5
developing the skills of mindfulness
HOW TO BRING KIND ATTENTION
INTO YOUR DAILY LIFE
Josette walked downstairs in the morning, feeling at ease after her brief mindfulness practice. As she walked into the kitchen, she noticed that Marco had left dirty dishes in the sink—again. She immediately felt frustrated, thinking, “Why can’t he put them in the dishwasher like I asked him to?” Her thoughts came quickly: “I need to catch the bus. I don’t have time to deal with this right now. I have to get into work and finish up that project. What if I can’t get the project done? My boss is going to be so disappointed in me.” Her shoulders and neck grew tense, her breath short. Then she noticed the quickness of her emotional response, this spiral in thoughts, and the changes in her body. She took a deep breath and smiled as she rinsed off the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. It continued to amaze her how quickly her mood could change and her thoughts could cascade in response to such a seemingly minor trigger. She noticed the warm water on her skin as she looked at the dishes, remembering the fun she and Marco had had picking them out before they moved in together. As she waited for the bus, she thought about all the things Marco did to keep the house in order and thought perhaps it was OK for her to be the one who did the dishes most of the time.
Josette’s experience illustrates how regularly practicing mindfulness can help us notice our reactions and the ways our stress can spiral. Mindfulness practice won’t keep us from having anxious, frustrated, angry, or sad thoughts and reactions—these are all part of being human. But it may help us notice these reactions as they unfold and keep our reactions from feeding on themselves in an intensifying spiral that gets in the way of our lives and our well-being. If Josette hadn’t been able to notice the reactions she was having, her physiological, emotional, and cognitive reactions to the situation would have continued to intensify, making it harder for her to make choices about her actions. In this reactive state, she might have taken actions that actually made her situation worse (e.g., making her later to work, starting a fight with Marco, without any awareness of the positive feelings she also had toward him) and her reactions would interfere with her ability to do things that were important to her (like functioning effectively at work). By seeing the reactions she was having and bringing awareness to them, she was able to stop the escalating spiral and reengage in living her life as she chose to.
The way we told Josette’s story made it seem that she shifted into mindful awareness automatically, without effort. She probably did. But only because (1) she had been practicing mindfulness regularly and (2) she, like the rest of us, had an innate capacity to be mindful. Thanks to the self-preservation instincts and cognitive abilities discussed in Chapter 1, steady-state mindfulness is not our habitual way of going through life. Through practice we can tap back into this natural capacity, developing the skill so we can use it during our day the way Josette did.
In this chapter we present a number of different ways to practice and cultivate this skill and address some of the challenges that often come up when we try to bring this new skill into our lives. Later chapters explore how mindfulness can help us use our emotional responses more effectively, turn toward challenging experiences instead of away from them, and live more fulfilling lives. As you develop these skills, you will be able to use mindfulness in the moment the way Josette did.
Weaving mindfulness into your daily activities will weaken the hold anxiety has on your life and allow you to live more freely and fully. But most people find it extremely challenging to invite in frightening worries and uncomfortable physical sensations with an open heart. Cultivating a mindful stance toward one’s private experiences is a process that often requires taking a radically new view of anxiety and other emotions while at the same time practicing some of the most essential skills of mindfulness. That’s why we start with building and strengthening the foundation skills of mindfulness in everyday, neutral, even boring situations. Once you can do that, using mindfulness in anxiety-provoking or distressing situations becomes much easier.
You might think of the practices in this chapter as the drills and workouts athletes do to prepare for games, where a range of skills needs to be applied more flexibly. And in the same way that these basketball or football practices confer benefits beyond more skillful play on the court or field, you’ll see multiple benefits of mindfulness well before you begin using it in highly stressful situations. A wealth of research has demonstrated that practicing mindfulness can improve sleep, reduce physical pain, boost immune system functioning, and increase relationship satisfaction, to name just a few benefits.
Research has shown that mindfulness practice can help to decrease:
• Anxiety
• Insomnia
• Stress
• Risk of coronary heart disease
• Substance use
• Urges to smoke
• Relapse into depression
• Chronic pain
• Symptoms of fibromyalgia
Research has also shown that mindfulness practice can help to improve:
• Quality of life
• Relationship satisfaction and closeness
• Sexual functioning
• Attention
• Immune system functioning
• Skin clearing among those with psoriasis
• Diabetes self-management
• Longevity and health among nursing home residents
Regularly practicing mindfulness can reduce the overall level of Mindfulness not only reduces
overall stress and anxiety in your
life but also can turn unremarkable
experiences into cherished moments. stress and anxiety in your life, making it easier to deal with challenges that arise. Another general benefit of mindfulness is that it brings us more closely in touch with the moments of our lives. Practicing mindfulness can transform even the most mundane experiences into cherished moments.
