Keeping Your Mind as Fit as Your Body with Mindfullness
As we all know, strengthening our muscles means working them regularly so that they become stronger over time. However, did you also know that taking a mindful approach to habit forming, urge control and other aspects of your life is like sending your mind to the gym? Or that strengthening your mind in this manner can help you socially by teaching your brain to effectively regulate your emotions?
Here is what you need to know about how taking a mindful approach can help you build mental fitness.
What is Mindfulness?
While the term mindfulness possibly originated from the ancient word “sati” –a Pali term for “having awareness, attention and remembering” –it can best be defined as having a moment-to-moment awareness of one’s experiences without passing judgement. (1)
The benefit for you?
This non-judgmental awareness can help you recognize and replace undesirable thoughts with ones which are positive. Doing so can help you change your habitual responses to recurring problems in order to replace poor habits with positive ones.
Breaking the Habitual Response
While mindfulness has connections to ancient spiritual practices such as Buddhism, today it is used in mainstream psychotherapy and in practices such as mindful meditation and mindful yoga.
The reason for this is simple, since learning a mindful approach can be key in helping you:
- Establish and maintain better habits
- Have less emotional reactivity
- Develop better cognitive flexibility
- Have better fear modulation
- Have better and more meaningful relationships
Mindfulness can also be practiced every moment of your life and applied to everything you do, such as mindful walking, mindful eating or mindful exercise.
However, while mindful eating and exercising are commonly touted areas of mindfulness, why stop there? In fact, such activities as driving or waiting in line at a busy eating establishment can also benefit from a mindful approach that in turn can further improve other areas of your life.
For instance, let’s use the act of driving as an example. For many of us guys, driving can be an act of frustration which causes us to grow impatient with other drivers. This leads to poor habitual responses such as cutting or flipping others off.
However, by recognizing that these behaviors merely perpetuate rather than solve any problems, you can then replace them with positive actions and behaviors.
As an example, let’s say an inattentive driver lazily ignores your right of way and cuts you off. Your habitual response may be to lean on the horn, shout obscenities and cut them off in retaliation.
Of course, this accomplishes nothing other than creating a defensive response from the other driver while making you to look like an angry jerk—which, by the way, is exactly how you’re acting!
By recognizing this, you can then change your thinking to create a more positive reaction. This can mean developing a mantra such as “I can’t change the world with anger,” or taking an empathetic approach such as telling yourself “we’re all preoccupied—I’m sure I’ve done similar things I am unaware of.”
The thing is to activate a positive train of thought and apply it to the situation. Since science tells us that your brain is activated about a quarter of a second before it produces a physical response, this helps create a calmer, more positive and less emotional reaction from you.
In fact, it’s during this “mindful quarter second” that we have the opportunity to either veto a negative response and replace it with one that is positive, or just go ahead with it. (2, 3)
Mindful Work to be Done
While mindfulness can help with everything from lowering your stress response to improving your eligibility for promotions at work, it is something that needs to be developed.
In other words, it doesn’t happen overnight.
In fact, your mental development is much like your physical development in that it requires time and effort to achieve. For instance, just as reaching your strength goals means hitting the gym regularly, achieving your mental goals means working on them daily.
This means learning to veto negative thoughts and reactions during the “mindful quarter second” and replace them with positive responses each and every day.
In fact, try this: each time you replace a negative outcome with a positive one, consider it another rep in the mental gym, and another gain in your mental strength.
Happy mental lifting!
References:
- http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.912.4622&rep=rep1&type=pdf
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-whispering/201305/mindful-habit-change
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeenacho/2017/01/03/5-simple-mindfulness-practices-for-people-that-hate-to-meditate/#340f0e135dc5
Keywords:
Mindfulness
Mindful meditation
Spiritual practice
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