Is Mindfulness Meditation Worth All The Hype It Is Getting These Days?

Everywhere you turn in the psychotherapy and self-help world these days, people are talking about mindfulness meditation.  Is it worth all the hype?

My short answer: yes.

For a couple of decades, scientific studies have been demonstrating the power of mindfulness and meditation to:

• lower blood pressure and respiratory rate
• decrease muscle tension
• help with stress management
• decrease anxiety and depression
• increase self-actualization
• help with pain management

And now, amazingly, neuroscience research is documenting how the actual physical structure of the brain changes with mindfulness meditation, strengthening those parts of the brain that support executive functioning, integrative thinking, and compassion.

This research is documenting what many people have experienced for centuries:  mindfulness meditation helps you feel more peaceful, more centered, and more connected to spirit.

I once heard someone say that when you first sit down for meditation, your brain is like a bull raging in a very small pen.  But over time, the raging bull will have a huge meadow to roam in, and occasionally he will be surprisingly content.

However, beginning a meditation practice can be a challenge.  Because of that raging bull, initial attempts at meditation can be almost painful, and often people end up feeling, "I'm not doing this right" or "I just can't meditate."

This is why I recommend a course to learn meditation.  While it seems simple, meditation is actually very hard to learn.  Sitting with other people, and realizing that most people are having the same difficulty "taming" the mind, can be enormously reassuring.  It is also easier to make the effort to practice regularly when you feel accountable to a class.

Meditation classes can be found at a variety of places, including:

• Town Continuing Education Programs
• Offerings at Local Churches, Temples or Community Centers
• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction courses, which are time limited, non-denominational courses offered by instructors across the country.
• National Organizations, which have locations across the country, such as the Insight Meditation Society or Shambhala Meditation Centers

If you've been thinking of learning, why not do a little googling right now, and sign up for a class?



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Which Runs Your Life? Your Priorities Or Your To-Do Lists?

Quite a number of years ago, I realized my to-do list was running my life.  I was well versed in time management, and knew how to prioritize the to-do list to get the most done.  However, the to-do list didn't allow for my real priorities in life.

I began to put my mission statement and true priorities at the top of every to-do list.

My mission (to live a sane and joyful life, while helping others do the same) is a wonderful guide to help me decide what to focus on, and what to let go of.  I break my true priorities down into five areas: my children, my relationships, my work, my health and my spirituality.

Here's an example in the area of parenting:

Let's say your true priority with your children is to help them grow into healthy and happy adults.  The day-to-day aspects of this include a huge number of tasks.  Beyond simply making sure they are clothed, fed and loved, today's world demands that you help them balance a schedule that includes music lessons, sports, schoolwork, etc.  There is tons of paperwork, hard-to-keep-track-of deadlines, and (where I live) lots of driving!

So, focused on the enormous list of to-do's, you become stressed and irritable.  Your focus shifts to accomplishing the task, not on the quality of the relationship.  In rushing to get one child to an activity on time, you snap at their sibling for holding up the process.  The mood darkens for everyone.

When we rush, the amygdala gets activated (the part of our brain that gives us our fight-flight-freeze response). All of a sudden everything feels urgent.  Our amygdala does not care about relating, it cares about survival.

Learning to breathe deeply at these moments helps to insert a "pause" in what is happening.  This pause enables you to think through "how important is it?"  Is it more important that my child be on time for their music lesson or that we have a good relationship?  Breathe.

If running late is going to make me late for my next appointment, will activating my amygdala help?  Is it better to arrive late and totally stressed out, or arrive late and, apologetic, but accepting, functioning and not in disaster mode?  Breathe.

Try inserting a pause into your day-to-day routine when you feel stressed, breathe, and put whatever is happening into the perspective of your true priorities.   Let me know what happens!

The Key to Reducing Anxiety

In my last blog post, I asked you to really pay attention to your anxiety, to investigate it with some of these questions:

• Where does your anxiety usually start? With thoughts or body feelings?
• How does it physically feel?
• What are your go-to topics of worry, or the main situations that cause you worry?
• Are your thoughts racing or do you get lost in a disaster fantasy?
• Are you aware of how the anxious thoughts and physical feelings interact to escalate the anxiety?

For some, the main symptom is racing thoughts, or thoughts that just won't stop worrying about something. As soon as one worry is out of the way, another replaces it. This is cognitive anxiety .

For others, panic seems to hit out of the blue. Their heart races, pulse increases, palms sweat, stomach is upset, etc. This is anxiety that is experienced somatically, in the body.

For many, there is awareness of both and how they intersect. Increasing the awareness of how these two elements contribute to each other will help you figure out how to interrupt the cycle.

The key to reducing anxiety is to interrupt the cycle of physical and mental symptoms and practice over and over.