Zoe drove home from work with her mind spinning with memories of frustrations from her day and plans for the next several hours. She worked out a plan for making dinner quickly so that she would have time to eat with the kids before heading out for her night class. She kept replaying what she’d said in the meeting at work, wondering whether she was out of line and how her words might come back to haunt her. When she walked into the house, she was greeted by both girls clamoring for her attention while the phone rang. She began absentmindedly gathering ingredients for dinner while she gave the girls instructions to clean their rooms. Then she remembered her commitment to practice mindfulness each day and that she hadn’t practiced that morning. She glanced at the clock, did some quick calculations, and decided that she could spare 5 minutes to practice and still make it to class on time. She asked the girls to leave her alone for 5 minutes and settled on the cushion she’d set up in the corner of her bedroom. As she brought her awareness to her breath, her mind continued to race with thoughts of the day and plans for the evening. Again and again, she gently brought her awareness to her breath. She smiled as she noticed how quickly her mind was off and running each time. She felt her shoulders release a bit as her breath deepened and her thoughts slowed down just slightly. When her timer went off, she took one last deep breath and called for the girls to come keep her company in the kitchen. As she prepared their meal, she listened to her daughters tell stories from their day, smiling at their way of seeing events. As the aromas of the meal filled the air, Zoe felt a sense of contentment, enjoying this moment in her day that she might have missed otherwise.
Mindfulness practice can be either formal or informal. Formal practice involves setting aside dedicated time to practice skills on a regular basis. Informal practice involves bringing mindful attention to your internal experiences and your surroundings as you go about your daily activities. Both can help you develop mindfulness skills, in the same way that an athlete benefits from both speed- or strength-building work and scrimmaging.
BEGINNING A FORMAL MINDFULNESS PRACTICE
Formal mindfulness practices are activities that require setting aside some time to practice every day or a few days a week. Mindfulness of breath, which you tried in the last chapter, is considered a formal practice, as are meditation and yoga. Formal practices require you to commit to investing some time in taking care of yourself—no easy feat, given the demands on our time and the pressure to be productive. But formal practices can be extremely beneficial in helping us learn firsthand about the ways our minds work.
Research has demonstrated a correlation between regularly practicing mindfulness and benefiting from it, so we recommend that you commit to spending at least 5 to 10 minutes a day in formal practice. If you want to do more, great. Many people find that a regular mindfulness practice of 15, 25, or 45 minutes is extremely helpful. If you want to do less, we completely understand. And yet we would still ask you to consider making this commitment to yourself. It’s OK if it feels uncomfortable because it’s not something you usually do, or you’re not sure it will help, or it feels like a waste of time. In our experience, it’s much easier to make an accurate judgment about whether formal mindfulness practice can benefit you once you’ve given it a serious try.
Regular formal practice of mindfulness can help us develop this skill so we can use it in our lives. Just like any new habit we try to develop (flossing our teeth, exercising regularly, eating healthily), it’s very challenging to add something new to our lives. The more we can make something part of a regular routine, and do it the same way every day, the more likely we are to establish a habit we can keep going throughout our lives.
Tips for Starting a Regular Formal Mindfulness Practice
• Pick a specific time of day for your practice.
— It’s often useful to tie practice to daily activities. So, first thing in the morning, just after your morning shower, before or after lunch, before or after dinner, or before bed is a good option for establishing this new habit.
• Pick a specific place.
— If possible, pick a place where you aren’t likely to be interrupted.
— Using the corner of a room or facing a wall can be a way to make a space when no separate space is available.
— Sometimes it can help to put specific things in this space, like pictures on the wall, incense or burning candles, soothing music, or gentle lighting to create an atmosphere that will be associated with your practice. These items become cues for mindfulness practice in the future, helping to strengthen your developing habit.
• Use a timer or an alarm (like on a cell phone) so that you can set the time of your practice and not have to track the time.
— The most important thing is that you practice for the full time you intend to, so it’s better to practice for 5 minutes and stay for the full 5 minutes than to plan to practice for 15 minutes but stop after 12. Part of the practice is sticking to the intention no matter how many thoughts and impulses to stop arise.
— For those who have never tried mindfulness, we often recommend beginning with 5 or 10 minutes of practice and then lengthening the practice if you choose to over time. (If 5 minutes is too challenging at first, start with 1 or 2 minutes and then lengthen your practice.) Other people start with longer periods, like 25 or 30 minutes. Choose whichever approach seems more reasonable to you. Again, some regular practice is better than an intention to have a longer practice that is never met. Often it is easier to add 5 to 10 minutes to daily routines than to add a longer period.
• Make a commitment to yourself to practice daily for at least a week or two.
— You (like all of us) have been practicing anxious responding for comfortable. The goal of this exercise is to spend time bringing your awareness back each time it wanders. There is no way to a long time, so learning new habits will take time and practice. Soon you’ll be able to see for yourself how this new practice can help you. But to get to that place, you will need to commit to the practice regularly so you can build up the skill and see its effects.
— As with any other life change, it can be challenging to get started on a new habit, but it’s satisfying to commit to something and find a way to fit it into our lives.
— All of us can benefit from some time set aside for our own well-being. Think of the practice as something you’re doing for yourself, which will also help those around you in time.
• Find strategies to remind yourself of your practice.
— Always practicing after an already daily ritual, like brushing your teeth or taking vitamins, can help you remember to practice.
— Visual cues, like colored stickers in visible places, can serve as useful reminders. Placing this book where you’ll see it first thing in the morning can help you remember to practice in the morning.
— Writing practice into calendars is a good way to remember and also to be sure that time is set aside.
• If you’re like us, you’ll find that every day you come up with reasons not to practice. This is natural. Notice the thoughts and practice anyway, to see what it feels like to practice even if you don’t feel like it or you have a good reason not to do it.
