FAQs

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a mind-body approach that increases our ability to manage difficult situations and stress in our lives.  Mindfulness can be practised on a daily basis. It can enable you to change the way you think and feel about your experiences and gives you a choice which ultimately leads to freedom. 

I’m not a spiritual person does that matter?

While it is true historically that meditation has been closely associated with various spiritual traditions, you can be a complete atheist and still experience the benefits of calm, clarity, focus and productivity that meditation and Mindfulness convey. There are many different types of meditation. Mindfulness meditation is deceptively simple, and completely secular. It simply involves paying attention to your breath, noticing when you get distracted by a thought or emotion, and then returning to focusing on your breath. That’s it. No mantras, invocations, chakras, or third-eyes are necessary if that’s not your thing.

Why should I care about paying attention?

Mindfulness meditation has been scientifically shown to improve mental health by decreasing depression, distraction, anxiety, rumination, and emotional reactivity, while simultaneously improving information processing abilities, resilience, cognitive flexibility, immune function, intuition, emotion regulation, and relationship satisfaction. For these reasons and more, companies like Google, LinkedIn, Monsanto, Aetna, and many others offer mindfulness programs to their employees. Mindfulness is also key to becoming emotionally intelligent, a set of skills that has been shown to be important in becoming an exceptionally effective leader or manager.

So, Mindfulness is about stopping thoughts?

Not exactly.  It’s more about learning how to recognise what you are thinking or feeling, and then making a conscious decision around whether it makes sense to continue that line of thought or to express that emotion; or whether you’d be better served by letting go of it.

How does Mindfulness change the human brain?

The human brain is well adapted to reviewing the past, building models of the world, and predicting the future. Unfortunately, it is so well adapted to these tasks that it often goes overboard, letting these things take over, and then negatively feeding back, ruminating. There are at least two problems with this.  Firstly, when you are thinking, you are not doing, or worse, you are doing things on auto-pilot.  Secondly, this feedback loop can amplify the wrong things.  For example, strengthening unwarranted negative emotions, or unjustifiably reinforcing how you view yourself based on your past actions.  Being mindful simply means that you observe this process in a detached way.  Mindfulness lets you decide whether this is the kind of thought or emotion that makes sense for you in this moment.

How can mindfulness help my mental wellbeing?

Practising Mindfulness can enhance our mental wellbeing by making us more aware of our thoughts, and emotions.  This awareness is important as we are then more able to identify when we are becoming bogged down in some thoughts and emotions in a negative way.  Mindfulness techniques allow us to step back from our constant stream of thoughts and “view” them from an external aspect so we can identify when they are overwhelming us and help us deal with them more productively.  Mindfulness helps us develop coping strategies to deal with issues we find difficult to let go of and how to ask the right questions about our thoughts and emotions.  It is important to remember that “thoughts are not facts” they are simply mental events that do not have to control us.  This realisation can help us improve our mental wellbeing and ultimately our mental health by helping us to remain calm, keep things in perspective and more able to cope. 

Are Mindfulness and meditation the same thing?

No. Meditation is simply a technique used to train you to learn how to be mindful.  It is like a targeted workout for your brain, one that trains you to learn a particular skill: being aware of where you are spending your attentional energy.  Mindfulness, on the other hand, is a way of life.  It can be practised in everything you do.  You can walk mindfully, eat mindfully, listen mindfully, speak mindfully - drive, read, play, and love mindfully. Mindfulness is all about being present and aware of what’s currently happening in and around you, encapsulated in these three words: Be Here Now.