Episode 10: How Can You Become More Mindful?

Mindfulness is defined as the nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment. It is a state of being that can be practiced through mindfulness exercises or incorporated into your everyday routines. This episode discusses what mindfulness looks like, how we can become more mindful, and includes two mindfulness practices to get you started on your journey.

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Episode Transcript:

INTRO MUSIC: Welcome to The Compassionate Wellness Podcast. I'm Alex Treanor. I'm a Nationally Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and I am so excited you're here. The wellness industry is full of do's and do not's, should's and should not's. But I like to take a different approach. I'll be sharing all things health and wellness from a joyful, real-life compassionate perspective. If you're ready to drop the cookie-cutter approach and create a life you truly love, while eating a cookie or two along the way, let's dive in.

Hey, friends, welcome to this week's episode. I cannot believe that we're already more than halfway through this month, I feel like it's going so fast! This month, our focus has been on reducing stress and we're going to be continuing that theme today.

I want to talk about something that we hear about quite a bit, but I think because we hear about it so often, sometimes the meaning gets a little bit lost or becomes a little bit incomplete. That topic is mindfulness. We'll start by defining what the heck mindfulness even means. There's plenty of definitions out there, but the overarching definition I hear most frequently is that mindfulness is a non-judgmental awareness of the present moment.

When we're being mindful, we are observing. We are being non-judgmental (that's the part I think that gets missed sometimes). We're accepting of the thoughts and feelings that we have. We're not judging the experience when we're being mindful. We're also not getting lost in our thoughts. We're not dwelling in past experiences and ruminating on those things. We're not worrying about the future. We're just focused on that present moment, being in that moment, and not judging it.

The origins of mindfulness go back thousands of years ago. It's actually inspired by Buddhist teachings. When we're thinking of mindfulness in terms of the evidence-based practices, how it's defined in scientific literature, the main person we think of is Jon Kabat-Zinn. He has a doctorate in molecular biology and was a student out at MIT who worked with Zen Buddhist teachers. Eventually, he developed an eight-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program and that's really where we take a lot of these mindfulness principles from.

Being that it has a lot of scientific evidence behind it, there are a lot of things that we know mindfulness can help with. It has been shown to reduce stress, anxiety, reduce depressive symptoms, can help improve our sleep, give us better coping skills, both mentally in terms of managing anxiety, and depression, and also physical coping skills. They've done a lot of research on mindfulness in managing chronic pain. There is some research to show that it has impact on blood sugar or blood pressure, some of these more internal biometric numbers. So there's definitely a lot of positive things about learning to incorporate more mindfulness into our lives and into our routines.

One of the reasons that mindfulness has been shown to be so beneficial to our health and well-being is that you're really training your mind to focus on the present and to be here, be in the now. When we think about stress, and when I think about my own stress, how much of our stress comes from worrying about the future, something that could happen, or the deadline that's coming up, or all the things that are on the to do list? Stress can also come from things in the past. Worrying about "I shouldn't have said that, why did I react that way?", all these different things that sometimes we get stuck on, and it can trigger that stress response.

So how do we practice mindfulness, because I think this is where it gets tricky. It sounds nice. It sounds very zen (and it is!), but I think sometimes it's hard to translate these theoretical principles into actionable items. So I want to talk about a couple of the ways that we can incorporate more mindfulness into our lives. The beauty of mindfulness, and maybe also what makes it hard, is that it can be done in a variety of ways, because mindfulness is really a quality of being more than an actual practice. There are ways that you can practice it, but you can also incorporate mindfulness into activities that you're already doing. For example, you could go for a mindful walk or you could mindfully eat. (That's something that we talk about quite a bit with my coaching calls). You can mindfully wash the dishes. That's actually one of my favorite things. You are in that present moment, you're not worrying about all the different things on the to do list, just focusing on how the water feels on your hands, the temperature. The task at hand is all that matters.

So to be mindful, you're really just doing one thing at a time and paying attention to that one thing. And one thing alone. You will definitely have other thoughts come and go, especially like when I think of dishes, that's when you tend to think about all the things you need to do or think about the things that happened into the day. That's where the practice comes in, of learning to have those thoughts arise, not judge to them, just let them be, and then letting them also pass without diving into them, or wanting to dissect them and figure out the meaning behind everything or what the action plan might be.