— Notice the obstacles that come up—these are probably obstacles that come up in other areas of your life. You might want to start a list of “reasons not to practice” so that you can notice them all and then go ahead and practice anyway.
— Remember that practicing will often not be enjoyable or this wrong. See the box “Working with Anxiety” (pages 103–104) for more discussion of how practice can be helpful even when it isn’t comfortable.
— If you miss a day of practice, be kind to yourself about it and recommit to a daily practice.
— One of the biggest obstacles to changing any habit is how we respond to any failures in our efforts at behavior change. Anyone who has tried to diet or start an exercise routine or quit smoking knows that “slips” or “lapses” are common. The key to successful behavior change is forgiving yourself for these slips and recommitting to goals. Practice this skill with your mindfulness practice. When you forget to do it, take that as an opportunity to find new ways of remembering for the next day.
• Monitor your practice.
— It can be helpful to track your practice. You can start a notebook and just write down each time you practice how long the practice lasted and anything you noticed that you want to remember.
Beginning with the Breath
The most common way to begin mindfulness practice is to focus on the breath, as illustrated in Chapter 4. For many people, focusing on the breath is a lifetime practice. One way to begin is by counting the breath.
After settling into a comfortable, alert, seated position on a cushion or a chair (as described in Chapter 4), begin noticing where you can feel your breath. Th is may be in your belly, your chest, the back of your throat, or your nostrils. Allowing your awareness to settle on this spot, begin counting your in breaths. Count from 1 to 10 and then count backward back to 1. Each time you notice your attention wander, begin back at 1 again. Your practice may involve counting 1 repeatedly—this is fine. Th ere is no goal of reaching 10. The counting is simply a way of noticing when your attention wanders. For instance, when you notice yourself counting to 12, that’s a pretty good indicator of your mind wandering! Each time your awareness wanders, kindly and gently guide it back to the breath, counting 1 at the in breath. Simply continue with this process until the time you’ve designated is up. When your timer sounds, take one more breath with awareness as you prepare to return to your daily life.
Encountering Challenges in Mindfulness
Practice: Working with Anxiety
Often mindfulness practice will lead initially to an increased awareness of symptoms of anxiety, which can make us feel like things are getting worse instead of better. This can be very discouraging and naturally makes us want to stop practicing. Increased awareness can lead to even more judgments and criticisms (“Why can’t I keep my attention on my breath? I am so bad at this!”). Given how used to turning away from discomfort we all are, it is very natural to instinctively stop practicing when this happens. However, if we stick with it, we will find that this initial discomfort often subsides and we become more able to tolerate discomfort and anxiety as we begin to see the ebb and flow of our experience. It takes a bit of a leap of faith to make our way through these initial challenges, which is why we ask you to commit to regular practice for at least a week or two so that you can start to see the range of experiences you can have while practicing mindfulness.
When physical, emotional, or cognitive signs of anxiety arise, bring curious awareness to them, as if you’re seeing them for the first time. Allow yourself to really notice what tightness in your chest feels like, or the steady stream of critical thoughts you experience. Bring compassion to yourself for having these challenging experiences. And gently bring your attention back to your breath. This new way of noticing will help to transform your experience if you stick with it.
On the other hand, sometimes people find mindfulness practice extremely relaxing at first, which naturally makes them want to practice more and more. Inevitably, however, this experience will pass and everyone will have a practice with a busy, crowded, anxious mind when feelings of frustration, sadness, or fear arise. This can be very discouraging and could lead you to give up the practice, convinced that it no longer “works.” Again, remember that mindfulness is a way of being in our lives, as they are. While it may be pleasant at times, it can also be very useful to experience distress or anxiety during practice. If we can stick with mindfulness practice and continue to pay attention to our experiences even when feeling uncomfortable, we can learn some important information about anxiety and how we respond to it. What we learn will be extremely helpful when we begin to apply mindfulness to anxiety-provoking situations. Practicing with anxiety on the cushion (or chair) makes it easier to continue to live our lives fully when we encounter anxiety in our lives. Also, these experiences give us an opportunity to practice being in the moment in the presence of responses that often pull us out of the moment and out of our lives. As we discuss in Chapter 6, living life fully involves experiencing the full range of emotional experiences. If we’re willing to be present in our lives only under certain conditions, we’re guaranteed to miss out on much of what life has in store for us.
Breathing from the Belly
Traditional mindfulness practices emphasize allowing the breath to be as it is, without trying to change it. Breathing from the diaphragm
can help slow down the racing
mind that is part of anxiety. But for those who are struggling with anxiety, we often introduce mindful diaphragmatic breathing as a way of cultivating awareness while also gently slowing down a racing mind. If you want to try this out, take a moment now to breathe as you do normally.
Do you feel your breath in your chest more than your belly? Interestingly, as infants we start out by breathing in the belly, but over time many of us begin breathing primarily in our chest. It is very common to breathe more from the chest when we feel like we need to get a lot of things done or like there is a threat present. This kind of breathing activates our sympathetic nervous system, which is great if we need to run or fight, but is less helpful when the tasks in front of us involve something less active. Although these reactions and this activation are usually automatic, we can also shift our breathing on purpose and activate our parasympathetic nervous system, the system that helps us recover from this kind of stimulation.
Take a moment now and put your hand on your belly. See if you can breathe into your belly, allowing the breath to travel through your chest and down to your belly and then back out the same way.
