It happens in life that we experience stress and anxiety about issues we can’t fix directly or immediately or maybe at all. These include challenges and uncertainties with health, relationships or financial matters. What happens in the wider world, can, of course, be the original source of these personal stresses (as in problems in the economy) but we feel them as personal issues.
For instance, if your job is under threat, you will certainly be anxious and stressed over it.
What is the point of mindfulness in such a situation?
Simple mindfulness
Simple mindfulness practices can help to lower levels of stress even if, in the circumstances, it can’t create serenity for you.
Returning from fearful thoughts to awareness of your breathing or of your body, for instance, can lower the degree of stress, help you to get a better night’s sleep and bring you some clarity of mind. Deliberately paying attention to your breathing has been found to reduce stress in the emotional system.
Cultivating acceptance – which is part of mindfulness – of what you have to accept can also lower stress and help you to see more clearly what to do next. Even accepting uncertainty can help.
Blood pressure
Stress can trap you in a vicious circle of upsetting thoughts which, in turn, can generate new upsetting thoughts.
So even if mindfulness in these circumstances isn’t going to turn you into a serene buddha, if it brings the level of stress down from – to use a traffic light analogy – red to orange, that’s good for you.
And it’s easier to move from orange down to green, when circumstances allow, than to jump all the way from red to green.This Daily Bell might also help:Why does bringing calm awareness to the moment a few times a day matter? What good does it do? It calms the stress centres of the brain (paying attention to breathing has this effect), it stops you building up stressful thought after stressful thought and it makes a space in which to allow positive feelings to arise. Try it now if you c
Try: For a few minutes observe your breath, especially your outbreath, and when your mind drifts, very quietly note that drifting and return to your outbreath.
I would add that acting attentively in your day and your life can lower stress as you bring more awareness to what you are actually doing and less to catastrophising about the near or far future.
This isn’t magic. It helps you to bring a quality of presence of mind to dealing with life, its challenges and opportunities.
Learn many simple mindfulness techniques with my 15-lesson online course, Easy Mindfulness. Payment is by donation so it is affordable to all.