Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World
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Mindful acceptance does not mean resignation to your fate. It’s an acknowledgement that an experience is here, in this moment—but, instead of letting it seize control of your life, mindfulness allows you, simply and compassionately, to observe it rather than judge it, attack it, argue with it or try to disprove its validity. This radical acceptance allows you to stop a negative spiral from beginning; or if it already has begun, to reduce its momentum. It grants you the freedom to choose—to step outside your looming problems—and, in the process, it progressively liberates you from unhappiness, fear, anxiety and exhaustion. This gives you far greater control over your life. But most important of all, it allows you to deal with problems in the most effective way possible and at the most appropriate moment.
4. Seeing thoughts as solid and real versus treating them as mental events
When in Doing mode, the mind uses its own creations, its thoughts and images, as its raw material. Ideas are its currency and they acquire a value of their own. You can begin to mistake them for reality. In most circumstances, this makes sense. If you have set out to visit a friend, you need to hold your destination in mind. The planning, doing, thinking mind will get you there. It makes no sense to doubt the truth of your thinking: Am I really going to see my friend? In such situations, it’s useful to take your thoughts to be true.
But this becomes a problem when you feel stressed. You might say to yourself: I’m going to go mad if this goes on; I should be able to cope better than this. You can take these thoughts to be true as well. Your mood plummets as your mind reacts in a way that is often very harsh: I am weak; I’m no good. So you strive harder and harder, ignoring the messages of your punished body and the advice of your friends. Your thoughts have ceased to be your servant and have become your master, and a very harsh and unforgiving master at that.
Mindfulness teaches us that thoughts are just thoughts; they are events in the mind. They are often valuable but they are not “you” or “reality.” They are your internal running commentary on yourself and the world. This simple recognition frees you from the dislocated reality that we have all conjured up for ourselves through endless worrying, brooding and ruminating. You can see a clear path through life once again.
5. Avoidance versus approaching
Doing mode solves problems not only by bearing in mind your goals and destinations, but also by holding on to “anti-goals” and the places you don’t want to go to. This makes sense when, for example, driving from A to B because it’s useful to know which parts of town or the highway network to avoid. But it becomes a problem if you use the same strategy for those states of mind you’re desperately trying to avoid. For example, if you try to solve the problem of feeling tired and stressed, you will also keep in mind the “places you don’t want to visit” such as exhaustion, burnout and breakdown. So now, in addition to feeling tired and stressed, you begin conjuring up new fears for yourself, and this only enhances your anxieties and stresses, leading to even more exhaustion. Despite its best efforts, Doing mode, used in the wrong context, leads you step by step towards burnout and exhaustion.
Being mode, on the other hand, encourages you to “approach” the very things that you feel like avoiding; it invites you to take a friendly interest in your most difficult states of mind. Mindfulness does not say “don’t worry” or “don’t be sad.” Instead it acknowledges your fear and your sadness, your fatigue and exhaustion, and encourages you to “turn toward” these feelings and whatever emotions are threatening to engulf you. This compassionate approach gradually dissipates the power of your negative feelings.
6. Mental time travel versus remaining in the present moment
Both your memory and your ability to plan for the future are critical to the smooth running of your daily life, but they are also biased by your prevailing moods. When you are under stress, you tend to remember only the bad things that have happened to you and find it difficult to recall the good. A similar thing happens when you think about the future: stress makes you think that disaster is just around the corner, and when you feel unhappy or a creeping sense of hopelessness, you find it almost impossible to look to the future with optimism. By the time these feelings have bubbled through to your conscious mind, you’re no longer aware that they are merely memories of the past or plans for the future, but have instead become lost in mental time travel.
We re-live past events and re-feel their pain, and we pre-live future disasters and so pre-feel their impact.
Meditation trains the mind so that you consciously “see” your own thoughts as they occur, so that you can live your life as it unfolds in the present moment. This does not mean that you are imprisoned in the present. You can still remember the past and plan for the future, but Being mode allows you to see them for what they are. You see memory as memory and planning as planning. Consciously knowing that you are remembering, and knowing that you are planning, helps free you from being a slave to mental time travel. You are able to avoid the extra pain that comes through re-living the past and pre-living the future.
7. Depleting versus nourishing activities
When you’re locked into Doing mode, it’s not just the autopilot that drives you—you also tend to get caught up in important career and life goals, and such demanding projects as homemaking, childcare and looking after elderly relatives. These goals are often worthwhile in themselves, but because they can be so demanding it’s tempting to focus on them to the exclusion of everything else, including your own health and well-being. At first, you might tell yourself that such busyness is temporary and that you are, therefore, quite willing to forego the hobbies and pastimes that nourish your soul. But giving these things up can gradually deplete your inner resources and, eventually, leave you feeling drained, listless and exhausted.
