Perhaps Being Mindful All the Time Isn’t Such a Good Thing

Introducing: The Anti-Mindfulness day.

Mindfulness™ is a good thing. You heard it here first, folks (patented and everything. It’s mine now), and you’ve heard it again and again, and again, and again, and again. And again. And again. So I don’t really need to elaborate on that (again).

But too much of anything is bad for you. Too much confidence. Too much salt. Too much eyeliner. Too much time spent rooting around Twilight renaissance Tumblr. Too much sleep and your sister might think you’ve died. Too much cheese and your house will need fumigation. Too much humor and you’ll never get that job at the morgue.

The same rules apply to mindfulness. Too much living in the present means that, when the future arrives seemingly out of the blue, it’ll knock the wind right out of you.

But I have a solution. Let me introduce you to: The Anti-Mindfulness Day™.

Mindfulness is Not The Enemy — You Are

By all means, be mindful. In fact, I encourage it. I plead for it. It’s important that you are. Because mindfulness is a superpower, it’s the “ability to know what’s happening in your head at any given moment without getting carried away by it.” It’s how we connect with ourselves and the world around us, as it is right here and now, truly taking note of these events without letting them affect us.

“Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us” — Mindful.

And being “fully present,” by rights, means we’re no longer trapped inside our regrets from the past or skirting the edges of our concerns for the future. It means we are here, now and embracing it.

Which is great! It’s ace! It’s literally what it means to be alive! All we have is the present moment, everything else is merely a concept. The past is a lingering memory and the future is an abstract thought. The old us is dead. The new us is yet to be born. We are who and what and why we are, right here and now — and we need to harness that. Even that old tortoise bloke from Kung Fu Panda knows that “yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift…that’s why we call it the present.”

But people mourn the dead. And people prep for birth. If we don’t learn from the fatalities of our past and brace ourselves for the painful, possibly poo covered openings of our future, then we’ll suffer. A lot.

If we loiter too long in the present, when the future eventually does arrive, we’ll only end up making the same mistakes that we did in the past.

If you don’t grant yourself time to be a little anti-mindful, well. You’re just screwing yourself over, really.

How to be Anti-Mindful

By not being uncle-mindless (okay, I’m sorry, my dad made me do this).

It’s simple. Schedule in a Time Travel Day.

Once a fortnight, maybe an afternoon every third Thursday, or just a half an hour before bed on the last day of each month — allow yourself to be swept away in time. Think only about the past or the future. Make it a point to plan for who you want to become and learn from who you once were. Give yourself a whole chunk of time to do the things that so often stop you from being mindful during your every day life:

Stress about the future.

“Many people have a habit of setting a future goal and deciding that once it's achieved, they'll be happy.” So we tend to favour the things that will aid us towards our ambitions. We think our happiness is waiting for us way out there at the finish line and it won’t come to us — we need to go get it. So everything we do from the moment we wake is a stepping stone towards it. As a result, we skip out all the things that don’t directly contribute. We ignore the sunrise, because that’s not going to bag us a producer’s chair at Netflix. We skip dinner with our aunty because we might need that extra tenner for petrol next week. We mute notifications from that cute boy because his love is not going to propel us towards those perfectly defined quadriceps we’re seeking (if anything, boyfriends cause the exact opposite). If the now doesn’t help us towards our then, then we ignore it. The “present is just a means to get to [our] future.”

But if we purposely strategised for the future, we could remedy all that. Here’s how:

• Pick a day, make it your Future Day™.
• Write down all the things you want to achieve.
• List all ways in which you can achieve it.
• In a different pen, a gross one like brown felt tip or something, jot down all the things that could obstruct your pathway to your goals.
• Come up with a contingency plan to account for this.
• Spend the entire day thinking of all the things that usually interrupt your regular, daily life. Get them out on paper. Death glare at them. Reorganise and remove and resolve what needs resolving. Solidify your ambitions for the future, both immediate and long long term.
• Grab a cuppa and envision yourself getting there.
• Then grab a biccie, dunk, and allow yourself to feel satisfied with where you’re at.
• Big grin.
• Stop thinking about the future when the day is over.

Ruminate on the past.