You may notice that this feels awkward or that you feel some tension in your body as you breathe this way. This is very common for people who tend to breathe more shallowly from their chests on a regular basis. This new, deeper type of breath takes practice to get used to. Don’t push yourself too hard—just invite your breath to slow down a little bit, to become a little bit deeper. And if it remains more shallow, that’s OK too. If you notice that trying to slow your breath down makes you feel more stressed, just shift back to noticing your breath and counting it, as described above.
Zoe had been practicing mindfulness for several weeks and really enjoying the changes she was noticing in her quality of life. She found herself enjoying her time with her friends and family more, and her work seemed more fulfilling to her. Because her practice seemed so helpful, she found it very easy to make time for it. One day she noticed she was feeling particularly agitated before she sat down to practice. She was angry with a coworker and anxious about an ongoing project that wasn’t going well. She anticipated the relief she would feel after her practice and happily sat down and began to focus on her breath. As always, her mind was busy. She gently brought her awareness back to her breath, time and time again. She waited for the sense of peace and grounding she so often experienced in her practice, but it did not come. She began to wonder what she was doing wrong and to try harder to be mindful, compassionate, and accepting. Her mind became busier, and her feeling of agitation increased. She thought, “Why can’t I do this right?” She wondered whether she wasn’t good enough at mindfulness to make it “work” when she really needed it. She noticed how uncomfortable she felt sitting and hoped her time would be up soon. Then she remembered something she’d read about accepting things as they were, even if they weren’t pleasant. She smiled, realizing that in her efforts to be “mindful” she was criticizing herself and her practice and demanding that it be other than it was. She spent the remainder of her practice noticing her feelings of agitation and her feelings of disappointment that relief wasn’t coming. She felt compassion for herself. Although her agitation didn’t go away, being able to see it clearly made it seem less menacing and destructive. She went through the rest of her day appreciating the new lessons she had gained from her practice that day.
Mindfulness Skills
By practicing mindfulness regularly, we develop a number of skills that will help us live the lives we want to be living:
AWARENESS
• Increasing the ability to notice where our attention is, how often it shifts, gently bringing it back to the focus.
• Expanding awareness so it captures the fullness of our experience. Anxiety often narrows our awareness to potential threats; mindfulness can expand our awareness so that we notice other aspects of a situation, other sensations, and other emotions.
PRESENT MOMENT
• Gently bringing the mind back to right here, right now, as we sit on the cushion, breathing in and breathing out, whenever the mind moves to memories of the past and plans or worries for the future.
SELF-COMPASSION
• Often the thoughts that arise while we’re practicing are judgments or criticisms: “Why can’t I just count to 10? I’m terrible at this. I’m never going to learn to do it. I’m wasting my time here.” When we notice these thoughts arising, we can practice having compassion for ourselves and our experience. It’s important not to judge our judging, though. Judging and criticizing are natural and often become a habit. We can notice this pattern and feel compassion for this struggle without criticizing ourselves for doing it.
BEGINNER’S MIND
• During our practice, we can greet each observation of our breath and each distraction as if it were our first time noticing it. This “beginner’s mind” perspective helps us see things fully, as they are, instead of as we expect them to be. We may notice that each practice is different—sometimes our mind is moving very quickly from one thought to the next, and sometimes it’s more settled. We can notice each of these states as they are, rather than expecting things to be the way they were the day before.
ACCEPTING THINGS AS THEY ARE
• A very common experience during any type of mindfulness practice is noticing experiences that seem desirable (e.g., a sense of calmness or relaxation or peace) and those that seem less desirable (e.g., a busy mind, sensations of tension, a string of worries). Repeated practice helps us greet each of these experiences as part of our practice. A busy, worried mind is just what is here right now. It is not inherently better or worse than a peaceful mind. It is just the way things are in a given moment. When we respond to it that way, we can reduce the reactivity that comes from wishing that things were other than they are. We can learn to approach whatever comes up with gentleness. Having this experience repeatedly, while we practice, can help us accept whatever arises in our daily lives, including the inevitable worries and stressors we face during the day.
• Accepting things as they are is not the same thing as resignation. We may accept that things are as they are and then choose actions with the intention of making changes (as we describe in later chapters). Josette, at the beginning of this chapter, might accept that Marco is not good at putting dishes in the dishwasher and yet still decide that she wants to try to find a way to encourage him to be better at doing this because this change is important to her. Similarly, we might recognize having a busy, stressed mind, accept that this is how things are in a given day, and decide we want to make changes in our lives to reduce the frequency of this state of being (for instance, cutting down our workload or adding more frequent mindfulness practice to our lives).
After practicing regularly for a week or two, you may want to start trying out some new types of formal mindfulness practice. It’s also fi ne to continue using the breath as a focus and make that your regular practice. You can either keep counting or move to just using the breath as an anchor and keep bringing your awareness back to your breath each time it wanders.
You may decide to try a slightly different practice. One that we often use is mindfulness of sounds (adapted from Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale’s mindfulness-based cognitive therapy). You can read it below and practice it on your own, or go to the book website (listed in the Introduction, page 5) and download an audio recording to listen to while you practice. Often, recordings can be particularly helpful when you fi rst learn a practice, although we also encourage you to practice at times without the recording so that you fully develop your own skills without relying solely on the recordings.
