Mental Health

Practicing Mindfulness – Beyond Buzzwords

How do you practice mindfulness? And what is it, anyway?

Take a deep breath, inhaling for as long as you exhale. Do it again, inhale and exhale, taking notice of how the air feels in your nose and throat.

If you followed along with that paragraph, consider yourself a more mindful individual than you were before.

Let’s first establish what not being mindful looks like; A common example of the mindlessness we should work to curb in adult life comes when you’ve driven somewhere but can’t really recall the journey that got you there. On a larger scale and longer timeline, that distracting mental chatter can lead to poorly-remembered months and years of your life.

It was birthed from the Buddhist method, but modern mindfulness has become a secular practice that can aid you in many ways.

Observing your thoughts with metacognition

Mindfulness seems like an abstract concept to grasp, and that’s why I rolled my eyes at the mention of it for a while. It seemed like too much effort; Just another ‘woo woo’ buzzword that had little intrinsic value in everyday life. I couldn’t have been more wrong in my assumptions.

Explaining mindfulness properly requires some understanding of metacognition, a term that’s easier to remember if you see it as a fancy way to say ‘thinking about thinking’. You’re meant to analyze your thoughts as a way of breaking things down into smaller, bite-sized pieces instead of leaving them as huge, vague and daunting feelings.

We all experience that introspection from time to time, but a greater focus on metacognition – taking a moment to question your thoughts – is key to making challenges, big and small, easier to navigate.

What does it mean to be mindful?

It wasn’t a Buddhist monk or stereotypical hippie who properly introduced me to the idea of being mindful, but a licensed psychologist.

In our first sessions, she taught me about the practice of recognizing the thoughts speeding through my mind without overreacting to them. I learned firsthand that ‘mindfulness’ is more than a hollow buzzword thrown around by self-help gurus.

This didn’t immediately solve my problems or fully connect with me in those first sitdowns, but later mindful practice made slowing down easier. With that practice came proof that I could get better at maneuvering around the noise, and having that confidence in later nervous moments has been immeasurably rewarding.

Five points to aid your mindful practice

Sit. This helps to relax and narrow your concentration.
Bring your attention to the present moment.
Notice the sensations in your body (breathing, touch, etc.)
Accept that your thoughts will inevitably wander.
When your thoughts do wander, re-focus on current sensations.

When you’re mindful, you’re able to turn your attention to the present moment without following the thoughts that inevitably trickle in. The thoughts don’t stop, but your reaction to them adjusts.

What mindfulness isn’t

When you’re finally getting better at being mindful, your life doesn’t become perfect or problem-free, but you’re better able to analyze and deal with what comes your way.

Mindfulness is NOT:

Ignoring your problems or thoughts
Something you can force
Becoming ‘blank’ or thoughtless

Applying mindful practice to your daily life

Do you get partway through the week with no awareness of how far the weekend is? I know I can go for several hours without even being aware of what day of the week I just started.

That type of ‘cruise control’ is an easy trap to fall into when society is scheduled to the absolute brink — sleep schedule, work schedule, TV schedule… without any introspection, that only leads to an exhausted mind and something I’ve personally experienced — years that fly by, barely remembered.

To practice mindfulness is to live a life with fewer ‘autopilot’ moments. Still, you shouldn’t venture into this practice with the goal of having fewer thoughts pass through your mind; you’re simply committing yourself to notice and release them as they pop up.

While giving a proper description of mindfulness may feel overwhelming, the actual practice is beautifully simple; You can be mindful at any time by asking yourself “Where is my attention right now?”

Activities that encourage you to be mindful

Really, anything that requires a single focus can be a mindful activity. You can mindfully eat, exercise, even knit. The saying “It’s just a state of mind” is kind of true here, because you’re meant to continue living your life as you work to become more aware of your thoughts and feelings.

Since the term ‘mindfulness’ only started to be used outside of the psychology world more recently, you may not have been familiar with the word. Knowing more about mindfulness now, it’s probably pretty easy to see how some common activities can be done mindfully.

Everyday activities for practicing mindfulness:

Showering, bathing
Cooking
Eating (Slowing down at mealtime is good for digestion!)
Waking up (mentally scan your body for sensation)
Tidying your space/making your bed

Make a routine of mindfully engaging in any one of those practices and you’ll be better off!

A Delicious Strategy for Better Self-Control

self-control at a pizza party is not my strong suit — Self-control at a pizza party? Not my strong suit.

Poor self-control, or lack of discipline, is one of the most common and burdensome traits that modern people wind up with. I feel confident saying that because I’ve been in a lifelong grappling match with self-discipline and regularly find myself pinned.

