Mindfulness

Many of us   label our emotions as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, depending on how they make us feel. However, this can lead to a rigid and judgmental attitude towards our own feelings, which can make them harder to cope with.

A more helpful way to think about our emotions is to see them as ‘wanted’ or ‘unwanted’, depending on the context and the outcome they produce.

The Power of Small

In their book The Power of Small, Aisling and Trish Leonard-Curtin explain how this shift in perspective can help us to relate to our emotions more skilfully and compassionately. They argue that no emotion is inherently negative or positive, but rather that each emotion has a function and a message for us.

For example, fear is usually an unwanted emotion, because it makes us feel anxious and uncomfortable. However, fear is not negative in itself, because it alerts us to potential threats and motivates us to take action to protect ourselves.

Regrets

Similarly, regret is often an unwanted emotion, because it makes us feel guilty and sad about something we did or didn’t do in the past. However, regret is not negative either, because it can help us to learn from our mistakes and to behave differently in the future, such as being more compassionate or honest.

By thinking of our emotions as wanted or unwanted, rather than positive or negative, we can avoid judging ourselves harshly for having certain feelings. We can also acknowledge the value and meaning of each emotion, even if we don’t like it.

They just ‘are’

As the authors of The Power of Small say, “Emotions are not good or bad; they just are.”

This perspective can help us to accept our emotions as they are, without trying to suppress or avoid them, and to respond to them in constructive ways that enhance our well-being.

Self compassion helps us to relate well to unwanted emotions. Learn more in my online  course True Friend Payment is by donation so it is affordable to all. More information

Most of us go around thinking thoughts detrimental to our own happiness, Ayya Khema points out in Know where you’re going.

In other words we get lost in thoughts which repeat fears, anxieties, regrets and resentments. Very often these concern issues we can no longer do anything about because they are in the past or because they haven’t yet happened. In mindfulness we try to get good at coming out of this painful mind-wandering whenever we notice we are lost in it. We do this by shifting awareness to whatever is going on in the present moment, even if that is just to our own breathing.  

Acceptance

We can also come out of painful mind-wandering by accepting what we have to accept (perhaps a loss we’ve sustained) or that isn’t worth fighting (rain when we wanted sunshine, say). This isn’t to say that we should never entertain negative thoughts. Life contains plenty of painful events that need attention or that have had a strong impact and continue to affect us for some time.   It’s making a habit of getting lost in gloom that we have to look out for – and because one of the brain’s primary functions is to keep us out of trouble, we very easily slip into thinking about threats in the future or losses from the past. This includes going over painful events from which we have already, so to speak, sucked the marrow dry. And it includes exaggerated, upsetting thoughts about the future which so often don’t turn out the way we feared.   Too much of this can have a very detrimental effect on a person’s well-being and quality of life.  

Return to awareness

But when we’re mindful we can spot what’s going on and we can return to awareness of the actual reality around us or even to doing some logical planning (as opposed to fantasising) about future events.

We return to that awareness as I said above by bringing our attention to our breath, to our body or to what we are physically doing.

This is well worth practising and the more you practise the better you will be at it. Stepping out of automatic pessimistic thinking is one of the great gifts of mindfulness.

• Ayya Khema, born in Berlin in 1923 was a Buddhist teacher. Her Jewish family escaped the Nazi persecution. She was best known for promoting the position of women in Buddhism. She was the author of many books. She died in 1997.

My online course Easy Mindfulness will help you make mindfulness part of your daily life and contains lots of material you can download and keep.

We are often urged to practise gratitude to improve our well-being? But does this have any backing in social science? Yes it does and I outlined some examples in my Irish Times column (the column is behind a paywall so here are the relevant extracts) :

“A series of studies reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2003 found that people benefitted from spending time deliberately reflecting on what they felt grateful for.

Benefits

“Benefits included a more optimistic outlook – helpful in many domains of life and, in one group, more time spent exercising. Those who practised gratitude were also more likely to help others. Engaging in the gratitude reflection every day for fifteen minutes had a stronger effect than doing so once a week.

“One of the groups studied was made up of adults with neuromuscular diseases. Participants in this group who practised gratitude also found felt more positive than controls, they had less negative feeling, they slept better and woke up more refreshed. The study covered a period of only a few weeks so the results are impressive.

Teenagers

“In a more recent, longer, study, researchers at California State University found children, aged 10-14, who had grown up to be grateful experienced many benefits. The researchers measured the gratitude levels at the start and end of a 4-year period to establish who were the most grateful. Those in the most grateful twenty per cent had a greater sense of meaning, were more satisfied with their lives, were more happy and hopeful and had fewer negative emotions or symptoms of depression. For more see http://bit.ly/gratefulteens

“What all these findings seem to suggest is that cultivating gratitude improves your wellbeing in many ways and that this applies even if you have challenging health conditions.”

How to do it?

How to cultivate gratitude? Try making a mental or written list daily of what you are grateful for. This could include items from today or yesterday or from years ago. If you want to take a really long view you could include events that happened before you were born – for instance a favour that made a big difference in the life of a grandparent and, consequently, to you.

You could write a letter of gratitude to someone for what they have done for you or meant to you – writing such a letter boosts your mood – even if you never post it.

You could divide your life into three sections (dividing your age by three is an easy way to do this) and reflect on something you feel grateful for in each time period.