Begin your practice the same way you begin mindfulness of breath—noticing how you are sitting and gently bringing your awareness to your breath. After a few moments of focusing on your breath, allow the focus of your awareness to shift from your breath to your ears. Begin allowing your awareness to open and expand from your ears so that you notice sounds as they arise, wherever they arise. Rather than searching for sounds, or trying to listen for particular sounds, do your best to simply open your mind to any sounds that arise, from any and all directions. You may notice sounds that are close or sounds that are far away, sounds that are in front of you or behind you, to the side, above, or below. Allow your awareness to extend to all the sounds around you. You may notice obvious sounds and also subtle sounds.
While you allow your awareness to take in these sounds, try to be aware of sounds simply as sensations. You may notice that you begin thinking about the sounds, labeling them, or judging them. Each time that happens, reconnect instead, as best you can, with direct awareness of their sensory qualities—their pitch, timbre, volume, and duration, rather than their meanings or implications.
Each time you notice that your awareness has wandered away from sounds in the moment, gently acknowledge this and guide your attention back to the sounds as they arise and pass from one moment to the next, noticing judgments as they arise and gently coming back to your awareness of sound as it is.
Suki practiced mindfulness of sounds and found that when she heard noises she quickly labeled and judged them—the sound of a truck backing up was labeled annoying; the sound of a bird singing was beautiful, and she felt disappointed when it stopped. Repeated practice helped her notice that it was very difficult to hear sounds in her environment simply for their pitch and volume. Instead, she noticed, her mind quickly and naturally labeled the source of the sound, judged the sound, and wanted more of certain sounds and less of others, and she began to see how these tendencies led her to feel dissatisfied with things as they were. As she cultivated awareness of sounds as they were—the pitch and timbre, instead of the meaning attached to them—she found that she could greet each sound with beginner’s mind just noticing it, rather than feeling drawn toward or away from it. She also began using this skill in other areas of her life—seeing how she immediately judged things as desirable or undesirable (e.g., traffi c on the way to work or a moment of silence while her son slept). When she practiced just experiencing each thing as it occurred, without becoming wrapped up in wanting more or less of it or thinking about how awful or wonderful it was, she found she was able to respond to events (like her son waking up unexpectedly) with less stress and reactivity.
Encountering Challenges in Mindfulness Practice: Nothing Is Happening!
During your practice you may notice the thought that nothing is happening and this practice cannot possibly be useful. You’re not alone! The process of mindfulness is slow, and the changes that occur are subtle and unfold over time. So it’s easy to feel like practicing mindfulness isn’t doing anything and to give up the practice. Often the practice itself is experienced as boring. Our minds are filled with alternative activities that would be more enjoyable or useful than spending time sitting still and noticing our breath. Yet learning how to remain engaged in our lives even with feelings of boredom can be a valuable experience, as is learning how to watch feelings of boredom rise and fall. Most of us spend some of our time doing something other than what we most feel like doing in a given moment. Having the opportunity to notice what thoughts and feelings arise as we engage in a task that is not immediately appealing can help us learn to do the things in our lives that are boring or unsatisfying in the short term yet are tied to things that matter to us (such as playing Candyland for the twentieth time, which brings great joy to a child but great boredom to an adult). Bringing patience to our practice can help us stick with it so that we can start to see how it can enhance our lives, and it also allows us to develop our skill of patience, which we can use in other areas of our lives.
A metaphor that we sometimes use to capture the experience of doing something that seems boring or undesirable in service of something else comes from Jamail Yogis’s Saltwater Buddha. He describes a realization he has while surfing: When you spend the day surfing, the goal is to spend time standing on your board, riding a wave. However, a large part of your day will be spent “paddling out” so that you are in a good position when the next wave comes in. Although no one goes surfing out of a desire to spend time paddling out, this paddling out is an essential part of the process of surfing. In a similar way, if we want to be more fully engaged in our lives and be able to notice our reactions and choose our actions, spending time in formal meditation can be very helpful, even if it seems in the moment like we aren’t doing anything. And practicing doing something that seems boring or useless, regardless of the thoughts we have or the impulses we have to stop, can help us when we’re in our lives and there’s some “paddling out” to be done, like studying for an exam that will help us pursue a meaningful career or going on a lot of first dates so that we can eventually make a romantic connection with someone.
Javid started a regular mindfulness practice because he had read that it might help him with his anxiety. He made a commitment to sitting every morning for 15 minutes and following his breath. He kept to his regular schedule and practiced every day for a week. He found the practice extremely challenging. He felt like he spent the entire time losing his focus on his breath. He noticed every pain and ache in his body and also every anxious thought that went through his head and every anxious sensation in his body. He repeatedly had thoughts about all the work he had to do and an impulse to get up and do his work instead of sitting. Other people he knew talked about feeling relaxed when they practiced; he wondered why he didn’t have that experience. He kept thinking about stopping, yet he kept practicing even though he couldn’t see any changes in his anxiety. Then, one day during his practice, he noticed that his mind had wandered off into worries about the future. And for a moment he was able to see that those worries were thoughts he was having, not accurate predictions or dire warnings, as they seemed to be. He smiled as he brought his attention back to his breath, amazed at how quickly his mind was able to jump to catastrophic predictions. He experienced a moment of peace and calm. It vanished quickly, as his mind wandered again. Yet having that experience showed him the kind of change that was possible. He went to work feeling more hopeful than he had in years.