Those pin attempts often look like afternoons spent staring blankly at a page while half-watching something that I claim is just ‘background noise’ on a second screen, fully committing my focus to nothing. I’m learning to kick out more and more, though. It’s been a grind through long therapy hours and research, but I’ve amassed little techniques that help me squirm out and ultimately have better self-control.

Willpower and discipline

We all have different natural capabilities when it comes to our will. I have a pretty shallow pool of self-discipline to draw from, while you may know somebody who’s easily able to avoid poor eating habits and stays endlessly polite without carrying a secret flask of liquor in their bag for mid-day sips.

So many of us find a weakness or lapses in our willpower that get in the way of accomplishing goals, but too few realize that we’re able to practice and strengthen our will. Still, one of the first steps to harnessing your self-control is gaining a fundamental understanding of discipline and what leads to differences in our capacity for exercising it. Let’s explore that.

Tolerate (some) discomfort

The primary barrier to self-control comes with learning to tolerate some level of discomfort. I’m like a lot of people in that discomfort makes me really prone to panic, not to act, and I’ve sought ways to bolster my defenses against it for over thirty years now.

Before I share my simple catch-all tip, here are a few other methods you can employ daily to keep your willpower from having to work too hard.

Healthy habits to make things easier:

Planning and visualizing will help alleviate the need for snap decision-making, giving you more energy to put toward strengthening your self-control.

Taking bite-sized goals in baby steps means a series of smaller decisions that deplete less energy.

Try your best to distract yourself when necessary. This is arguably the most effective means of resisting the temptation to succumb to your current train of thought.

A limited resource

The energy you have toward self-discipline is a finite resource that gets depleted every time you exercise your willpower. In other words, you need physical energy to practice self-control and every time you do, you have a smaller pool of it to draw from.

A commonly-cited experiment demonstrated this effect by placing multiple subjects at a table with both a bowl of radishes and a batch of fresh cookies. Some of the participants were told they could only eat the radishes, while others were permitted to help themselves to the cookies. After a half-hour passed, they were each given a complex puzzle to solve.

Who worked most diligently on their puzzles? The cookie-eaters.

Why?

Well, I have a personal theory that eating a raw radish or going hungry instead of getting a cookie would kill off your will to live (Am I serious? Perhaps. Am I testing the theory? No! Radishes are weird), but what does the science actually say? Not only did those cookie-eating people have a sugary boost, they hadn’t depleted their stores of self-control like the subjects who refrained from taking the appealing snacks. Because of that and the metabolic energy surplus provided by their snacks, they were able to spend roughly twice the time and energy solving their puzzles.

Some good news on this front is that even though your capacity for self-control is limited, you can provide yourself with a temporary boost just like the research subjects with their cookies. Scientists have noted that blood glucose (sugar) assists with the energy required to exercise your will.

More energy, better self-control

That’s right – many of us are struggling with getting better self-control around food when a part of the solution is eating more in the first place. Fuel’s a tricky thing, though, and some burn cleaner than others. That means you shouldn’t seek out the nearest cookie; There are many less processed foods that still convert to glucose to give you energy. Fruit, for instance!

Armed with this information and desperate to teach myself some healthier habits, I’ve forced myself to eat a small breakfast each morning for a few months now. A protein bar or similarly balanced, modest-calorie meal has been great to avoid the fatigue and fogginess that a huge breakfast brings on.

The effect this has had is sort of a no-brainer: I’m snacking much less during the day and find it’s easier to stay on task when my gut isn’t processing a big meal or, more frequently, gnawing at its own emptiness.

Regardless of what you’re eating, however, the most important part of breakfast is just having it.

How to control fight or flight anxiety

It’s a late-night and you’re shutting the lights off in the unused part of your home. You have to pass a dark, exposed window to get to the bedroom, and realizing this sends a nervous zap up your spine that urges you to bolt for safety as you approach the vulnerability.

Does that sound familiar?

What is the fight or flight response?

Your body’s acute stress response is commonly referred to as the fight or flight response. In the animal kingdom, it aids survival by powering the body’s systems with the explosive energy necessary to escape danger.

You can thank physiologist and Harvard professor Walter Bradford Cannon for formally describing the reaction in the early 1900s. He was also one of the first to insist that emotional stress, not only physical trauma, can trigger fight or flight.

For modern people, the source of the reaction is often vaguer than an obvious physical threat in front of us. We tend to anticipate danger more often than it is present.