See if you can feel that gratitude in your heart or tummy areas – these areas connect to the emotional parts of the brain and so can help deepen your sense of gratitude.

In whatever way you’d prefer to do it, try cultivating gratitude in your life and I think you’ll be glad you did it.

Mindfulness helps us to cultivate gratitude – take a look at my  Easy Mindfulness  online course which has 15 lessons you can do whenever you like.

People involved in wellness sometimes make the mistake of giving the impression that anything negative is bad and that we should aim to feel positive all the time. But that’s not realistic.

Negative feelings often are telling us something that we need to know.

Something you need to do

For instance, if you feel anxious about a particular undone task, maybe there is something you need to do about it.

If you feel guilty, maybe there’s something that you did that wasn’t right, and that you need to try to put right if you can.

If you feel bored, maybe you need to do something different in your day or in your life.

But the key thing is not to get lost in it, not to be overwhelmed by it. We need to be able to step back and see if there’s anything useful here.

If there is, the question then is what could I do about it?

If there isn’t anything useful, you can try to change your focus to something else. For example, feeling very negative over things that happened in the past that you can’t do anything at all about now often isn’t a very useful thing to do. And in such a case, you would try to change your focus to something else.

Mindfulness and stepping back

Mindfulness practice makes it easier to do all of these things. Mindfulness helps you develop the skill of stepping back, through the repeated practice of coming back into the present moment. And that makes it much easier to see what is useful and what is not useful.

That awareness then helps you to, as I said, move your focus to something else; or wait for the feeling to pass by itself; or if there’s something you can do about the issue, to do that something.

So negativity is not always negative, especially when it’s coupled with mindfulness

My Easy Mindfulness online course (15 lessons in your own time)can help you develop that vital skill of stepping back. Payment is by donation, so you can afford it. Learn more here.

Image by LeoHoHo

I’m sure that like the rest of us, you have repeated a phone number to yourself over and over to memorise it until you can write it down.

Consider that when we repeat dissatisfactions to ourselves over and over we are doing the same thing – keeping them alive in our memory.

Oh, I’m not happy with the weather today. I’m not happy with the time that that meeting has been moved to. I’m not happy with the service here tonight.

Keeping dissatisfactions alive

We keep our dissatisfactions alive by repeating them to ourselves endlessly, just as if we were repeating a number that we wanted to remember.

That’s a pity because after all, most of our day to day dissatisfactions are forgettable if we don’t work hard at remembering them.

Better to move on from them instead of insisting on upsetting ourselves over trivial things.

Trivialities

Life has plenty of serious and painful challenges to deal with. Why load trivial dissatisfactions on top of them?

As they say in Recovery International: There is no right or wrong in the trivialities of daily life.

So do yourself a favour – take your list of everyday grievances off repeat.

Mindfulness emphasises the importance of Acceptance – take a look at my  Easy Mindfulness  online course which has 15 lessons you can do whenever you like. 

One of the points I emphasise in my book Acceptance is the value of being able to accept that the world is not going to act in accordance with our wishes all the time. Other people are not always going to have opinions that we agree with.

I think that’s important because I feel that we’re living in a world in which we’re becoming less tolerant of  different opinions, for instance, or of behaving in different ways.

Expanding toleration

I make a point in the book, drawing on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, that expanding the range of experiences we can tolerate is an important life skill.

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, acceptance is defined as “expansion.”

What this means is that we can learn to tolerate a wider range of experiences, through mindful acceptance. We learn to expand our world, so to speak, to allow more experiences into it, instead of pushing them away.

Making life harder

I think that the less we are able to accept the reality of this strange and often frustrating world that we live in, the harder we are going to find life.

This doesn’t mean that we have to lie down under everything that happens to us. But what it does mean is wisely choosing your battles. And also asking, well, is this thing that I’m getting worked up about something I could just accept and not get worked up about? Could I save my energy for something that’s worth it?

In this very strange, often ramshackle world, acceptance of what we don’t like can often be a virtue.

Mindfulness emphasises the importance of Acceptance – take a look at my  Easy Mindfulness  online course which has 15 lessons you can do whenever you like. 

I think one of the most important things to remember about breathing is that it’s a great resource – apart from keeping us alive, of course – in working with our emotions.

Calming stress

And one point I want to emphasize is the importance of slow breathing in order to calm you down. So when you breathe slowly, if you’re feeling stressed, or tense, that slow breathing switches on the calming part of your nervous system (called the para sympathetic nervous system). So it’s a physical process that happens as you’re doing that breathing.

Longer out breath

One way to breathe slowly is to take a longer out breath than in breath. So you breathe in, and then you take a longer out breath.

Do that now for just one in breath, with a longer out breath.

Belly breathing

So if you do that for a few minutes, you will find yourself becoming calmer than you were when you started. It also helps if you do ‘diaphragmatic’ breathing, which could be called belly breathing, and which is really breathing from the area around your belly button.

So just try that now, breathing in and taking a longer out breath.  And breathing from your belly button.

So the key point is that even if you’re feeling quite wound up and stressed, if you make a space to do that slow breathing, you will begin to de-stress and to calm down your nervous system.

Mindfulness emphasises the importance of breathing – take a look at my  Easy Mindfulness  online course which has 15 lessons you can do whenever you like.