Mindfulness and Mental Health: Tips and Strategies for Being Present
Take a deep, cleansing breath. Notice the sensation of the air as it enters your nostils and fills your lungs. Did you notice that your belly expanded as you did this? Now exhale and see what you notice. Did you belly fall toward your spine and the air out of your nose feel warm? Welcome to mindfulness, the noticing of the present moment.
What is Mindfulness?
Not only is mindfulness one of my favorite life hacks for reducing stress, anxiety, and depression, it’s just overall awesome! Mindfulness is the practice of being in the present moment without judgment or interpretation. It requires you to tune in to your feelings and senses as they occur, instead of focusing on the past or future. Mindfulness often results in heightened self-awareness and wellbeing. Let’s check it out!
In my therapy practice, I like to incorporate mindfulness into both sessions and the space between sessions in the form of a ‘mini-assignment’. This is the work the client practices between our meetings to learn the skills that will reduce distress. The benefits of mindfulness are that it keeps you from being reactive to your environment out of impulse or instinct. It encourages you to stay calm and respond to stress in more productive ways. Mindfulness has been studied across many areas including: helping to achieve goals, manage diabetes, reduce symptoms of burnout, improve focus and attention, ease stress/anxiety/depression and chronic pain, improve relationships, and address insomnia and high blood pressure.
Mindfulness for Anxiety
Anxiety thrives on creating stories in our thoughts that things are ‘out of control’ or ‘unpredictable’. This is where mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness practices can help people feel more in control of their actions and outcomes, increase self-awareness, and recognize signs of anxiety and stress in your body and mind. If used early and preventatively, this can increase the chances of stopping those feelings from escalating. But once anxiety has heightened into a full blown panic attack, mindfulness can also help you return to a sense of calm.
Mindfulness for Depression
Mindfulness can help you become aware of negative thought patterns common to depression and thus, you can change the way you relate to them. It can also help lessen your emotional reactivity to situations allowing you to have a better outcome. With mindfulness, you can halt unproductive rumination and put your thoughts on a more positive track.
Mindfulness Techniques
One of my favorite things to do in my practice is teach mindfulness techniques to my clients. Why? Having these tools in your pocket for every day or “as needed” use is like having a secret weapon to combat dis-ease. If practiced regularly, your body and mind start to incorporate these more automatically as a form of refocusing and self-soothing.
Meditation. This involves focusing on a single object, activity, or thought to heighten awareness and increase attention.
Mindful Eating. This involves being fully present when eating. Using your 5 senses, you tune in to your full experience of being around food from seeing it on your plate to chewing and swallowing the food and noticing the sensations.
Focused Breathing. This requires you to bring your focus to your breath. You may notice your stomach expanding on your inhale and contracting or deflating on your exhale.
Walking Meditation. This involves going for a walk and becoming aware of each part of the stepping process. You may focus on the heel to toe motion or the sound of each step you take.
Mindful listening. This technique allows you to fully attend to sounds or noises you hear without attaching stories, judgments, or thoughts to the observation.
How to Practice Mindfulness
I often recommend practicing some form of mindfulness every day to manage and reduce stress. To start, this may look like you focusing on your breath even before you roll out of bed in the morning. If you tend to need support relaxing in the evening, you can use this practice for a nighttime wind-down activity. Throughout the day, you might practice tuning into your senses. One thing I love to do when I take my daily walk is to choose a sense such as hearing/sound and bring my focus to all that I am hearing. If I find myself labeling the sound, I notice the label and move on to return to sound.
Another great way to practice mindfulness, particularly when you’re feeling anxious, is to have a temperature change of some sort. You could run your hands under cold water and tune into the sensation of the water or the sensation of the coldness. Notice what happens when you bring your attention to a different sensation other than your anxiety.
Finally, you can feel and acknowledge any and all emotions you experience when they arise. This requires you to fully attune to your experience and to detach from any need to judge or ‘make sense’ of the emotion. Just feel it and watch how it tends to rise then fall.
If you’re interested in learning more about mindfulness and how it can support your wellbeing, please send me a message or schedule a session. I would be happy to teach you techniques and give you practices to apply between our sessions to develop a strong sense of calm and presence.