Whether your goal is to lose weight or quit smoking, becoming more mindful is the first step toward that change. Aside from helping you change your habits, it carries some benefits. Becoming more mindful can help you control your emotions, focus, and be more joyous. Read on to find out how.
What is mindfulness?
The American Psychology Association defines mindfulness as:
“a moment-to-moment awareness of one’s experience without judgment”
For those unfamiliar with meditation, this definition of mindfulness might seem like just another word for meditation. Mark W. Muessen explains the difference between these disciplines in his The Great Courses: Practicing Mindfulness lecture series.
He says that meditation is focused attention on a given thing. While mindfulness is being aware of your thoughts. You can meditate on chocolate or coffee without noticing your mind’s thoughts as they bounce from one place to another. Your attention is on the item, but you don’t need to be more mindful.
Meanwhile, you can be mindful while not meditating. You are mindful when you become aware of your thoughts in a non-judgemental fashion. As they arise, you note them and let them drift through your mind uninterrupted.
While different, mindfulness and meditation are intimately related. As you do one, the other tends to follow. Doing a mindfulness meditation, for example, combines both practices by making the focus of your meditation your mind. These meditations will have a compounding effect allowing you to go deeper into your meditation.
Benefits of mindfulness
Control of your emotions
Your thoughts are like the clouds in the sky. Sometimes there are many; sometimes, there are non. When there are non, you can see the beautiful blue sky and the sun shining on your face. You can look at these clouds from two perspectives: a person on the ground observing them or a bird flying through them. Mindfulness allows you to look up at the clouds without interacting with them.
A seasoned mindfulness practitioner can control their emotional response to a stimulus. They can choose whether to have empathy, compassion or no response to things such as sad movies. This ability is handy when it comes to making ration decisions.
The more you can distance yourself from the decision, the better the outcome will be. This observation is especially true with habit change. Developing sustainable habits is a very logical decision. Enhancing your emotional response to such decisions makes them more likely to stick.
Better Focus
If you can learn to focus on your thoughts as they arise, you can learn to focus on anything. Learning to control your focus can alter your perception of time. The more you focus, the more you will remember and the slower time will feel. Conversely, the less you focus, the less you will remember, and your perception of time will be faster.
“Creating new memories stretches out psychological time and lengthens our perception of our lives”
Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein
This happens when you are having fun, and time seems to fly by. The more you enjoy an activity, the easier it is to focus on that activity, and the faster the sands of time will fall. There are two things you can do to take advantage of this phenomenon.
Make time feel slower.
When you are doing an activity you enjoy and want it to last longer, pay closer attention. Just like the control over your emotions, controlling your focus allows you to take a step back and be an observer. When you take a moment to say to yourself, “”wow, this is really fun,”” you are showing gratitude towards the moment and making it more memorable.
Make time feel faster.
Conversely, when waiting in line at the bank, you can make time go by faster by loosening your focus and letting your mind wander. As your mind wanders through the clouds, the time will slip as the moment becomes less memorable. After all, waiting in line does not have to be a memorable moment.
Being more joyful
You may have already guessed this benefit from the above two, but increased mindfulness makes your life more joyful. Joy is a discipline, while happiness is a reflex. Anyone can be happy when something good happens to them. Still, only a well-disciplined mind can find joy in a difficult situation.
Mindfulness is not a panacea against sadness. Regardless of how much you practice, you will always feel sad when something bad happens. But, the ability to spot your sad thoughts will break the cycle of rumination, which will keep you in that sadness.
Observing your thoughts is the easiest way to move past them. When you learn to acknowledge them without interacting with them, you will gain a powerful tool for overcoming difficulties.
In every difficult situation, the first thing you need to change is your mindset. For proof, look no further than Viktor Frankl’s Man’s search for meaning. The chronicles of his time during the darkest period of human history show how much power your mindset can have on your perseverance.
Even during the darkest days, he could see the positive side and appreciate his blessings. Above all else, that is what mindfulness teaches you, to enjoy the boons that life gives you. There is no secret that appreciating life’s blessings is the quickest path to riches.
Getting started
If this has inspired you to get started, then don’t hesitate. Through mindfulness, most often curated via meditation, you gain control of your emotions, focus and inevitably, your joy.
If you would like a beginner’s guide to meditation, click here. Or, skip it and go straight to apps like headspace with a wonderful beginner guide. That’s how I started, and I am now more joyful than ever.
We all face difficulties in life, and bad habits can be hard to overcome. That’sThat’s why I built this practice, to help people like you get their lives back on track. Schedule a session with me, and let’s get you on the path to a better and healthier life or subscribe to my newsletter below and have these articles sent straight to your inbox.
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