think about it (especially if you would typically use an unhelpful strategy to help you not think about it), just take a few minutes to practice a mindfulness exercise. You can make it 2 minutes long or 20 minutes long, whatever feels useful for you. I generally encourage people to make it shorter as that often feels more manageable. And after all, the best mindfulness exercise is the one you do!

References

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2009). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. Hachette Books.

Khoury, B., Sharma, M., Rush, S. E., & Fournier, C. (2015). Mindfulness-based stress reduction for healthy individuals: A meta-analysis. Journal of psychosomatic research, 78(6), 519-528.