Something that I find very powerful with mindfulness is that it also teaches us how to lose focus, and then come back to it. I focus a lot on nutrition with my clients and I think that's such a great skill that we can develop through mindfulness; being able to feel like I lost my focus a little bit, all I have to do is come back to it. There's no judgment involved. It's just a matter of losing focus, coming back to it, losing focus, coming back to it. And that's a normal part of the process. It's to be expected. That's something we can really learn from mindfulness and how we are looking at our thoughts as we're being mindful.

Okay, so what are the practical ways to start with mindfulness, if it's something you're interested in? I'll give you two main practices.

The first one is doing a form of mindfulness meditation. The goal here is not to turn off your thoughts, or never have a thought, or clear your mind completely and be completely empty of all outside forces. The goal really, is to observe the thoughts and feelings that you have without judgment, just like we talked about the definition. We're just applying it into our own thoughts and feelings. The common metaphor we hear with this is imagining that your thoughts or your feelings are like clouds in the sky. They will come in, you can notice them, you can see them, and then they will roll out. They're not there to stay forever, they're not impacting you. They're just something that you see, accept that they are there, and you let them go. To help build in some focus to your mindfulness meditation, you can focus on your breath. Just breathing in and breathing out, and the feelings and the sensations that are associated with that. You will 100% catch yourself thinking about something. Going into it, just know that that will happen, that's normal. Having that focus on the breath gives you something to come back to, so when you have those thoughts, you can note them say, "Oh, I had a thought" and then recenter yourself. We continue coming back to that focus on your breath. So that's the skill that you're developing when you're doing a mindfulness meditation.

Another exercise you can do to practice increasing your mindfulness is called a body scan. With this, instead of focusing mostly on your breath or your thoughts, you're going to be focusing on the sensations in your body. You're bringing awareness to every part of your body. Typically, you'll start by getting comfortable, maybe sitting in a chair, or lying down. Then you'll start at the top of your head and work your way down through your toes. Almost like, you know the thing that comes to mind is like, Mission Impossible when they have those body scanners that like, go up and down your body..but I actually don't know if that's in Mission Impossible. It just sounds like something that would be in Mission Impossible. So let's say some spy movie where it body scans you, that's what you're doing in your mind. So you're starting at your head, working your way down, moving slowly through each body part and noticing the sensations that you feel. Maybe you feel your shirt on your skin. Maybe you feel "oh man, I slept a little weird, my neck feels a little bit tight, that muscle is pretty sore". Or maybe you feel discomfort, or maybe there's a pain. You are just feeling all these different parts of your body and the physical sensations associated with them. The goal with this is not trying to relieve that tension. When you notice that your neck is sore, you're not going to stop doing the body scan to stretch out your neck or move your body around. You're just learning to notice the tension, acknowledge it, recognize that it's there. We're not judging it. We're not saying "Oh, why did I sleep weird, that was so stupid of me". You're just recognizing it, and then continuing the scan. That's it. So that's where it does take practice, because we tend to notice discomfort or tension and want to fix it. But then we're judging it that it's something that needs to be fixed; it's something that's wrong. We're not doing that with with a mindfulness exercise. We're just noticing, observing, accepting, and moving forward.

These are just a couple of the ways that we can incorporate mindfulness. Those are two pretty standard exercises, but as I mentioned, you can incorporate mindfulness into any activity that you're doing, because it is more a quality of being. So anything that you do, you can bring a perspective or an approach of mindfulness to it. So as we are focusing on stress this week, and knowing that mindfulness can be so helpful for managing stress, I would encourage you to really consider how you can incorporate more mindfulness into your routine this week. Maybe looking at what are some of the activities you're already doing that you could practice that mental component of adding that to the activity, to give yourself some practice and some time, non judgmentally observing in your day to day life.

That is all I have for you today. Thank you so much for joining me, and I'm looking forward to talking with you again next week.

OUTRO MUSIC: Thanks for joining me on this episode of the compassionate wellness podcast. If this message resonated with you, please share it with someone you care about. I'd love to connect with you as well follow me on Instagram @alextreanor.coaching, or visit my website alextreanorcoaching.com. And as a reminder, Treanor spelled kind of goofy, it's T-R-E-A-N-O-R. For any references mentioned in this episode, be sure to check out the show notes. I hope you have a wonderful day and don't forget to make time for something you enjoy.