What’s the Point of Mindfulness?  

If you’ve spent any time in the chronically online mental health space, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of mindfulness. Perhaps you’ve encountered the litany of meditation apps, reminding us, at pre-determined intervals, to slow down, breathe, and “protect your peace.”

Indeed, mindfulness has in recent years—in more placid terms—exploded. And not for trivial reasons. Plenty of research appears to support the mental and physical benefits of mindfulness and meditation, often pointing to how these activities reduce cortisol, a key hormone involved in the stress response.

And yet, despite its scientific backing, much of the content emerging from mindfulness appears vaguely mystical, having been quickly snatched up by the self-help space, which loves nothing more than to conceal uncomplicated ideas in an elusive, profound manner, propping up mindfulness as a kind of grand cure for mental health issues. And it’s quite a shame considering that mindfulness is quite useful, even apart from the grandiose claims which so often accompany it.

What is Mindfulness?

If we remove the excess, mindfulness is simply a state of mind which we can intentionally occupy, where we observe our internal and external experience. In a mindful state, we attend consciously and deliberately to our five senses, our thoughts, feelings, and any experience that arises in the present moment. We then attempt to maintain this present state of awareness and observe our conscious experiences as a non-judgmental observer.

While this might sound like how we behave normally, one of the great revelations of mindfulness is that this is, in fact, not the case.

Indeed, if we truly pay attention, we realize that much of our conscious experience is informed by our unconscious: without choosing to, we find ourselves thinking about the past, the future, or conjuring up imaginative realities involving our hopes, worries, or fears. Thoughts and emotions arise in conscious experience, like a projector casting a movie onto a curtain. Normally, we experience those thoughts passively, without drawing much attention to them. Yet we feel their effects through our overall emotional state.

In this state of existence, there exists no separateness between us and our thoughts: our thoughts define our experience.

In a mindful state, however, we recognize that while we cannot necessarily choose our thoughts, we can choose to be more present with them. As thoughts emerge, we can notice them and approach them with curiosity, acknowledging their separateness from us (and objective reality) and remaining rooted in the present.

If our mind were like a train station, and our thoughts like trains entering the station, mindfulness allows us to notice these trains of thought without automatically getting on them and being carried away.

Mindfulness in Practice

We can acknowledge an anxious or catastrophizing thought, for example, as something that emerged into our conscious mind at a singular point in time. We can notice its intensity, where it might have come from, and where we felt it in our bodies. We can then allow it a moment to fill our conscious space, giving rise to its fullness. And then we can make a concerted effort to release it.

The idea here is to notice thoughts, emotions, and sensations as experiences that are separate from the totality of us, rather than becoming blended or encapsulated within them. In that sense, a mindful observation might be: “I just had an anxious thought,” as opposed to “I am anxious.”

Within this practice lies a certain kind of power: the power not to control our thoughts, but to experience our thoughts without being swept away by them.

What mindfulness offers isn’t a profound cure, but an opportunity to experience a state of existence that is very different from our ordinary one. Instead of endlessly ruminating and getting lost in our thoughts, we can slow down and pay mindful attention to what’s available to us in the present moment. When we do, we often find a sense of peace or tranquility, or at the very least a reprieve from the cacophony of thoughts that normally intrude without our agency. And, in that sense, mindfulness is pretty cool.

A Mindfulness Activity to Try

If you’re interested in mindfulness and would like to try a straightforward mindful activity, see below!

1. A common place to start with mindfulness is with the breath. Close your eyes and take a couple of deep breaths, inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth. Don’t try too hard to control or restrict it. Inhale slowly until you reach a point of feeling comfortably full, and then exhale without forcing the air out. Allow it to escape you naturally. A good guide to slow, deep breathing is to inhale while counting to four and then exhale until your body tells you it is time to take another breath. It may take some time to find a proper rhythm. This is okay. Mindfulness isn’t about doing it “correctly.” It’s just about participating in the experience. If you find yourself experiencing negative thoughts or like you’re testing this experience for its effects, notice those thoughts and then allow them to subside as you return to the breath.
2. Once you find a comfortable breathing pattern, imagine taking an elevator from your brain down into your chest. Notice any sensations there. Any tightness? Feelings of warmth or coolness? Any pain or discomfort? If so, try to describe the sensation, mentally, like a scientist collecting data. Is it a sharp feeling, or is it more diffuse? What are the boundaries of this sensation? See if you can draw a shape around it using your mind or your hand.
3. Notice any thoughts that emerge here that want to protect you from this experience. If you feel uncomfortable or too anxious, be kind to yourself and know that you can stop at any time. Or, return to what you were paying attention to when you felt better. Maybe that’s the breath for right now. Inhabit the space where you are for a few minutes. Notice any changes or shifts.
4. Depending on your level of comfort with being present in your body, you can choose from two different paths to try next, if you’d like to continue.
   • If you feel curious about this experience and want to expand your bodily awareness, try to spread your awareness to hold even more experience. As you continue to breathe deeply, allow your field of attention to widen, as you take inventory of your entire body. Allow yourself to notice any sensation that occurs anywhere in your body. If you like, you can imagine taking a scan of your body, from top to bottom. Spend a bit of time in each region: face, jaw, neck, shoulders, chest, arms and hands, abdomen, and your sit bones. Notice anything there is to notice. If you notice any areas of tightness or tension, try to relax them, allowing the breath to perfuse these areas, like a healing ocean wave. If you find yourself getting tired or feeling taxed, feel free to stop.
   • As you continue to breathe deeply, expand your awareness to include the room you’re in. Consider each of your senses as relevant. What can you see? Describe these things, aloud or in your mind, perhaps in terms of their color. Notice even the things you normally take for granted. What can you hear? Do you notice anything you weren’t paying attention to before? What can you feel on the surface of your body? Any sensations of warmth or coolness? Prickliness, or soreness? Allow gravity to pull you down into the surface you’re sitting on, and to feel rooted to this space. Any smells? Maybe a blanket or a pillow in the room that you can hold up to your nose? What’s that like? Does it remind you of anything?
5. For a moment, allow all of these things to exist simultaneously: the breath, the sensations, the thoughts, your environment. Without restricting it in any way, let your attention be drawn wherever it’s pulled, but notice that it’s happening. Notice how you don’t choose where your attention is placed. Notice how it’s pulled along, as if by a string, by each new experience. Follow along, allowing yourself to be surprised at what your mind finds.
6. And when you’re ready, take one more deep breath, open your eyes if they are closed, and give yourself a mental pat on the back for doing a difficult thing. Whether it was easy or hard—comfortable or uncomfortable—you experienced something a bit different today!