Mindfulness of Physical Sensations
Often people who experience anxiety experience a lot of physical sensations and have strong reactions to these sensations. It can be helpful to practice mindful awareness of these sensations as a different way of responding to the sensations that naturally occur. Read the exercise below and then take a moment to practice it before reading on. This is one of many practices that you might find helpful to use occasionally as you develop a regular schedule of formal mindfulness practice.
Begin by closing your eyes or looking down and settling in your chair so that you are upright but comfortable, noticing the way you are sitting . . . the way your body feels in the chair . . . the places where your body is touching the chair. Notice your breath and where you feel it in your body and just allow your awareness to expand so that you notice any sensations that arise in your body—tension or soreness in your muscles, the feeling of the air on your skin, sensations of hunger, any physical sensations that arise. . . . Notice sensations as they arise, without labeling or judging them, just noticing them as they are—“a sense of tension here,” “a feeling of coldness here”—and if judgments arise, noticing these too and shifting awareness back to your body, to the sensations you are experiencing, allowing each sensation to be, as it is, for however long it remains, just noticing it and continuing with expanded awareness.
This practice can help you get into contact with the responses in your body. As we said in Chapter 1, If we can break the habit of
automatically scratching when
we feel itchy, can we break
the habit of automatically
avoiding when we feel afraid? anxiety often affects our bodies, making our muscles tense or sore or leaving us feeling jittery. And when we notice these sensations in our body, we often respond with judgments about them: “Why am I anxious again? Why can’t I just relax?” By practicing noticing our sensations in a compassionate way, we can start to interrupt this spiral in our daily lives.
Encountering Challenges in Mindfulness Practice: Physical Discomfort
The act of sitting still for a period time often brings with it physical sensations such as soreness in the neck, back, shoulders, or legs or limbs falling asleep. Any consistent experience of pain should be addressed by altering your position, for instance, adding an extra pillow or moving your hands from your lap to rest on each leg (which may reduce shoulder pain). More transient experiences that don’t indicate any physical risk, such as limbs falling asleep or itchy skin, however, present an interesting opportunity.
Typically, we make some sort of adjustment in response to these physical sensations, without much thought. But what if we didn’t? What if we responded to an itch by noting with gentle awareness the physical sensation along with all the thoughts and impulses that arise in response to the sensation, such as “If I don’t scratch my leg, I’m going to go crazy”? Mindfulness might reveal to us that thoughts and impulses don’t always have to be followed. Noticing impulses without automatically responding is, in fact, an incredibly valuable skill to apply to more challenging areas of our lives. Not always reacting reflexively to internal urges and impulses gives us more choices about our actions.
At first it can be difficult not to respond to an itch or other discomfort because we often assume that such sensations will grow stronger and eventually become unbearable if we don’t take some action to relieve them. Interestingly, that is not always the case. Sometimes if we carefully observe a reaction rather than fighting against it or impulsively responding to it, its frequency and intensity may change in ways that surprise us. Simply noticing an itch can at first make us even more aware of the discomfort. Yet bringing patient and curious attention to itchiness may reveal that sensations often ebb and flow.
Just to be clear, being mindful doesn’t mean you can never choose to scratch an itch, stretch a muscle, or, for that matter, avoid an anxiety-provoking conversation (even authors and researchers in the field of mindfulness and anxiety do these things from time to time). But being mindful allows us to recognize the frequency with which we respond automatically to events and experiences without acknowledging the full range of choices available to us and gives us an opportunity to choose our actions instead. We talk more about this in the following chapters.
Mindfulness-Based Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Another practice that expands our awareness of our physical sensations is mindfulness-based progressive muscle relaxation, or MB-PMR. This mindfulness exercise is adapted from a procedure called progressive muscle relaxation, or PMR, which involves systematically tensing and releasing different muscle groups in the body. There are two goals of this exercise. The first is to learn how to notice subtle cues of tension in different parts of your body. For example, people often don’t notice tension across their shoulders and back until it is so tight their shoulders have crept all the way up to their ears and only a professional massage therapist could work the kinks out! Mindfulness helps us become aware of earlier, more subtle cues of tension that are easier to respond to. This brings us to the second goal of the exercise: to learn to release that tension. MB-PMR is based on the principle of a pendulum—pulling it in one direction and releasing it allows the pendulum to swing farther in the other direction than simply pushing it would. In a similar way, tensing slightly and releasing can start the momentum toward deeper muscle relaxation.
Something important to keep in mind if you try MB-PMR is that you should spend only 5 seconds or so tensing each muscle group, and the tension should be very slight and gentle. Sometimes people do this practice with such intensity that they end up tensing their muscles a lot, and that’s not what we’re working toward! You shouldn’t feel pain, just the sensation of tension. You can read the instructions below and then practice this exercise on your own.
