Using Mindfulness Skills in Everyday Life

A practical guide

Christine Dunkley, Maggie Stanton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317384823
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In the last decade, more mental health treatments have begun to incorporate mindfulness as a skill to help people with their problems. Despite this, not everyone is sure how to incorporate mindfulness effectively into their daily lives. Giving simple explanations, examples and exercises, Using Mindfulness Skills in Everyday Life shows clearly how this is done.

The book, written by two NHS clinicians experienced in teaching mindfulness, takes a down-to-earth approach, providing straightforward answers to the most commonly asked questions. The authors give definitions of mindfulness and guide people through instructions on how to set up and evaluate simple practices. As each component is taught, they provide examples of real-life situations, so the reader can clearly see how to be more mindful as they face the ups and downs of modern living.

This practical guide is essential reading for anyone who wants to learn mindfulness to help with difficulties and challenges. It is also the perfect book for therapists, coaches, teachers, social workers, nurses, psychiatrists and psychologists to recommend to their clients. The book is ideal for students on clinical training courses.

1

What is mindfulness?

Do you ever worry about things that may happen and end up feeling stressed or anxious? Does this get in the way of you doing something you want to do? Does it sometimes feel that life is rushing past and you are missing spending time with friends or family? Do you endlessly replay in your mind a mistake you have made or a situation you wish had gone differently? If so, then mindfulness has something to offer you.

So what is mindfulness? The essence of any description will tell you that mindfulness is being awake and aware of the present moment, choosing where to put our attention, noticing when we have got caught up in our mind’s story of how life is and bringing our attention back to the here and now. Once we have this skill, we can choose when we use it, and it’s amazing what a difference this can make; it can be invaluable as in the example below:

Using mindfulness at work

Amy got an email from her boss saying that he wanted to see her. She began thinking that he would tell her that her job was under threat. She imagined that he was unhappy with the standard or speed of her work. As she walked to his office, with her heart racing and mouth dry, she remembered her mindfulness practice. She recognised that being caught up in why her boss wanted to see her was not being mindful. She brought her focus onto the experience of walking along the corridor, with the carpet under her shoes and the sound of people talking from the offices. When Amy ‘woke up’ to realise she was paying attention to her minds’ version of events, she was being mindful. In noticing her experience of walking along the corridor, she brought her attention into the present moment.

From this example, we can see Amy’s mind went to an imagined future (her boss being unhappy with her work). When she realised this and brought her attention back to the moment of walking down the corridor, she was being mindful.

Automatic pilot

An example of being unmindful or mindlessness that you may find easy to recognise is when we are on ‘automatic pilot’, that is, doing things without being aware of what we are doing.

I work in two locations during the week: the clinic and the university. The first part of the journey is the same. Sometimes I can set off for the university, and before I realise it, I am turning into the clinic. I have been driving on automatic pilot. If I had been driving mindfully, I would have been aware of where I was, the road in front of me, changing gear, and would have gone to my intended destination.

Has this, or something like it, ever happened to you? Of course, this process is a very natural thing that all minds do. But how much of the time do you live in ‘automatic pilot’ rather than fully living each moment? Might it make a difference to your life to learn to be mindful?

Taking control of your mind

We first came to mindfulness through our work as therapists when we trained to deliver Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT). Marsha Linehan developed this therapy, and she makes the point that mindfulness puts you in the driver’s seat so that you are in control of your mind, rather than your mind being in control of you. So what does your mind being in control of you mean? Here are a couple of examples.

Rob had been struggling at college. He’d failed a couple of assignments and was finding it hard to sit down and write his essay. Whenever he sat at the computer, his mind would go back over all the assignments he’d failed in the past or onto predicting that this one would fail too. It was so powerful that Rob couldn’t even start the essay he needed to do. The chatter of Rob’s mind was taking him away from the course he wanted to follow. He didn’t ask it to do this. He wanted to get the work done and to do well.

Cheryl hadn’t heard from her friend and thought ‘I must have done something to upset her.’ Whenever she had the urge to text or phone her friend, she would put it off. The longer it went on, the more convinced she was by thoughts that her friend was angry with her and didn’t want to see her.