One example is the sudden urge to seek shelter when you realize your back is to a doorway or exposed window at night time. While this may have been helpful when locks and various other security devices were more primitive, civilization has recently kept us (fairly) safe and your neighborhood probably isn’t known for its packs of marauding bandits.

Civilized comforts mean that many times, our fight or flight response activates in the absence of real danger. Because the stressor only has to be a danger in our imagination, those of us with disordered thinking often find the response engaged when there isn’t something real to fear. It’s quickly exhausting and leaves you searching for ways to control fight or flight anxiety.

What does the fight or flight response feel like?

The first step in dealing with or adjusting your body’s reaction to stress is being able to identify when it’s happening. Modern triggers aren’t usually as obvious as their historical counterparts when even average humans commonly had to face something they had a good reason (from a life-preserving standpoint) to fear.

But we still find ourselves anxious when there is no clear and present danger.

Physical symptoms of hyperarousal

When you sense trouble, your sympathetic nervous system flips fight or flight’s ‘On’ switch. Your heart races. Adrenaline (also called epinephrine) is a major hormone and neurotransmitter involved in this response, responsible for binding to the receptors that regulate your heart’s output, the blood flowing to your muscles and your blood sugar.

The major reactions require energy that gets provided in the form of glucose (sugar), which is produced when the epinephrine binds in your liver. Sudden muscle tension is meant to support the strength necessary to run or physically defend.

Another boost comes via the ‘stress hormone’ cortisol, which (as mentioned) temporarily increases sugars in the bloodstream. Personally, that’s the part where I get dizzy.

Emotions in fight or flight

Those physical symptoms – the adrenaline dump, racing heart, etc. – are especially distressing without a clear trigger, and lead to the mental struggle that many find most difficult.

Anxiety and aggression are common emotional responses to the physical process going on in our bodies when stressed. There’s so much tension still there even when you aren’t actively fighting that your mind remains hypervigilant and anxious. This is true both for people with and without added panic disorders.

These symptoms are helpful for short-term bursts of energy but begin to wear on a person’s long-term health if they’re experienced consistently. Because living in this state is such a drain on the body, it’s critical to recognize and then to prioritize mindful stress management as a regular part of your life.

Relieving your nerves

With a better understanding of fight or flight and its triggers, we should consider how to identify and control it in our daily lives. Anything I mention in the next section is something I’ve personally found effective and, if not, I’ll be making that very clear.

As you leave fight or flight mode, your parasympathetic nervous system activates what’s known as ‘rest and digest’. You can strengthen and even control this parasympathetic response in a number of ways, mostly by directing your body.

BREATHE! – An easy method called diaphragmatic breathing is particularly useful for calming your nervous system.

An anecdote on the effectiveness of breathwork: I was recently obligated to attend a corporate awards ceremony-slash-dinner that hosted 200 people. It was a familiar venue where I was married a few years ago, but I got overwhelmed by the sudden chorus of voices having separate conversations when I walked in beside my husband. Using mindfulness techniques like breathing exercises as we sat really helped get me through my initial urge to avoid the situation.

MEDITATE – Meditation is not the art of relaxation. It’s the act – or art, I suppose – of repeatedly focusing your attention back to something. This practice strengthens your ability to redirect your focus during stressful situations and works hand-in-hand with the breathing exercises I just mentioned.

Just like lifting the same weight with your arm every day gradually becomes easier as your body adapts to the repetition, working this ‘mental muscle’ enough will help move your focus faster and smoother.

WORK IT OUT – A great way to get out of this stressed state is to go straight through it via exercise. Adrenaline prepares you with an explosive energy that needs an outlet – use it!

… SELF-SWADDLING? – Just like a baby whose brand new nervous system is overwhelmed by sensation, you can swaddle yourself in tight, uniformly fitting clothing (think compression stockings and athletic wear) or heavy blankets. I know this sounds absurdly simple, but it can work wonders for many of us who have long aged out of babyhood.

If you can get a better grip on your natural reactions to stress, you’ll find it becomes much easier to maintain balance in your daily life. Understanding responses like fight or flight and how we encounter them even during common activity is a big part of achieving that balance.

Go forward with these bits of information on your stress response; I hope they serve you well!

When Your Anxiety Means Memory Loss

Around 30% of people have anxiety disorders and everybody on the planet experiences some kind of stress. Everyone also experiences some memory loss and an increase in blank moments as we age. But imagine being in your 20s or 30s and honestly searching keywords like ‘early dementia symptoms’ or ‘how young can Alzheimer’s present?’

Maybe you don’t have to imagine – I know my own search history’s had similar phrasing after I forget somebody’s name on the sidewalk.

