Today, many studies have shown that there are multiple reasons why practicing mindfulness can help you create your best life. There are physical health and emotional well-being boosts that can be had when you practice mindfulness.
When you become aware in the present moment, it can soothe your emotions and help strengthen your immune system. The use of mindfulness is tied in with many forms of meditation that are designed to bring self-awareness and rid the body of negative thought patterns.
Mindfulness helps center the user and cause him to choose to live fully active in today rather than focus on the past or get caught up in what might happen in their future.
What Can Mindfulness be Helpful For?
The mental and physical state that mindfulness brings about can be helpful in treating many diseases since stress is a key factor in everything from heart disease to bipolar disorder.
Mindfulness also helps many people who are not 'ill' but feel that they could be living a happier and more meaningful life. However, there are two particular conditions that mindfulness can have a particular impact upon:
1.Depression
When we are depressed, our negative thoughts and negative moods become intertwined. We feel awful, we think we are a terrible person or that everything is going to be awful, and that makes our mood even worse. A downwards spiral is very easy to get into, especially if you have been depressed before, and we gain no pleasure from the things that usually cheer us up, and nor can we see anything in perspective.
Mindfulness helps to halt the escalation of the negative thoughts associated with depression and teaches us to focus on the present moment, rather than reliving the past or being concerned about the future.
Mindfulness can help us experience the world directly and without judgement. We may notice that we are feeling awful but we accept it, rather than trying to fight it, or let it worry us, and we do not panic. Hopefully, a depressed state can be avoided in this way or at the very least accepted: people with depression very often feel guilty or anxious about being depressed and that makes it worse.
2.Chronic Pain
People who are in chronic pain have got stuck there because their brain became attuned to pain during an original painful condition. So, even though they are healed from a physical perspective, their brains are so well wired to feel pain that they take a lot of convincing that the body is not, in fact, under any threat.
Sufferers are usually trapped in a cycle where they have a good day, do too much, and then have a bad day or several of them, a process known as activity cycling. The 're-wiring' of the brain needed is usually done by the sufferer staying well within their limits and then gradually increasing their level of activity. It is also very important to exercise the body gently so that the brain stops 'being afraid' of certain areas.
Sufferers usually attempt to hold a painful area rigidly so that it never moves, and the clenched muscles that result can just cause more pain. Mindfulness means that the sufferer is firstly aware of their pain, and then accepts it, rather than worrying that they are hurting and not going to be able to do something later on. It also means that sufferers are aware when they need to rest and do not push themselves too hard, and thus avoid activity cycling. This process is not easy and chronic pain programs generally do not result in a complete absence of pain. However, sufferers generally find that they manage their pain much better and enjoy life far more as a result.
Mindfulness Can Help You Make Better Choices
You might be surprised to learn that some of the choices that you make in life, you’re making without being fully aware in the present. When this happens, the choices that you make aren’t really the ones that can give you the best outcome. This can impact your entire life. But when you practice mindfulness, you can make better choices and change your life to let it become the one that you’ve dreamed of living.
One of the areas where mindfulness can help you make better choices is in the area of eating. Many people eat countless times a day without ever giving a second thought to what it is that they’re doing. This is because it’s easy to eat while you’re busy with things unrelated to eating. You don’t have to focus on putting fork to mouth in order to accomplish this task. You learned how to do it at a young age, so you can multi task easily.
It’s easy to eat while you’re reading, while you’re talking on the phone or while you’re watching a movie. What happens then is that you miss being in the present while you’re eating. It means that you miss out on the taste of the food, the pleasure that you could derive from it – and this can also lead you to make poorer food choices in terms of the types and quantities of food that you’re consuming.
Plus, when you eat without practicing mindfulness, it can be easier for you to not connect the emotions to what you’re eating. That means if you’re an emotional eater, lacking mindfulness can cause you to eat more and not be aware of what it is that you’re eating that could be sabotaging the health or the body that you want.
But if you practice mindfulness, this practice can help you learn not to link your emotions to food. Another area where mindfulness can help you is in your relationships.
When your relationships are good, it can help make you feel better physically, lessen stress and contribute to your happiness. Mindfulness can help you have harmony in your relationships. This is because you won’t feel as stressed, so whenever there’s an issue, you won’t immediately react to what you perceive is going on. By being mindful, you’ll be focused on being present during the interaction with the people in your life.
What this will do is help you better understand what someone else is saying and feeling. It helps eliminate the defensiveness that can be at the root of many relationship problems.
Mindfulness can help you respond to relationship interaction in an appropriate way. You’ll be able to be in the moment with the other person, not throwing out the past or burdening the two of you with what might happen in the coming days, weeks, months or years. You’ll be focused on that one moment, giving them all your attention, rather than having your mind be a thousand miles away. Mindfulness helps you tune in to the people in your life.
Being mindful helps you be more empathetic, which makes you more in tune with how the people in your life are acting by seeing the emotion behind the action and behind the words they speak. It helps you not be as defensive and not react with ingrained thought patterns that can be so damaging to relationships. You’ll be able to leave your personal baggage at the door and interact with the other person based on truth, not personal perceptions.
When you practice mindfulness techniques, it can also help you make better choices that impact your productivity. By using mindfulness, you can stay aware of the present rather than focusing on what’s coming later. Being aware of where you are right now works to increase your focus. When you’re unfocused, it’s too easy to let your mind start to think about what else is coming your way that you have to get done.
Mindfulness helps you accomplish tasks by keeping you on track. It can be easy to start working on something, only to start thinking that maybe you forgot to respond to a phone call, or you forgot to write an appointment down on the calendar.
So off you go to deal with these other tasks and before you know it, you’ve lost productivity. When your mind jumps from one thought to another, you can end up not being as effective and causing a rise in your stress level because you haven’t been able to get things done.
Staying in the here and now is what mindfulness can help you with. When you can focus, you’ll make better productivity choices and you can create the best life for yourself.
Being Mindful is a Natural Therapy for Improved Mental Health
For the brain, mindfulness can be an action that can help keep the mind focused