We can’t stop our minds from producing thoughts like this. Minds churn out thoughts like sweat glands produce sweat, but if we have the skill of being mindful, we can notice what our mind is doing and bring it back to what we want to focus on, so that we can write the essay or text our friend. We are in the driver’s seat and it feels good!

The growth of mindfulness

In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn started using mindfulness with his patients in a stress reduction programme. He noticed people often live their lives thinking about what might happen in the future or what has happened in the past and treating these thoughts as if they are facts. He was aware that eastern meditative practices such as Buddhism focus on bringing attention into the present moment, accepting it rather than trying to push it away or make it into something different. He thought this could be a helpful skill for the patients he was working with, so he introduced it into his programme. Jon Kabat-Zinn is credited with being the first person to bring mindfulness into Western clinical practices. In the following years, mindfulness has been incorporated into many therapies for a variety of problems. A common theme in these therapies is the emphasis on changing our relationship to experiences rather than changing the experiences themselves. It would be great if we could go through life having only positive things happen wouldn’t it? But we know that’s not realistic. Of course if we can change something, let’s go ahead, but how many things happen that we cannot change, at least not immediately? Accepting the experience without judging it as good or bad allows us to have the experience and choose how we want to respond to it. The changes for people can be truly remarkable, enabling them to start doing activities they had previously given up or going into situations they had been avoiding. In Chapter 8 we tell the stories of how people have used mindfulness in this way.

Research into mindfulness has grown at a tremendous pace. Its application has expanded from medicine and psychology to education, sport, business and leadership. The merging of the two great traditions of empirical science and Buddhist meditative practice has provided a catalyst for the expansion of mindfulness into many areas, and there is growing evidence for its beneficial effects.

Brain changes

One area of research that has generated a lot of interest is looking at whether mindfulness meditation has an impact on the brain. Many people will have seen pictures taken with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanning of brain activity changing when a person engages in mindful meditation. An example was shown on BBC News (4.1.12, BBC News). A patient with chronic pain was taught mindfulness meditation. When meditating, the scans showed a decrease in her brain activity in areas associated with pain. This fitted with her experience of the pain being more manageable or ‘being taken down a notch’ when using mindfulness meditation.

Does this mean mindfulness is for everyone? Research has also looked at whether people suffer any negative effects. If we think of mindfulness as a skill of directing where we put our attention and bringing ourselves into the actual moment of our lives, then it is hard to see that this is going to prove hugely detrimental. There are suggestions that practices should be kept short initially, that if you are learning from a teacher, they should be properly qualified, supervised and have their own practice, and if you have physical or mental health problems, to seek advice, for example, from a medical practitioner. So whilst no one skill is for everyone, a balanced view is needed remembering mindfulness is being taught in schools and used widely in therapies, business and sport with growing evidence of positive gains.

Our experience

Our approach to teaching mindfulness is that it is a practical skill that can be learned and used in many different situations. This may be slightly different to other books that you have seen on this topic. We are experienced NHS therapists who have helped many people use mindfulness skills to overcome their difficulties, some of which were very severe. People we worked with were often desperate, unable to see how anything could change. We had the privilege of being able to teach these people mindfulness skills and how to apply them not only during the time they spent with us in formal teaching, but during their daily activities at home and at work. The results were often life-changing, and for some, life-saving. The feedback about the way we taught mindfulness was so good that other therapists were interested in our style of teaching. Over the last 6 years, we have taught thousands of therapists in our workshops, showing how to bring the skill of mindfulness into people’s lives in an accessible and useful way.

Reading this book is your opportunity to hear our top tips and suggestions for learning mindfulness. You can be confident that the things we suggest have been tried in the most challenging circumstances. If mindfulness can help in those situations, then it probably has something to offer you too. If you are thinking, ‘this doesn’t sound like me, I don’t have any particular problems or issues,’ then don’t put the book aside. These strategies and practices are relevant to all of us. We have found mindfulness hugely beneficial to us. Everyone is subjected to the influence of their own mind, and we will teach you how to become awake and aware of how that process works. We continue to do the same practices that we teach to others, and we share in the same benefits of leading a more mindful life. In the following chapters, we will show you how to develop and use this skill to enhance your work, your relationships and your experience of being comfortable in your own skin. If that sounds like it’s for you, then read on!

