You need not sit quietly or silence all thoughts to practice mindfulness. You don’t have to sit at all, in fact, and your thoughts are free to roam.
Mindfulness isn’t about cultivating laser-sharp focus or controlling an unruly mind. Mindfulness is simply awareness. It’s noticing.
Pause for a second and explore how your body is feeling right now, as you read this. Are you holding tension in your shoulders, jaw, back? Is your stomach rumbling? Is there pain or soreness anywhere? Is your mind drifting off to somewhere else? Drawing up a grocery list, or worrying about a looming deadline? Remembering a conversation you had this morning?
That’s mindfulness, in a nutshell. Pausing to pay attention to what’s actually happening.
Fostering these moments of awareness can help in many areas of life. It can reduce self-critical talk, impulsivity, and ruminations, and it can strengthen our ability to make healthy choices about eating, sleeping, and exercise.
Let the Snow Globe Settle
When we’re not focused on the present moment, we’re often thinking about the past, reliving a previous encounter, or thinking of the future and worrying about outcomes that are far from guaranteed. Both past and future thinking can cause stress, impact our emotional state, increase our reactivity to people and situations, and create physical tension. Living lost in our thoughts and reactivity can feel like we’re trapped in a self-shaking snow globe.
Mindfulness is the process by which we allow the snow globe to settle. It entails pausing, finding stillness, and watching the frantic swirls of thoughts, feelings, and sensations without judging or trying to control them. In this quiet moment, your inner snowstorm has a chance to settle. Once the storm has subsided, you’re able to see the scene much more clearly.
Make Space for Mindful Moments
There is no right or wrong way to practice mindfulness; it is simply noticing what’s going on inside and outside ourselves while we’re going about our lives. Give compassionate, nonjudgmental awareness to what’s happening, whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant.
It’s OK if your mind and your body stay busy or distracted. It’s OK if you’re bored or restless, frustrated, angry, or sad. Simply recognize these thoughts and feelings by saying, “I’m feeling really distracted now” or “This is a moment of sadness for me.”
As we notice what’s unfolding, we’re building the ability to be aware of it with a sense of patience, rather than a need to act — or, quite commonly, mindlessly react. The long-term goal is not to banish all stress or negative feelings, which is of course impossible, but to learn how to relate to our stresses more intentionally.
Start Here
As with almost everything, mindfulness becomes easier with practice. Start by setting a timer for five minutes — or whatever seems right to you. Observe your body, your thoughts, your emotions, and your urges during this time. You might feel angry or frustrated. You might think, “This is quacky. I hate this.” You might observe, “I’m feeling hungry, and normally I would walk to the kitchen and grab something, but right now I’m just sitting here until my practice ends.”
Let go of any idea that you’re trying to still your mind or force yourself to be calm. Some other time during the day, you might need to say or do something to fix a situation. Right now, give yourself permission to observe whatever you are experiencing with any need to fix it, change it, or wrestle with it. Through this, patience develops, allowing you to stay in touch with your own wisdom and best intentions more often.
Any, and all, of this is OK. It’s exactly what mindfulness comprises.
Why Mindfulness Is Worth the Effort
As you integrate mindfulness into your daily life, you’ll find that you more completely experience whatever you’re doing, whether it’s eating a sandwich, petting a dog, or having a difficult conversation. Little moments will feel more full.
There are downstream benefits too. When we pay attention to our bodies and our feelings in the moment, it gives us a better understanding of our emotions and helps us manage them. When we’re less emotion-driven, we make more skillful choices, whether that’s reacting with patience to a partner or taking a walk when stressed, instead of eating or using substances to self-soothe.
A sense of self-compassion is integral to practicing mindfulness. We all tend to be harsher on ourselves than we’d treat a close friend. We all have ingrained, difficult habits we might wish were different. Just because we recognize these habits doesn’t mean they change so easily. How would you counsel a best friend in a moment of difficulty? It’s hard, but you’re doing the best you can. Aim to bring to your practice, as well as any changes you’re aiming for in daily life, this same sense of kindness and care.
When your thoughts and attention are focused on the present, they’re not projecting back into the past with regret, longing, or disappointment. They’re also not racing into the future with anxiety, dread, and self-doubt. There’s less opportunity to engage in critical self-talk, which upends our mental well-being and physical health. Our minds will continue to wander, always, but the more often we train ourselves to see what’s happening with clarity and compassion, the more easily we manage whatever we find.