Being mode restores the balance by helping you sense more clearly the things that nourish you and those that deplete your inner resources. It helps you sense the need for time to nourish your soul and gives you the space and courage to do so. It also helps you deal more skillfully with those unavoidable aspects of life that can drain away your energy and innate happiness.
Consciously shifting gear
Mindfulness meditation progressively teaches you to sense the seven dimensions (as these points are known) outlined above and, in so doing, it helps you to recognize which mode your mind is operating in. It acts like a gentle alarm bell that tells you, for example, when you are overthinking and reminds you that there is an alternative: that you still have choices, no matter how unhappy, stressed or frantic you might feel. For example, if you sense that you are tying yourself in knots with overthinking and judgmentalism, mindfulness helps you to become more accepting and allows you to approach your difficulty with a sense of warmth and curiosity.
Now we can let you into a secret: if you shift along any one of these dimensions, the others shift as well. For example, during the mindfulness program you can practice letting go of avoidance and find yourself being less judgmental as well; you can work on “staying present” and you’ll also find yourself taking your thoughts less literally; if you cultivate greater generosity toward yourself, you’ll find that you also have more empathy for others. And, as you do all of these things, a natural enthusiasm, energy and equanimity bubble up like a long-forgotten spring of clear water.
Although the meditations in this book only take up twenty to thirty minutes of “clock time” each day, the results can have an impact across the whole spectrum of your life. You will soon come to realize that while a certain degree of comparing and judging is necessary for daily life, our civilization has raised them up to be gods. But many choices are false choices—you simply do not need to make them. They are driven by your thought stream. Nothing more. You don’t need to compare yourself endlessly to others. There is no need to compare your life (or standard of living) with either a fictitious life in the future or some rose-tinted view of the past. You do not need to lie awake at night trying to judge the impact that a passi
ng comment you made in a meeting will have on your career prospects. Nor do you need to concern yourself with a throwaway comment made by a friend. If you simply accept life as it is, you will be a lot more fulfilled and increasingly worry free. And if any action should need to be taken, then the wisest decision you can make will most likely pop into your mind when you are not brooding about it at all.
We must stress again that mindful acceptance is not resignation. It is not the acceptance of the unacceptable. Nor is mindful acceptance an excuse to be lazy or to do nothing with your life, your time and your innate talents and gifts. (Meaningful work, whether paid or unpaid, is a surefire way of boosting happiness.) Mindfulness is a “coming to your senses” that moves closer and closer to the fore, quite spontaneously, when you regularly set aside the time to practice. It allows you to experience the world—calmly and nonjudgmentally—directly through your senses. It gives you a tremendous sense of perspective. You can sense what is important and what is not.
In the long run, mindfulness encourages you to treat yourself and others with compassion. This sense of compassion liberates you from pain and worry, and in their place arises a true sense of happiness that spills over into daily life. It’s not the kind of happiness that gradually dissipates as you become immune to its joys; rather, it’s a flavor that soaks into the very fibers of your being.
Happiness taking root
One of the most astonishing features of mindfulness meditation is that you can see its profoundly positive effects actually changing the brain. Recent scientific advances allow us to see the parts of the brain associated with such positive emotions as happiness, empathy and compassion becoming stronger and more active as people meditate. The new science of brain imaging means that we can watch as critical networks in the brain become activated, almost as if they were glowing and humming with renewed life, and, as they do so, unhappiness, anxiety and stress begin to dissolve, leaving a profound sense of reinvigoration. And you don’t need to spend years meditating to see the benefits. Every minute counts. Research has shown that committing yourself to daily practice over a period of eight weeks is sufficient for you to see the benefits for yourself.4
This realization is relatively recent. For many years it was assumed that we all have an emotional thermostat that determines how happy we are in life. Some people were presumed to have a happy disposition, while others had a miserable one. Although major life events, such as the death of a loved one or winning the lottery, can significantly alter mood, sometimes for many weeks or months on end, it was always assumed that there was a set-point to which we always return. This emotional set-point was presumed to be encoded in our genes or became set in stone during childhood. To put it bluntly, some people were born happy and others were not.
Several years ago, however, this assumption was shattered by Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin and Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. They discovered that mindfulness training allowed people to escape the gravitational pull of their emotional set-point. Their work held out the extraordinary possibility that we can permanently alter our underlying level of happiness for the better.