For this practice, you may want to sit in a comfortable, reclining chair or lie on the floor so that you are using as few of your muscles as possible. You can also do it sitting as you do for other practices, but being in a position where your whole body is fully supported helps. Begin by bringing your awareness to your breath and then to sensations in your body. After a few moments, bring your awareness to the muscles in your neck, noticing any tension you feel there. Then, by lowering your head toward your chest or pushing your head back against the chair or floor, bring a slight tension into your neck for a few seconds. Now release all the tension, allowing the chair or floor to fully support your head and neck as you breathe gently and notice what it feels like to let your neck muscles lengthen and smooth out. Allow that process to continue for 30 seconds or more. Then tense those muscles again for 5 seconds and release them for 45 seconds or so, just allowing these muscles to continue to lengthen. Next, bring your awareness to the muscles in your shoulders and upper back. By pushing your shoulders up or back, tighten those muscles and notice what that feels like. Then release, sinking into the chair, allowing the muscles in your shoulders and upper back to relax more and more. Bring your awareness to any sensations in your body as you let any tension in that area drain away. After 30 seconds or so, repeat the process of tensing briefly and then releasing for 45 seconds or so. Then scan the rest of your body and see if you notice any tension in other parts of your body—your face (particularly your jaw), your arms, hands, legs, feet. If you do, bring your awareness to those muscles, briefly tense them, and then release them, paying attention to what it feels like to allow those muscles to continue to relax, more and more. Repeat this process and then allow all the muscles in your body to continue lengthening and smoothing out.
If you find MB-PMR helpful and you’re interested in practicing it more extensively, we’ve provided several recordings of the procedure on the book website. The most extensive one involves 16 muscle groups and can take up to 45 minutes. Daily practice is strongly recommended. But over time, you can reduce to the seven-muscle-group version, and eventually a four-muscle-group version, so that it takes less and less time to move through your body and relax it.
Adding Movement
Although formal mindfulness practice often involves sitting still, you can also practice mindfulness while moving. One practice that you might want to try is walking mindfully.
Find a place where you can easily walk in a circle and won’t feel self-conscious about moving slowly and with intention. Begin by bringing your awareness to where your feet are touching the ground and what it feels like to hold your body up. Allow your awareness to settle briefly on your breath, noticing what it feels like to breathe in and out while standing. Now, while you inhale, slowly raise one foot, noticing what it feels like to lift it off the ground. While exhaling, place the foot back on the ground and shift your weight onto it. Repeat this process with your other foot. Continue to walk slowly, taking a single breath with each step, continually bringing your awareness back to the sensations in your body as you engage in this simple, usually automatic, movement.
Gentle yoga is another opportunity for mindful movement. Yoga classes or videotapes provide an excellent opportunity for cultivating mindful awareness while also moving your body. Yoga provides an excellent opportunity for noticing our judgments—so often we have thoughts like, “Why can’t I stretch further? The person next to me is better at this than I am. I’m so out of shape. Yesterday I was so much more flexible.” These are the same kinds of thoughts that occur to us as we do other things in our lives: “I wish I were funny like Tony.” “Why can’t I meet new people?” “I’m so bad at housekeeping. I used to be better at this.” By noticing these thoughts in the context of yoga practice, we can bring compassion to our experience and our attention back to our intention to do something that is healthy for us, regardless of our performance or anyone else’s. This experience can make it easier for us to bring similar compassion to these judgmental thoughts as they occur in other aspects of our lives. Other types of intentional movement such as tai chi can also provide excellent opportunities for this kind of practice.
Encountering Challenges in Mindfulness Practice: Finding Time
Chances are you didn’t pick up this book because you felt like you had a lot of extra time. Anxiety is usually accompanied by a sense of not having enough time to do everything that needs to be done. We certainly struggle with the same feeling. However, we’ve discovered repeatedly in our own lives that taking 15 minutes to practice mindfulness leaves us more productive in the rest of our daily tasks and feeling more rewarded by our experiences throughout the day. Practicing regularly allows us to spend less of the day caught up in frustration or annoyance, provides us with more cognitive flexibility for problem solving, and reduces our time spent procrastinating. Even though we learn this repeatedly, we often have to try it out again because it is such an easy lesson to forget. Try for yourself: commit to practicing for a week and see what you notice about how the rest of your day goes.
Also, no matter how overscheduled your day may seem, you probably spend some time doing things that you don’t value highly. Many of our clients have found that they can carve out some time for practice by choosing to play one computer game rather than 10 in a row or watching 15 minutes less TV at night while still watching their favorite shows. Or sometimes asking a partner to watch the children for 15 minutes each evening can provide the window needed for regular practice. If none of these suggestions work, try to practice for 2 minutes a day instead and see how that goes.
Realistically, sometimes people’s lives do not easily allow for formal practice. Roxanne had a 6-month-old daughter and a 3-year-old son. Although she tried to set aside time to practice mindfulness regularly, she often found that her daughter would wake up just as she settled on the cushion or her son would come into her room and want her attention. At first she judged herself for not being able to make time for practice and feared that this would mean that the mindfulness-based therapy she was trying wouldn’t be helpful. Her therapist suggested that instead she accept that formal practice wasn’t fitting into her life in this moment and that she commit to regular informal practice, such as practicing mindfulness while breast-feeding her daughter, showering, folding laundry, and doing dishes. Through these practices, Roxanne noticed how easily her mind moved to the future, to lists of things she had to do and worries about her children. As she developed the ability to turn her attention toward the task at hand, she found she was also able to notice the judgmental thoughts that arose in her interactions with her mother, sisters, and partner and found herself more able to practice compassion in these contexts, reducing her stress and reactivity. Although some formal practice can be extremely useful, this kind of regular informal practice can also help with learning new skills that will help with the cycle of stress and anxiety. So, if you find that despite your best efforts over several weeks you can’t establish a formal practice, stick with informal practice for now and keep following along with the book. Maybe you’ll take up a formal practice after you experience some of the ways that mindfulness can help you.