When your memory is affected by anxiety, insidious little thoughts like ‘But what if it is a brain tumor?!’ can seem even more reasonable. Suddenly you’re Googling tumor symptoms for an hour instead of being productive or resting, furthering your stress and occupying your mind all because you had a little mind-blanking moment earlier in the day.

My mind went blank. What just happened?

It’s likely that your stress response took over! The human body’s stress response goes, roughly, like this:

A “Threat” occurs and a distress signal goes to the emotional processing center of your brain, called the amygdala.
If your amygdala agrees that the signal confirms immediate danger, it passes it along to your brain’s primary control center, called the hypothalamus.
The hypothalamus lights everything up; Adrenaline releases, your heart rate increases and all that energy causes a heightened state of alertness that’s traditionally been necessary for the survival of our species.

Now you’re alert and still sense danger – time for a shot of that not-so-sweet, sweet stress hormone: Cortisol!

When Hormones Get Involved

Sitting on top of your kidneys are your adrenal glands, responsible for secreting the main stress hormone – called cortisol. When your stress response keeps going, cortisol is one of the primary hormones responsible for the ongoing physiological effects.

At this stage, your mind is firing on all cylinders, extra sharp thanks to the new burst of hormonal energy.

Do you lose your appetite when you’re anxious? That’s because cortisol shuts down down non-essential functions when your body is under attack. This tends to quiet your digestive and even reproductive systems.

Though you may be craving less food, cortisol makes sure the fight or flight response gets plenty of fuel by telling your liver to turn your body’s protein stores into more glucose (sugar) to use in the sprint away from danger. This process is called gluconeogenesis, a word you probably don’t need to remember how to spell unless you’re planning on writing a keto diet guide.

Your cortisol levels will only drop when you’ve accepted that the danger has passed (even if it really passed long before), and this is the cause of the common ‘crash’ after heavy moments of anxiety.

Why does anxiety make me more forgetful?

There are a few different factors when it comes to how our anxiety affects memory.

Close up of elephant face and eye — Even elephants forget. Credit to Joel Mbugua

Consistently high levels of cortisol in the body have been linked to the loss of synapses (think of these like little highways for information) in the prefrontal cortex, which is where your brain stashes short-term memory.

That’s partly because anxiety and stress are exhausting for your body and greatly increase the demand put on many systems. It’s especially taxing for individuals with anxiety disorders (like GAD, among others) who excess stress on a near-daily basis, reflected in research on the comorbidity of these disorders with impaired memory.

Recently, researchers have found that short-term stress fires up molecules that limit some of the brain’s memory and learning processes. Studies like this are key to better understanding of why we have increased difficulty learning and recalling information when under stress.

Reduce stress & improve memory

So the results are in when it comes to the link between anxiety disorders and memory loss, particularly with anxiety disorder as a predictor of future cognitive decline. They go hand-in-hand.

That doesn’t have to read as grim to those of us suffering, though, because there are many avenues to treatment that can even begin at home.

A few things that are completely under your control can contribute to anxiety-associated memory loss. Sleep quality is a common area of suffering when we experience excess stress, and happens to be one that we can self-treat (to an extent! You’re likely not a medical professional and neither am I).

Sleep better, think better

Approximately 70 million people in the United States suffer from sleep disorders, insomnia being the most common among them. Insomnia sufferers experience great difficulty falling and/or staying asleep, and the disorder has a high comorbidity with anxiety. This makes it very likely that improving your sleep will jog your memory.

That’s not to say your symptoms are necessarily reversible, but there’s certainly hope for staying sharper in the future. A big factor in your sleep quality is timing – sleeping at night, when it’s dark out. Sounds pretty obvious, but there’s good research that backs why you should do your best to sleep when it’s dark, not when it’s noon.

Spoiler alert: More hormone talk!

Melatonin is a hormone released by your brain’s pineal gland in the evenings under normal circumstances. Elevated levels of melatonin in your blood will help you wind down and get to sleep, but those levels are only present naturally in darkness.

Why? Because bright light harshly suppresses melatonin production in the human brain.

I personally didn’t realize that until I brought up to my doctor that I’d been using a special feature on my computer and phone to reduce blue screen light in the evenings. It was easier on my eyes, for sure, but didn’t seem to help me fall asleep any faster. She vaguely explained that the brightness mattered and, being a little bit of a jerk, I double-checked to confirm her advice with a quick Google search.

Sure enough, making sure you’re exposed to plenty of light during the day will help keep your circadian rhythm strong.