What is Mindfulness and why is it important

 

What exactly is Mindfulness and why is it so important?

The whole goal of Mindfulness is to put it into practice every day 24/7.  What Mindfulness does is help us decrease suffering and increase happiness. Obviously one is not going to always be mindful, which is why it needs to be practiced constantly. 

The goal of Mindfulness is to experience your reality as it is, not how you want it to be. We may experience a reality that is painful which makes it difficult to accept. You don't HAVE to accept it, just accept the truth without fighting it.  For example, pain is inevitable in life, but suffering is when you are not accepting the reality of that pain.  Mindfulness is walking around with the lights on, while Mindlessness is like walking in the dark. While Mindlessness IS a coping skill, it is not an effective one. We all make our own choices.

Mindfulness can increase the focus of your mind by not allowing your mind to be in control of you. The ability to focus your mind helps in decreasing negative thoughts and harmful emotions. 

So what is Mindfulness? Without attachment to a moment, or judging or rejecting that moment, you live with the awareness of the present moment. All too often humans ruminate about issues worrying them, or the past and it causes us to lose focus on what is happening right now. 

 Skills in Mindfulness are things that we specifically modify to live in the present moment.  Mindfulness skills can be done anywhere, any time, just focusing. For example, you can be mindful of doing dishes. While washing the dishes, you don't have your mind race with all the other things that need to be done around the house, just focus on doing the dishes. See how clean you can get them, rinse the dish soap off, or rinse dishes to put into the dishwasher, being mindful of how the dishes are placed inside. 

You can have mindful prayer for a spiritual focus or meditation where we just allow thoughts to come in and let them go instead of your brain making out a grocery list.  It is difficult to stay in the moment as we have been taught that multi-tasking is something that we must do. 

Mindfulness can be in the form of movement like yoga, karate, spiritual dancing, horseback riding, or even walking.  Mindfulness can be practiced standing up, sitting down, or laying down. When we meditate, pray, do karate, or walk, we do it mindfully by being aware of our breath, body, and thoughts, or opening our mind by paying attention to what comes into our awareness.

I am all too aware of attempting to practice mindfulness at a job where you are being asked to multi-task, talk to people, sell something, or a job where you feel that you cannot be mindful. You can be even with jobs like the ones I mentioned. You can be mindful of how you speak to someone even in difficult situations, mindful of what the other person is saying, or in sales, maybe be mindful of what you are going to say to sell something.

Even though we have all seen job ads where the phrase, "must be able to multi-task" is a disservice to anyone that is being asked for that. First, if you are trying to be mindful, you can't multi-task. Second, human beings are unable to multi-task effectively because the human brain is not built to do that. Studies have shown that employees who multi-task suffer job burnout fast than those who don't. Employees who have to multi-task make more mistakes than those who don't, and multi-tasking isn't as time efficient as someone who focuses on one task.  

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26844712/

https://opensource.com/article/19/4/mindfulness-over-multitasking

https://www.mindful.org/mindful-multitasking-with-less-stress-more-concentration/

These are just a few of the articles out there discussing the benefits of Mindfulness versus Multi-tasking. I get having a difficult boss that doesn't understand why multi-tasking would be worse than just being mindful. Most careers/jobs almost require us to multi-task such as working in fast food, or a coffee shop, working with reading emails, going to meetings, and trying to do the job we were actually hired for. It can be almost impossible to be mindful all of the time. It is one of the many things being taught in DBT to handle stressful situations and constantly practice Mindfulness.