Developing our own practice

In order to learn the skill of being mindful, it’s no surprise that we need to practise it. Any skill needs to be developed if it’s going to be useful to us, whether it’s riding a bike or boiling an egg. So like us, you will need to incorporate a regular time to be mindful into each day. This can be anything from a couple of minutes to much longer times, but it is helpful to start small and build up. Often people will set aside a short time when they first get up, come home from work or before they go to bed. To learn mindfulness, you need to have a time to practise, and we will talk more about setting up your formal practice time in the next chapter. We like to practise both on our own and with others. You may also want to consider joining a mindfulness group or class where you can take part in mindfulness together and help each other in learning this valuable skill. We have found having our own mindfulness practice not only has had a huge impact on us being able to incorporate mindfulness into our lives, but is also an important part of our ability to teach mindfulness to others.

You may notice we use personal examples in this book. We do this because people have told us they like it, and it helps them to see how they could use mindfulness in their lives. It also demonstrates that we are no different; we need to use the skills as much as anyone does.

What will mindfulness do for me?

You may have picked up this book because you have heard about mindfulness from a friend or colleague, watched a clip on YouTube or read about it on the internet or in the paper and are curious to find out more. Or it could be that you are having difficulties, and it has been suggested that mindfulness may be useful to you. You may have been given this book by your therapist or mindfulness teacher. Some of you may have practised meditation or yoga and are interested in expanding the benefits you have gained. Whatever the reason, we hope you will enjoy reading this book and trying out the mindfulness practices in it.

Learning mindfulness as a skill means that you can use it when you want to, whether that is to get more out of events you are enjoying or to help when life gets tough. Let’s give you an example:

A member of our mindfulness class, Alana, told us about going to the pub with her friends Rachel and Sarah for an evening out. She knew Sarah had also been to mindfulness classes and practised it regularly. Sarah had been shouted at by a customer that day at work and kept going over how unpleasant they had been to her and what she wished she had thought to say to them at the time. Alana and Rachel were sympathetic, but Sarah became more upset each time she remembered the event. Eventually Alana said: ‘Sarah, your mind keeps going back to what happened at work today and it’s stopping you from enjoying the evening. This could be a good time to use the mindfulness you have learned. Just notice when your mind wanders and bring it back to being in the pub with me and Rachel and what we are talking about now.’ ‘That’s not the mindfulness I have done,’ said Sarah. ‘When I do mindfulness, I go up to my room for half an hour, and everyone in the house is quiet while I do it, and I feel a lot better afterwards.’

Sarah is obviously willing to practice regularly and is getting benefit from doing this, which is great. But by only doing the mindfulness practices in her room, and not using mindfulness in her everyday life, she is missing out on all the extra benefits she could have. By learning how to use mindfulness in everyday situations, Sarah could have noticed when her mind went back to what happened at work that day, gently brought her attention back to the conversation and enjoyed the evening with her friends.

In this book, our aim is to show you how to be able to use mindfulness in your life when you want to. We will take you through the steps of how to carry out, reflect on and learn from short practices, and then how to use your mindfulness skills in your everyday life. We finish each chapter with some key tasks we suggest you try out as you go along. So start the journey.

Key tasks

• Read on!

2

Why learn mindfulness skills?

If you have read about mindfulness, seen it on the TV or had this skill suggested to you, you might be wondering what all the fuss is about. If so then keep reading, we hope to explain how this skill might help you in your everyday life.

Ask yourself this question: do you ever try to concentrate on something that you either really want to do or really need to do, only to find that your mind gets pulled away to problems that simply can’t be solved in the next 5 minutes, no matter how much you chew them over? It’s not even as if all that time you spent worrying or replaying past hurts was fruitful, or allowed you to put these horrible events behind you forever. Most of the time, that kind of ‘mind-chug’ just gets in the way of you living your life, right?

Do you ever find that things are going reasonably well and then your mind seizes on some issue that you can’t seem to let go of, and your mood plummets? Do you ever feel like you are constantly watching yourself, worrying about getting things right, judging ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 What is mindfulness?
• 2 Why learn mindfulness skills?
• 3 First steps in practising mindfulness
• 4 Reflections after a practice
• 5 Being mindful of your thoughts
• 6 Living mindfully
• 7 Acting wisely
• 8 From practice into everyday life
• Concluding comments
• Other resources
• Index