This sentence has two key parts: interrupting the cycle, and practicing over and over.

The main point to keep in mind about practicing is that the techniques used to interrupt the cycle will need to be practiced with effort. You will be rewiring your brain - creating new grooves for information flow. This takes time and practice, but the result is worth it!

OK, so how to interrupt the cycle? I regularly work with my clients to find ways that work specifically for them and their type of anxiety. Over time, I will suggest tools and techniques for you to try. Some may work, some may not. If they work even a tiny bit, keep practicing them. These techniques often initially feel like a drop in a huge bucket of anxiety. But over time, drops do fill buckets.

Today's suggestion (cognitive & somatic): Take a large, deep breath. Push your stomach out as you breath in to the count of five. Pull your stomach in as you breath out to a count of five. Do this five times. Use the breath to create distance from your anxiety. Recognize that your body is responding as if you are not safe, and yet you are safe. Slowing your breathing is telling your body you actually are safe in this moment. Reinforce this by looking around yourself and seeing that you are actually safe at this moment.

And if you are reading this on your computer while sitting in the middle of the highway, call me, we have other things to talk about :)

#1 Step Toward Reducing Anxiety and Increasing Joy

The first step to reducing anxiety and increasing joy is to understand anxiety. Not get rid of it, or ignore it, or change it. But to understand it.

Once understood, anxiety can more easily be managed and reduced. And it is nearly impossible to increase joy in your life if anxiety is in the way. So understanding anxiety is also a first step in increasing joy.

So, what needs to be understood about anxiety?

1) Anxiety is anticipatory.

It is about something that might happen, not that is happening now.

Yet your body responds as if it were already happening.

If you imagine an upsetting or scary event, your body releases the same internal chemicals that would be released if the event were indeed happening: adrenaline, cortisol, etc.

Your flight, fight, freeze mechanism is activated. Your pulse rate increases, your blood pressure goes up, your palms might get cold or sweaty, you might feel nauseous or have butterflies in the stomach, your muscles tighten. Your body is preparing to fight or flee.

Yet there is nothing in the present moment which you need to fight or flee, so your physical reaction has no release.

Which leads to the second thing we need to understand about anxiety:

2) Anxiety has physical and mental components that exacerbate each other.

The anxious body feelings described above, which result from thinking anxious thoughts, actually increase the anxious thoughts, which start spinning even faster. The increased thoughts in turn increase the physiological reaction, and the cycle continues and gets worse and worse.

For some people, anxious feelings start the cycle. The body first feels anxious and on edge and the mind tries to figure out why, so it comes up with things to worry about. Then those worrisome thoughts increase the physiological anxiety, and the same cycle ensues.

So, I can hear you thinking, "How does understanding this help me to reduce anxiety?"

Once you understand this cycle and become aware of how the cycle works for you, you can figure out the easiest area for you to target to stop the escalation.

I'll tackle the issue of exactly how to do that in my next blog post. In the meantime, I encourage you to approach your anxiety with more curiosity. How is this cycle working in your mind and body? Where does the anxiety start? How does it physically feel? What are your go-to topics of worry, or the main situations that cause you worry?

All of these items hold the key to taming your anxiety. It may seem curious that I am initially asking you to think more about your anxiety, but, truly, the investigation can lead to more peace in your life.

What is a Sane and Joyful Life?

A sane and joyful life is a life fully lived, connected to our true selves.

A sane and joyful life does not mean a life free from sorrow or mistakes, as we are human, and sorrow and errors are part of our path.

I focus on the word “joy” rather than happiness or success, as “joy” represents for me the ability to feel our emotions deeply and to be in touch with our true selves. Joy reflects the tender quality of being human, incorporating the sorrow and pain we inevitably encounter along with the happiness and bliss we occasionally feel.

Sanity, for me, means living a life which is congruent with one’s own values and true desires. If we are living our lives according to other people's values, whose life are we living? Often, when we feel "insane" it is because our behavior is not reflecting our core values.

Both sanity and joy require the ability to stay in the present. To stay in the present, we must be able to limit our compulsive thinking and worrying about the past and future, and to limit the compulsive behaviors that enable us to run from our feelings.

We live in a society that veers to the insane in terms of the stress we create for ourselves, the pace at which we live, and the relationships we neglect. So many of us are looking for another way.

Approximately fifteen years ago, I developed a personal mission statement:

To live a sane and joyful life, while helping others do the same.

This mission statement is an aspiration, and, as an aspiration, rings true for me today. This blog is part of how I would like to manifest this mission. In this blog, I hope to share simple tools with you for increasing sanity and joy in life.

I look forward to hearing from you about how I am doing, about which suggestions work for you, and about other ways you have for achieving sanity and joy in your own life!