The magic of mindfulness: how present moment focus reduces stress.
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“How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and therefore the quality of our lives.”
In my teens to mid-twenties, I knew the thoughts and turbulent emotions that my mind produced were the cause of my great distress – anxiety, depression and a constant feeling of not being able to relax. If someone had told me at that time that all I had to do to feel better was let go of my thoughts and pay attention to what was happening to me in the present moment – specifically, by focusing on my breath and body sensations – I would not have believed it.
However, in my late twenties, I did just that very thing. I turned to mindfulness meditation as a technique to help me deal with the very stressful events in my life at that time. I had just experienced a series of major life changes all at once. I changed my career, moved across country, got married, and bought my first house. My body’s response to this upheaval was panic attacks – an extreme form of anxiety where the body’s fight or flight mode goes into overdrive, causing you to feel like you’re dying. A trip to my doctor revealed that the panic attacks were stress related and I was advised to take a mindfulness meditation class.
I took the now popular Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Course (MBSR) developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I learned mindfulness practices that reduced my reactivity to stress by training me to focus on present moment experiences through awareness of my breath and body sensations.
Mindfulness practice trains you to contact the present moment more fully and frequently in your day-to-day living. You can think of mindfulness as an antidote to living on autopilot, where we go about our activities distracted, un-centered and constantly lost in thoughts of the past or future. Research shows we are in this distracted and unfocused state of mind 50% of the time, which can leave us feeling anxious, stressed, unproductive and even unhappy (2010 Harvard Study, Killingsworth and Gilbert).
In the last 30 years, there’s been a considerable amount of research conducted on how mindfulness impacts our brain. Studies conducted by Neuroscientist, Dr. Sara Lazar, a key researcher in the field, found that by learning to attend to our present moment experience through mindfulness practice, we strengthen the connections between the brain’s cognitive and emotional centers. Focusing our attention on our breath and body sensations draws our attention into the present moment, and this activates the brain’s sensory mode of awareness. When we are in this mode of awareness, our body’s natural relaxation response turns on and the fight/flight (stress) response turns off. With consistent practice, we become less reactive to our stress triggers. The stressors themselves may not change, but we start to relate to them differently- with more calm, presence and mental clarity.
The two core practices in mindfulness that help you train your present moment awareness are mindful breathing and the body scan.
In mindful breathing, you focus on one object of attention – your breath.
In the body scan, you scan your attention throughout the body, placing your attention on different body regions.
Mindfulness is not a quick fix by any means. In order to be effective in building stress resiliency, daily practice is required. The good news though is that with short periods of daily practice, you can start to build the skills of self-awareness, presence and mental clarity. As Dr. Lazar points out, “ Mindfulness is like exercise, exercising three times a week is great. But if all you can do is a little bit everyday, that’s a good thing too.”
Getting back to my own situation, after about a few weeks of daily mindfulness meditation, I started to feel more centered. It was an empowering experience to see that I did indeed have some control over my body’s response to stress. Currently, I aim to meditate every day. What makes this doable is that if I can’t practice formally every day, I practice informally by weaving in moments of mindfulness throughout my daily routine. Please be sure to check out the resources section of the website to try out the guided meditations that will get you started on your own mindfulness path.