INFORMAL PRACTICE
Formal practice acquaints us with our habitual ways of responding (e.g., attention is pulled in multiple directions, thoughts are often judgmental and critical, behaviors are automatic and impulsive) and helps us develop fundamental mindfulness skills. It is equally important that we bring these practices directly to our daily experiences.
Informal mindfulness practice involves purposely bringing your attention to an everyday life activity, like taking a shower or petting your dog. It doesn’t require any additional time; the key is to gently bring a new quality of attention to whatever activity you are already engaged in. Informal mindfulness involves approaching a task that is common and mundane with the curiosity of someone who is doing it for the very first time (instead of mindlessly multitasking). For instance, even if you’ve brushed your teeth more than 21,000 times (twice a day for the last 30 years), imagine doing such a strange thing for the first time. Take a close look at the bristles of the brush—the various lengths of each individual thread, any pattern of wear. Notice the consistency and smell of the paste as you spread it onto the brush, really examining the size, shape, and color of the minty crystals embedded in the gel or paste. Deeply inhale the smell of the paste before you put the brush into your mouth and notice what happens. Do your eyes water slightly? Does it clear your sinuses? Listen to the sound of the brush as it moves across your teeth. Notice any differences in sensitivity across different teeth. Feel the sensation of the water and paste mixing as you go to rinse and notice the strong urge to spit before you actually do so. You can bring this type of observation to virtually any activity during your day. Some suggestions are listed below.
To see what it’s like to do something mindfully, pick one of the tasks listed in the box below, or something else you do every day, and spend this week doing it mindfully. Again, you may want to keep a journal or make some notes each time you engage in this informal practice, noticing what it is like for you. At the end of the week, add another daily activity to your practice. See what you notice as you bring awareness to different kinds of activities. You may find that some are often very pleasant, while others are uncomfortable as you notice how difficult it is to maintain awareness or how busy and crowded your mind feels. Remember that challenging practices are also important aspects of your learning, so make sure you don’t choose only more “pleasant” types of practice. Each practice brings its own lessons. All practices help to increase flexibility and develop this new habit, while reducing the habit of responding automatically, with attention on the past or future and judgments continually arising.
Just Some of the Activities
You Can Do Mindfully
| • Eating | • Talking on the phone |
| • Sitting | • Driving |
| • Walking | • Riding the bus or subway |
| • Washing dishes | • Cooking |
| • Folding laundry | • Listening to music |
| • Doing housework | • Hugging someone |
| • Taking a shower | • Working |
| • Petting your dog | • Listening to a friend |
| • Brushing your teeth |
The ideas and suggestions in the following chapters are based on our own experiences as well as our experiences with clients who have come to us with a range of anxiety symptoms and stressors. By developing your own practice and enhancing your awareness of your experience, you will be able to see how the observations we and others have made fit with your own experiences and apply best to your life. These practices are therefore an important part of how you can make the best use of this book and develop your own mindful path through your anxiety. Now that you have been practicing mindfulness for a little bit, you may fi nd it helpful to do a brief practice before you begin reading each of the following chapters. Just taking a few moments to notice your breath and the way you are sitting in your chair will help you focus fully on the material and see the way it fits your experience.
Encountering Challenges in Mindfulness Practice: Not Being in the Mood to Practice
We and our clients often find that certain mood states seem like reasons not to practice. The thoughts “I’m too tired to practice,” “I’m too stressed out and cranky to practice,” and “I’m too sad to practice” arise in all of us. At first these seem like reasonable conclusions—many activities seem less appealing when our physical or mental state seems to be off in some way. Wouldn’t it be better to practice mindfulness when we’re in the right state of mind?
We’ll revisit the problems associated with waiting for the right mood or state of mind to act, but many of our clients have passed up promotions or turned down relationships because they didn’t feel calm or confident enough to take advantage of the opportunities. Even though it may sound odd at first, practicing mindfulness when you’re in a bad mood or tired can also present a wonderful opportunity to practice turning toward things that you habitually turn away from. As we discuss in depth in the next chapter, internal states that we have all learned to ignore, suppress, or avoid often have a great deal to teach us. In addition, the act of turning away from them doesn’t always bring relief and, in fact, often makes them more challenging and distressing.
So, each time we notice a tendency to skip practice because of our emotional or physical state, we have a new chance to practice turning toward these experiences and proceed with our practice nonetheless. While practicing, we can welcome the many opportunities to practice responding to our thoughts and feelings with gentleness and openness instead of reactivity and judgment. Exercises in the next few chapters will help you develop these skills.
EXERCISE Mindful monitoring of fear and anxiety
Continue mindfully observing and recording your anxious responses in the moments when they occur. Remember, mindfulness involves becoming fully aware of the thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, and images that you experience. Also, observe these reactions with curiosity and interest. View your responses as they are instead of what you know or fear them to be. Notice the pull to label, judge, and react to your anxiety and practice acknowledging that the reactions we have are part of being human.