Why you should take a few seconds and breathe
THINK your life is too busy to be mindful? Well, there are good reasons why you should.
Since the early Eighties, when Jon Kabat-Zinn demonstrated its relieving properties for people suffering chronic pain, mindfulness – a discipline that helps you achieve fully-focused intentional, nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment – has been applied in a vast range of settings.
Mark Williams and colleagues at Cambridge taught patients suffering from recurring depression to use MBCT (Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression), and found their chance of relapse was significantly reduced.
Paul Grossman at the Freiburg Institute for Mindfulness Research found mindfulness can help relieve symptoms across a range of health issues – mental and physiological.
Sarah Bowen at the University of Washington used mindfulness to help prevent relapse in adults recovering from substance abuse. It has also been shown to help parents with autistic children cope more adaptively with their child’s challenging behaviour.
Even Martin Seligman, who in his latest book The Hope Circuit argues that the key to happiness is having an optimistic view of the future rather than focusing on the present, would have to accept that it’s impossible to be realistically optimistic about what lies ahead until you first take a calm, nonjudgmental
look at what’s happening right now.
Not only are the benefits of mindfulness obvious, it is easy to learn. If there is not a course near you, there’s always Mark Williams and Danny Penman’s excellent book, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic
World; or my own, The Key to Calm.
Why then, even on a public holiday, do so many of us believe it’s difficult to find time to be mindful? The fault lies in the idea that mindfulness is a discipline separate from daily living, something you must set aside time for. Most people find that daunting. It’s much better instead to think of mindfulness as a way of being; of doing what you already do, but with focus and openminded, non-judgmental awareness.
You can do it by starting each day feeling calm and balanced. As soon as you wake up, sit up in bed and breathe in through your nose slowly and evenly. Hold for as long as you comfortably can, then exhale slowly.
Do 10 of these, concentrating just on your breathing. This will only take two minutes. Yet by starting your day like this, later on you’ll find it easy to become aware of negative thoughts or anxious feelings. You can then rebalance by taking another 10 mindful breaths anytime and anywhere. Then you can live your life – only better.