Our every day is infused with random moments of memory. Reminders of stupid crap we said or did or were, sometime in the past. You could be washing up and then cringe! as your intestines coil at the thought of that time when you grabbed the wrong woman’s hand at the supermarket. And other stuff, too. Regrets are heavy, pain resonates, nostalgia is bittersweet — and their presence echoes deep into the, well, present. And like a familiar face in a bustling crowd at a festival, us and our minds are naturally drawn to the familiar memory of the past because we know it, we have things we want to ask it, comfort we want to get from it. But then we miss the rest of the festival, Maroon 5 right here, right now, pulsating down from the stage, because we’re too busy chattering away with our Old Self.

But, as Psychotherapist Tim Hill says, “there is little pleasure or insight to be gained from rumination; on the contrary, it’s more associated with anxiety and depression. Rumination has a heavy and automatic tone to it.” That is, when we let it seep into every moment of our day.

So how to we intentionally lighten it up? By ruminating on purpose for a fixed about of time:

• We pick a day and make it the Past Day™.
• Section a poster sized piece of paper into the things you regret, the things you miss, the things that hurt you. Add other categories as necessary.
• Think about the past introspectively, “with an attitude of curiosity and self-exploration.” This allows us to draw some conclusions about ourselves. To learn and to grow.
• Make sure you’re getting something out of this scheduled time. Don’t let your emotions run the show here. That’s like having a drunken director on set. Keep Intention out front, instead. Let her direct your thoughts, let her carefully observe those scenes from your past an analyse what’s in need of fixing. She’s not here to berate you, to wear you down, to fire you. She’s here to make your show better.
• Seek closure. Write down an ending, make up a conclusion, find a way to put the past to rest.

Play on your friggin’ phone

Sometimes we’re mindless because of Twitter. There’s nothing more to it. It’s not anything as profound as the past or the future eating up our present time, it’s that tiny kitchen account on Instagram that makes lasagna slices little enough to feed to a mouse. We spend three hours on social media each day. That’s three whole hours of sticking on one of those Don’t Approach Me hi-vis jackets that nervous pups wear, and keeping the Present Moment away.

That’s an eighth of our entire day that we are totally oblivious to. What might we be missing? Our nephews first steps? The sunrise and the sunset? A conversation about multiverses with our best pal? We could cram in a bangin’ date in that duration (literally). But no, not us. Busy scrolling, sorry.

So. Stop that. Switch off your phone. Log your Apple watch out of Facebook and instead, schedule in a couple hours a week for social media, only. Use that time to:

• Reply to non-urgent messages
• Tweet stupid sh*t
• Watch Draco Malfoy TikTok videos
• Scroll through the 7324 photos of your sister’s neighbour’s nutritionalist’s spirit guide’s holiday in Antigua.
• Let your eyes gloss over as Instagram sucks out your soul
• Comment on your nan’s Facebook profile picture

And then, when your scheduled time is up — get the f out of there.

There’s a Difference Between Being “Mindless” and “Anti-Mindful”

Being mindless is what we so often, inadvertently end up doing. We mindlessly bumble about our days, stuck on autopilot, reacting instinctively to each moment of our day. And by the end of it, if we were asked to recount any of the events that occurred — we’d have no idea. Mindless living is not living as the main character that we are. It’s not even perceiving as an enthralled audience member. It’s that bloke in the back row who fell asleep before the trailers had ended. That’s what being mindless is.

But anti-mindfulness is the active intention to schedule in these moments elsewhere, so they no longer infiltrate our every waking minute.

The same way we schedule in hours to sleep each night so that we don’t drop unconscious whilst crossing the road. We have mealtimes so we don’t end up biting a chunk out of Uncle Steve’s bicep. We allow ourselves this time so that tiredness and hunger don’t effect the rest of our day.

We need to do the same for the distracting stuff.

Schedule in a little anti-mindfulness so that the rest of your life can be full of mind. It can’t be a distraction if it’s a pencilled-in event.

Oh hey, whilst you’re here: why not put the “em” into your “emails” and lob your name onto my mailing list for weekly em-bellishments on my rose-tinted, crumb-coated lens of life. It’s the equivalent of the reduced section in the supermarket (low value Weird Crap™ that you didn’t know you needed).