The Art Of Being Mindful

Mindfulness has become very popular in recent years. It is claiming huge mental health benefits in treating anxiety and depression and has become integral to psychotherapy, especially within cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), with a common goal of helping people gain perspective on irrational, unhelpful and self-limiting thoughts.

- Jivan Dempsey

But what is mindfulness and what are the benefits?

Mindfulness is, in principle, simply a set of meditation techniques that lead you to question your identity and your relationship to the world. If you can understand your patterns and triggers to painful emotions that manifest themselves in unhealthy behaviours, habits and beliefs, you can help yourself to transform them.

In other words, mindfulness seeks to train the brain to break the patterns of unhealthy autopilot responses to painful emotions and help you accept your experiences, from a positive and healthy perspective, and create alternative conscious thoughts and behaviours.

Is it successful in helping anxiety and depression?

Yes - mindfulness can help in many ways:

It can increase your ability to engage and enjoy the pleasures of life, form connections with others and enables you to “let go” so you can focus on the here and now, be less preoccupied about the future, or wallow in the past.

This has proven benefits to mental wellbeing as psychotherapists use mindfulness to treat not only anxiety and depression but in addition, substance abuse, eating disorders, relationship issues and obsessive compulsive disorder. •As mental wellbeing improves, mindfulness has proven benefits to physical wellbeing in the prevention of heart disease, lower blood pressure, reduced chronic pain, improved sleep, and alleviated gastrointestinal issues.

How do you it?