The Mindful Space of Find-and-Rewind

In everyday life, if and when not suffering from a state of complete unawareness, most mental health is about managing poor emotions, thoughts, stress, and pain. A thread of calm that keeps things in perspective for all the above is mindfulness. Mindfulness is a state of moment-to-moment awareness without judgement (Brown & Ryan,2003; Langer, 1989). When I was under ten years of age, mindfulness was first introduced to me in the form of yoga-based meditation. Even then, I could intently recognize how mindfulness could change the experience of time. Mindfulness generates constructive space between recognizing a challenge to responding to a challenge.

When many people are first presented the term 'mindfulness meditation', they understand the experience as good but not as something suitable for them. In the 1960s and 70s, some of this was also apparent in the West. It took time for mindfulness practices to become popular. A common reason was initially recognizing mindfulness states with stationary postures in which you had to anticipate what you still didn't understand well. In the 1980s, a time when aerobics was rampant in the United States and I used to be a child, most people saw the traditional value of this practice in the East but couldn't see its instant advantages in their daily chaotic lives. Eventually, people who had invested some time in mindfulness meditation began to spread the word about this personally available hidden strength. Today, mindfulness as transcendental meditation is practiced even by Clint Eastwood.

The core of dealing and healing resides in knowing how to introduce constructive conceptualizations. Most of the challenges we face today are psychosocial in nature and don't require countering imminent threat to life. However, as human beings, we evolved firstly and strongly to tackle immediate threats to life, which is why even when facing sharp psychological or social demands, we initially experience a fight-or-flight response. It's a revelation to people when they first learn how our initial usual responses can be revised.

In other words, we are mainly designed to protect our life. However, sometimes we have to take a second look when life is not actually in danger and is only bringing us something new.

In the absence of reframing our challenge, the very physiological responses that are supposed to be life protecting in the short run (i.e. fight or flight) become harmful to health over time. Mind influences physiology by depleting our immune functioning or keeping the heart rate stressed, for example, which can then, indirectly, make us sick (for more see research on psychoneuroimmunology). Mindfulness makes sense in sorting this psychological turmoil by transforming fight-or-flight to find-and-rewind — even, and most importantly, in daily situations. Therefore, mindfulness is not only observed in sedentary forms of meditation. Mindfulness matters strongly in how you see and feel the world.

Mindfulness sets the psychological stage to better notice what we need to manage and regulate. As we engage in mindfulness more, we become adept at

-recognizing the contexts and conditions in which we are more or less in control,

-understanding where our initial reaction is coming from (e.g., due to past experiences or limited knowledge),

-foreseeing how our response will impact another person and us,

-considering other responses that will be constructive even in the face of uncertainty or alright even if visited later, and

-buying time and perspective about what matters in the here-and-now and what will matter in the end.

In managing arduous physical symptoms on a daily basis, such as chronic pain, mindfulness can enable an understanding of the patterns without the physiology of anticipating death.

Mindfulness shifts our sense of time, or time spent well, tremendously. In the absence of a mindful state, we are likely to be in self-preservation mode. One way to avoid this default setting is to introduce a blend of positive other-focused emotions or think of similar difficult scenarios from the past in which you didn't actually die, figuratively speaking.

Ruminating about the past constantly or worrying a lot about the future are examples of a threat-based state of mind. This can be tackled if the timeframe is still kept intact, past or future, with one change — engagement in positive recollection (e.g., gratitude) or positive imagination toward the future (imagining best possible self). With this slight positive tilt in your mind's direction, introducing a state of mindfulness becomes easier, even if running.

References

Brown, K. W., & Ryan, R. M. (2003). The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(4), 822–848.

Hilton, L., Hempel, S., Ewing, B. A., Apaydin, E., Xenakis, L., Newberry, S., Colaiaco, B., Maher, A. R., Shanman, R. M., Sorbero, M. E., & Maglione, M. A. (2017). Mindfulness Meditation for Chronic Pain: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Annals of Behavioral Medicine: A publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, 51(2), 199–213.

Langer, E. J. (1989). Mindfulness. Addison-Wesley/Addison Wesley Longman.