Like all spiritual pursuits, mindfulness offers a wide array of benefits to those who practice it—but sometimes those benefits are very personal and difficult to describe.
Odds are good that you’ve met at least one person in your life who swears by some technique of mindfulness, whether that’s yoga, meditation, or otherwise. But you may not know what mindfulness is exactly, or what you might stand to gain from it. Simply put, mindfulness is the practice of being in tune with your physical, mental, and emotional selves and aware of your present surroundings. You can think of it as a kind of tuning out of excess noise or distractions from how you’re doing and what you’re doing at any given moment. In this way, mindfulness is a very effective practice with a few concrete benefits:
Practicing mindfulness, even for a short amount of time each day, helps reduce stress by increasing situational awareness.
When you’re more focused on your surroundings, on what’s actually happening around you, than fixating on your emotional reactions to those things, you’re better able to have agency over how your current situation makes you feel. This reduces stress. Mindfulness can help teach you how to effectively use situational awareness to your advantage in this way.
An open attitude means more freedom from negative thoughts and greater relief.
Mindfulness can help you better learn to appreciate and accept what’s going on around you. A mindful approach to life can even lead you to embrace an attitude of curiosity toward different or difficult circumstances and can allow you to find fun in the otherwise challenging. Many people report feeling more optimistic and less negative on the whole when practicing mindfulness.
By creating new relationships to experiences, mindfulness helps develop coping skills and positive behavioral change.
Practicing mindfulness regularly also helps people dis-identify from stressful emotions, thoughts, and reactions, helping them attack the problem rather than themselves when they find themselves in trying situations. Through mindfulness, you might start to realize “this worry is not me,” or “these negative thoughts are not truly reflective of who I am.” These realizations help increase our ability to cope with stress as it arises, and levels up our ability to handle stress on the whole.
If you’re hoping to use mindfulness to decrease your own stress, you don’t have to go it alone. Contact me and we’ll chat about how we can start your journey into mindfulness together.
