What is Mindfulness and How Can It Help Me?
What is Mindfulness and How Can It Help Me?
Maybe you’ve heard the word mindfulness before and have no idea what it means. Or maybe you’ve learned a little bit about it and don’t understand how it can help you. If you are in either of these situations, let me shed light on what I’ve learned about mindfulness and how it can be a wonderful coping skill if you are struggling with stress, anxiety, depression, insomnia, addiction, and so much more!
What is Mindfulness?
First of all, what is mindfulness? Mindfulness is simply the skill of being in the present moment. It is so simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. For example, how many times do we eat something without really being hungry, or even without really tasting our food? How many times do we zone out on our drive to work because we do it every single day? Just the other day, I was driving somewhere that was in the same general direction of my office. Since I started taking my everyday path, I started driving to work before I even realized that I wasn’t going there. I missed the turn that I actually needed to take and I had to turn around in order to continue on my journey.
How to Practice Mindfulness?
Using Your 5 Senses
There are many different ways to practice mindfulness. This is great news because it means that there are already many areas in your current day-to-day life that can be used to practice mindfulness. An easy way to start integrating mindfulness into your daily life is to start becoming aware of how your 5 senses interact with different things that you do.
For example, a great way to practice mindfulness is to practice mindful eating. This can look like acknowledging your hunger before you eat, being intentional about the size of bite that you take, and using all five of your senses to experience your food. Of course you can think about what it tastes like, but you can also explore the feeling of the food against your tongue, the roof of your mouth, and your throat. You can become aware of what smell it is giving off, and how that smell makes your body react. Are you making any sounds while you are chewing? Is the fork clanking against your teeth? And what does the food look like? What are the colors and patterns that your food has? Does looking at it make you feel any certain way?
This same curiosity can be applied to your drive home, your workout at the gym, calling your mom on the phone, etc… all for the purpose of becoming more aware of the present moment.
Mindful Walking
Another great mindfulness skill is to go on a mindfulness walk. Walking in general is good for you, and adding mindfulness is extra good for you. A mindfulness walk is just like a regular walk, but encourages you to pay special attention to your breathing and each step that you take. The goal here is to practice being in the present moment without forcing anything to happen. Your mind will inevitably drift off of your walking and your breathing. That’s okay! Allow yourself grace and when you find your mind wandering, gently direct your mind back to your breathing and your walking.
Body Scan Meditation
My all-time favorite mindfulness practice involves doing a body scan meditation. A body scan is a guided meditation that involves starting at the top of your head and noticing any tension that you are holding. You are then prompted to release it. This continues all the way down to your toes. The reason I enjoy this so much is that I usually realize I’m clenching some weird part of my body that I wasn’t even aware of. This allows me to relax and release tension that I didn’t even know I was carrying.
A great way to practice a body scan meditation is to simply look one up on YouTube and follow along. Here is a good one to start off with:
Body Scan | (DBT) MEDITATION - YouTube
Mindfulness Apps
If you love having apps for everything, great news! There are definitely apps that can help you with mindfulness. Whether it’s through guided meditations or written prompts, it can be great to have something that helps you with being in the present moment that is as easy and quick to access as an app. Most apps have free versions but require a subscription to unlock all of the features. Here are some of my favorite apps:
Headspace: Mindful Meditation (Free trial, and then $12.99 per month or $69.99 per year)
Calm (Free trial, and then $14.99 per month, $69.99 per year, or $399.99 for a lifetime membership)
Check with your health insurance to see if they offer any free subscriptions to apps like this. I was able to get a free year-long subscription to Calm with my Kaiser Permanente Health Insurance.
How Can Mindfulness Help Me?
So what is the big deal with mindfulness? Through various research studies, mindfulness has been proven to have many benefits to the person who practices it. It all goes back to neuroscience (the science of the brain), because mindfulness can create new and more helpful pathways in our brain. Positivepsychology.com lists the 5 most common benefits of mindfulness as, “decreased stress, enhanced ability to deal with illness, facilitation of recovery, decreased depressive symptoms, and improved general health.” And you don’t need to take my word for it, there is tons of research to back this up. Feel free to google mindfulness research and you will find thousands of studies to back-up this research, including studies from the American Psychological Association (APA) and Harvard University.
I encourage you to find a mindfulness practice that you can begin integrating into your everyday routine. If you would like to learn more about how mindfulness can be used as a healing tool in a therapeutic setting, make an appointment today with one of the therapists at the Center for Integrative Change either online or by calling our Client Care Specialist.
About The Author
Jorden Groenink, MS, AMFT, APCC an associate marriage and family therapist (AMFT136162) and an Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC12906), supervised by Jeremy Mast, MS, MDiv, LMFT, CSAT, CPTT (CA90961). She has been trained in Experiential Therapy and loves working with couples and individuals who want to experience a more fulfilling life. Jorden wholeheartedly believes that every person is worthy of love and relationship. When not working with clients or listening to audiobooks, Jorden enjoys spending time with her family (husband, dog, & cat) and doing DIY projects around her house.