This discovery has its roots in Dr. Davidson’s work on indexing (or measuring) a person’s happiness by looking at the electrical activity in different parts of their brain, using sensors on the scalp that measure activity or an fMRI brain scanner.5 He found that when people are emotionally upset—whether angry, anxious or depressed—a part of the brain known as the right prefrontal cortex lights up more than the equivalent part of the brain on the left. When people are in a positive mood—happy, enthusiastic and bubbling with energy—the left prefrontal cortex lights up more than the right. This finding led Dr. Davidson to devise a “mood index” based on the ratio between the electrical activity in the left and right prefrontal cortices. This ratio can predict your daily moods with great accuracy. It’s akin to taking a peek at your emotional thermostat—if the ratio shifts to the left, you are likely to be happy, contented and energized. This is the “approach” system. If it shifts to the right, you are more likely to be gloomy, despondent and lacking in energy and enthusiasm. This is the “avoidance” system.
Davidson and Kabat-Zinn decided to extend this work by examining the effect of mindfulness on the emotional thermostats of a group of biotech workers.6 The workers were taught mindfulness meditation over a period of eight weeks. Something profound then happened. Not only did they become happier, less anxious, more energized and increasingly engaged with their work, but also Davidson’s brain activation index had shifted to the left. Incredibly, this “approach” system continued to operate even when the participants were exposed to slow, depressing music and memories from their past that made them feel sad. Instead of this sadness being fought off or suppressed as an enemy, it was seen as something that could be approached, explored, befriended. It was clear not only that mindfulness boosted overall happiness (and reduced stress levels), but that this was reflected in the way their brains actually worked. This suggests that mindfulness has extremely deep-seated positive effects on the brain.
Another unexpected benefit of the mindfulness course was that the biotech workers’ immune systems became significantly stronger. The researchers gave a flu shot to the participants, and later measured the concentration of disease-fighting antibodies that they had produced. Those who showed the greatest shift toward their brains’ “approach” system also showed the greatest boost to their immune systems.
But even more interesting work was to follow. Dr. Sarah Lazar at the Massachusetts General Hospital found that as people continue to meditate over several years, these positive changes alter the physical structure of the brain itself.7 The emotional thermostat is fundamentally reset—for the better. Given time, this means that you’re more likely to feel happy, rather than sad, increasingly likely to live with ease, rather than be angry or aggressive, and be energized, rather than tired and listless. This change in the brain’s circuitry is most pronounced in a part of the brain’s surface known as the insula, which controls many of the features that we regard as central to our humanity (see the opposite page).8
The insula and empathy
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Scientific research using brain imaging (fMRI) has shown that the insula becomes energized through meditation.9 this is hugely significant because this part of the brain is integral to our sense of human connectedness as it helps to mediate empathy in a very real and visceral way. Empathy allows you to see into another’s soul, as it were, helping you to understand their predicament “from the inside.” With it comes true compassion, true loving-kindness. If you looked inside your brain using a scanner you would see this area buzz with life when you are feeling empathy for another person.10 Meditation not only strengthens this area, but also helps it to grow and expand.
But why is this important? Apart from being good for society and all of humanity, empathy is good for you. Empathy and feeling genuine compassion and loving-kindness toward yourself and others have hugely beneficial effects on health and well-being. The longer a person has meditated, the more highly developed is the insula. But even eight weeks of mindfulness training is sufficient to show changes in the way in which this critical area of the brain functions.11
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Numerous clinical trials have now shown that these hugely positive effects on the brain translate into benefits for our sense of happiness, well-being and physical health too. A few examples are shown in the box on page 50.
Other proven benefits of meditation
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Research centers around the world are continuing to discover the benefits of mindfulness meditation on mental and physical health. Here are just a few:
Mindfulness, loving-kindness and positive mood
Professor Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have proved that meditation focusing on loving-kindness for the self and for others boosted positive emotions that th
en led to a sense of having a greater zest for life. After just nine weeks of training, meditators developed an increased sense of purpose and had fewer feelings of isolation and alienation, along with decreased symptoms of illnesses as diverse as headaches, chest pain, congestion and weakness.12
Different aspects of mindfulness affect different moods
Each of the meditations in this book produces different—but intimately connected—benefits. For example, research at the University Medical Center at Groningen, the Netherlands, shows that increases in positive mood and well-being are directly related to becoming more aware of routine daily activities, observing and attending to the ordinary experiences of life and acting less automatically. By contrast, decreases in negative mood are more closely related to accepting thoughts and emotions without judgment and learning to be open and curious about painful feelings.13
Mindfulness and autonomy
Kirk Brown and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester, New York, have discovered that more mindful people engage in more autonomous activities. That is, they do not do things because others want them to or pressure them into doing them. Nor do they engage in tasks just to help them look good to others, or even to help them feel better about themselves. Rather, those who are more mindful spend more time doing things that they truly value, or that they simply find fun or interesting to do.14