Daily mindfulness can lower stress, improve your health
There were no yoga mats or anyone sitting cross-legged with their eyes closed while humming mantras.
But the people trickling into the room at the Mount Carmel Healthy Living Center in Franklinton recently were about to practice mindfulness.
“Are mindfulness and meditation the same?” Teddy Lowery, a first-time attendee, asked the instructor, who sat in one of the seats in a carefully arranged circle. They are not, the teacher clarified. “Mindfulness is the capacity to pay attention,” said Daron Larson, instructor for the class and a mindful awareness coach at Attentional Fitness Training, Downtown.
Larson compared it to physical exercise. When people decide to be more physically active, they might set aside time and go to a gym or they might incorporate healthy activities into their daily routines such as taking the stairs instead of the elevator.
Similarly, people can incorporate mindfulness in their daily lives by doing such things as paying attention to the taste and smell of the foods they eat, or intentionally listening to the sounds they hear when driving.
Though meditation is a form of mindfulness, not all mindful activities involve meditation. “Meditation is a more formal way of practicing mindfulness,” Larson said.
Being mindful helps you take note of your emotions and experiences. Instead of escaping, it helps people deal with those things, said Maryanna Klatt, a professor of clinical family medicine at Ohio State University's College of Medicine, who is a trained mindfulness coach and certified yoga instructor.
“Mindfulness is an awareness of the present moment,” Klatt said. “It’s an avenue to enhance people’s ability to live their lives."
Although mindfulness is not a cure-all, it is one of the keys to a settled mind, Klatt said.
She and a team of Ohio State researchers have found that a workplace mindfulness-based program reduces stress for employees in highly stressful work environments such as the surgical intensive-care unit.
The eight-week program, called Mindfulness in Motion, combines mindfulness with gentle stretching, yoga, meditation and music and has been shown to reduce perceived stress and improve quality of sleep, according to research done by Klatt and her colleagues.
Mindfulness can be the solution to living a fuller life in this busy, turbocharged world, Larson said.
With an abundance of distractions competing to grab people's attention, there’s barely any time or energy to be attentive to one’s own life, he said. When people commute from home to work and back, for example, they often operate on autopilot and barely pay attention to their emotions.
At the practice session at the Mount Carmel Healthy Living Center, Larson coached participants to be mindful through several exercises. He asked them to focus on their feet; to sense their feet. He then rang a bell and instructed the participants to focus on the reverberating sound.
Later, he instructed them to listen to the sounds in the room. Eventually, he led them to switch their focus between sensing their feet and listening to the sounds in the room.
“We are wired to make sense of things,” Larson said. “Mindfulness helps us shift from making sense to sensing what we are experiencing.”
Many people fail at mindfulness because they think they have to set aside 20 minutes to sit down and meditate, he said. But people can incorporate mindfulness into their daily activities and be more successful. “If you practice for more than zero seconds a day, then you’ve succeeded,” he said.
Another misconception is that people think they are doing it wrong if their thoughts wander while practicing mindfulness, Larson said. But it's only natural, he said. They should take note of the thoughts that caused them to wander and bring their attention back .
Lowery, who walked into the class expecting to quietly meditate and reflect, was pleasantly surprised by what she learned.
“What I’ve been doing is completely OK,” the 62-year-old said. “I just have to intentionally pull back from my careless thinking.”
For Ingrid Weekley, 63, a regular attendee at Larson’s practice sessions, mindfulness has helped her focus and be present in the moment.
“I want to pay attention and stay out of the fog,” Weekley said. “Whatever emotion that envelops me, I use the tool of mindfulness to see what I am feeling. If it is good, I keep moving forward. If not, I change direction.”
mmichelle@dispatch.com @mishimike