Mental Health & Mindfulness
Here’s Why We Need Mindfulness More Than Ever.
Problems persist and are ubiquitous, but we can stop the effects of second darts for suffering.
If I had to choose one natural therapy for my mental health, I’d choose mindfulness. Knowing the importance of mindfulness on the brain, mental health, and physical health, I have a strong affinity for the usefulness of a mindful approach and meditation practice in our lives.
Awareness, acceptance, empathy, and compassion are the key components of mindfulness. Making mindful living a life habit is a sustainable lifestyle. Mindfulness practices advise us to live in the moment by observing and accepting thoughts and sensations without judgment.
Noticing every moment has an incredible value for our physical and mental health.
There will always be setbacks in life. They are considered the first darts by mindfulness experts. For example, when I reviewed the works of mindfulness teachers, I noticed that they focus on the second darts in solving issues.
The meaning we add to impediments is known as the second darts in mindfulness practice. While we cannot prevent the first darts, we can control the second ones. This is where the mindful approach plays a critical role in our well-being.
As an excellent mindfulness practice, structured meditation is no longer a religious and spiritual practice, even though religions and spiritual practices originated it. There is robust scientific evidence on the efficiency of mindfulness on our health and well-being. Moreover, there are many physical and mental health practitioners helping us.
From my reviews, here are a few well-known mindfulness and meditation teachers who have made a global impact: Jon Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, Satya Narayan Goenka, Eckhart Tolle, Jeff Warren, Michael Beckwith, Richard Alpert, Deepak Chopra, Sharon Salzberg, Andy Puddicombe, Susan Piver, Emily Fletcher, Pema Chodron, and Sara Auster.
Many more great leaders, mental health practitioners, and scientists pave the way for us and make mindfulness an excellent tool to address our physical, mental, and spiritual concerns.
At the structural level, mindfulness practice affects the amygdala to shrink by strengthening the prefrontal cortex. However, we must understand that our cortex is much slower than the amygdala. Thus, we need to slow down by leveraging the power of our breath and observing our thoughts without judgment.
Thoughts come and go. These mindful activities can help us tap into the power of our cortex. Healing happens when we can use our cortex to make good decisions. A mindful approach to life situations can put us in a better position to control our thoughts and emotions. This mental control can be reflected in our behavior.
Watching the silence between sounds, feeling the smells of flowers, sensing the breeze, tasting food and drink, and noticing temperature, air, and wind are mindful activities that ground us. However, we can also detect the sensations inside our bodies by using the power of imagination.
Mindfulness is an excellent tool for living a positive and optimistic life. It increased my optimism. I know that optimists live longer and happier life than pessimists. Furthermore, habitual mindfulness contributed to tasting euphoric feelings and reducing my chronic stress.
Chronic stress, especially emotional stress, is the cause of many ailments. Keeping a diary and voicing emotions can be great grounding strategies. Mindfulness is a way to prevent us from cracking by toxic emotions and chronic stress at work.
Stress is an inevitable part of our lives. It is essential for our survival and growth. We are designed to cope with acute stress to survive and thrive. However, we are not equipped to deal with chronic stress. In other words, the brain and body are not wired to cope with chronic stress. Thus, we waste significant energy and valuable resources to deal with the accumulated stress.
Mindfulness is one of the most vital tools to stop stress from accumulating. We need to find ways to integrate mindfulness into our life. We don’t have to use formal meditation practices to stay mindful.
It is possible to add mindfulness to everything we can do. For example, we can be mindful while eating, before going to sleep, when we wake up while working, walking, listening to conversations, and participating in meetings.
Bringing the mind to the present moment is the core aspect of mindfulness. Observing thoughts, feelings, sensations, noise, and disruptions and then describing them logically without judging them are good ways of mindfulness to reduce the effects of stress.
We can connect with our environment with mindful approaches. Grounding can give us control over our conditions. By grounding, we move out of the fight, flight, and freeze status. Observing natural occurrences in the surroundings, such as color, shape, size, texture, smell, sound, and movement, can ground us.
One known physical effect of chronic stress is the damage it causes to the hippocampus. When the hippocampus is injured, our memories, especially spatial memory, are affected. Thus, we lose orientation and can have difficulty remembering events, locations, and directions.
The amygdala puts us in fight and flight mode. It generates unpleasant emotions such as fear, anger, and anxiety. However, we shouldn’t fear to understand, feel, and acknowledge our positive and negative emotions.
With mindfulness, we use the whole brain. For example, calming the amygdala and activating the cortex is the key to dealing with stress effectively. Mindfulness helped me to connect with my mind, body, and soul.
When we reduce stress, the body reduces inflammation to cope with wear and tear. We need to have acute inflammation to heal wounds. However, we can relieve accumulated inflammation which can turn into a chronic state, by remaining mindful. Chronic inflammation is the root cause of several physical and mental diseases.
I have been using mindfulness for a long time in my personal, interpersonal, and professional life. For example, we recently experienced a critical situation in the family affecting the life of a loved one. Mindfulness helped me coordinate complex and challenging case better and keep it under control effectively.
Likewise, when we have important thoughts and feelings, we need to write them with mindfulness meaningfully. Our words reflect our thoughts and emotions and can have a significant impact on the online world too. As writers, we need to be more mindful in our written communication.
As readers, when we respond to a piece of content, we can be aware of not hurting the creators’ feelings. There are myriad different ways to share our ideas and thoughts. Just a little mindfulness in responding can prevent conflicting situations. Just having empathy by thinking about the effects of our words on others is essential.
Meditation, as a mindful practice, is a psychosomatic tool. It helps us connect body and mind naturally. We can use it for personal and interpersonal matters. Some of us use mindfulness techniques to resolve issues more amicably.
I observed a very stressful situation in my country recently. While I had a strong empathy for the cause of the defenders, their mindless actions, unfortunately, caused pain and suffering, making the valid reason more difficult to deal with at multiple levels.
As members of the communities and society, a mindful approach is critical in our lives. We are experiencing many stressful situations in these tough times globally. To reduce the impact of this global stress, we all need a mindful approach to our thinking and actions more than ever.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a mindful and joyful life.
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