Mindfulness is not…

You are missing out, if you think mindfulness is just about relaxation and distracting yourself from difficult thoughts and emotions. Go beyond McMindfulness, and you will be rewarded with awareness

Mindfulness has become mainstream over the last 15 years. It is being taught everywhere, in schools, workplaces, hospitals and by therapists. This is a great development of course, because of all the benefits it can give us. Unfortunately it has also led to a reduced, capitalistic version of mindfulness, adapted to time-deprived, stressed-out people and the egocentric attitudes of the Western world. Sometimes this is referred to as ‘McMindfulness’, As a consequence there are a lot of misconceptions and half-truths about what it means to practice mindfulness[1]. Let’s look at some of them.

Mindfulness is not meditation

You can be mindful without meditating and you can be meditating with other intentions than to be mindful. A regular mindfulness meditation however tends to help us live our days more mindfully.

Mindfulness is not relaxation

‘This is my way of being mindful’ is something I hear regularly, often referring to an activity that makes the person relax and gives them a break from everyday life. This usually involves something like cooking, playing music, gardening, doing puzzles or sports, or simply just looking out the window. And, yes, there can certainly be a mindful element to these activities, but more often than not, when we do these things, we are allowing the mind to wander. This is the opposite of being mindful. For instance, when we are cooking, we might think about what happened earlier that day or start to plan tomorrow’s dinner. Don’t get me wrong, relaxing and doing things we enjoy is very good for our health and well-being, but it is quite rarely done mindfully.

Mindfulness is not striving for resilience and efficiency

Mindfulness is often sold as an efficient way to cope with the highly pressured busy lives we live today. When people join my mindfulness courses, most of them have a specific reason for doing so. They want to be less stressed, less anxious, more efficient, more creative, more productive, or more resilient. But here is the thing: the more they strive for their goal, the less likely they are to achieve it.

This is a very frustrating paradox of mindfulness. We are doing it to achieve something, but it requires us to stop striving. Mindful awareness does not come to us through hard work but requires us to do something that most of us find much harder – letting go of our battles and invite the challenges in with acceptance, curiosity and kindness. We need to be instead of doing. A recent study found that participants on mindfulness courses who meditated with the intention of managing difficult feelings or getting rid of stress or fear largely did not reach their goals, while those participants who meditated with no intention other than being open and accepting whatever thoughts and feelings arose reaped the commonly found benefits of mindful meditation: less anxiety, less worry, less depression and better mindful awareness.[2]

Also, the awareness we aim for when practicing mindfulness, is not of an intellectual kind. A mindfulness practice gives us insights which we cannot gain through reading, reflecting or thinking alone. It must be practiced with our bodies and our senses and it involves connecting with our emotions and physical sensations.

Mindfulness is not only about being present

You might think that you are being mindful when you are playing your guitar or swinging your tennis racquet, because your mind is very much present in the moment. And yes, to some extent you are – and yet not quite. In those situations, I would describe your state of being as in flow rather than mindful. The concept of flow is described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as situations in which we experience a sense of enjoyment, purpose and meaning.[3] When in flow, we are completely absorbed in an activity and forget about time and place. We are challenged at just the right level, doing something that is neither too demanding nor too simple for our abilities. Flow can bring a lot of happiness, however, it will not allow us to gain the full benefits of the insight that comes with mindfulness. To acquire these, you need to not only aware of the present moment, you also need to be aware of being aware. You need to observe and label your own thinking and physical feelings in order to fully understand them.

Mindfulness is not about getting rid of our thoughts

Our minds are constantly thinking about things and occasionally it would be nice if we could just stop thinking (especially at night, when we want to sleep). Mindfulness is sometimes sold as a way of doing this. And yes, being mindful can calm our minds and to a certain extend stop a lot of unnecessary worries. However, the aim of mindfulness is not to get rid of or distract yourself from your thoughts, but rather to investigate them. Instead of being a means of escaping, mindful awareness meditation can make you conscious of your innate and habitual ways of reacting to things, which will give you the freedom to choose to respond to life´s difficulties in alternative ways.

Mindfulness on a continuum

There are hundreds of definitions of mindfulness out there. The problem with mindfulness is that it cannot be understood with the intellect alone, yet a lot of people try to. It is a shame, because these half-truths means that people miss out on the huge benefits the full version of mindfulness might give them.

I have come to view mindfulness as a continuum. At one end lies what most people associate with mindfulness; the skills of being able to choose a focus point (often the breath) and sustain attention and concentration. Very often, guided meditations that help us concentrate also make us feel relaxed, which is why people associate mindfulness with relaxation. And it certainly has benefits. When we focus on the present moment, our bodies and mind step out of busy doing and achieving mode, and this allows us to just be. Our autonomous nervous system goes into a calm mode where we can rest, digest, heal and connect. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over from the stress-induced fight/flight/freeze sympathetic system, where we focus on achievement and/or danger. A balanced nervous system is important to our health, and it also allows us to make wise, calm decisions. Therefore, just a few minutes of basic mindful meditations during the day can be extremely helpful.[4]

However, this is only the very basics of mindfulness. If we move up along the mindfulness continuum, we don´t only benefit from improved attentional skills but we also start to gain awareness. We see the habits and behavioural patterns, which stem from the way we are wired genetically and from our social and cultural upbringing. With this awareness comes freedom to respond in more conscious ways. We gain better emotional understanding and control and we learn to meet our life as it is, including the pain and discomfort, with acceptance and kindness. This is where a mindfulness practice truly pays off.

If we choose to go even higher up on the mindfulness continuum, it becomes more of a religious/spiritual exploration with the aim of receiving enlightenment – or so I have been told. This is mindfulness beyond the secular version I am familiar with and to go there requires more spiritual and religious-based teachings.

Mindfulness can be placed somewhere between a religious and spiritual practice on one side and a secular, scientific, evidence-based approach on the other. It also breaches many academic walls; biology, medicine, psychology and physiology, to mention a few. We can learn mindfulness from different angles, but no matter which one we choose, to truly learn mindfulness it is necessary to invest time and energy. Mindfulness is not easy to learn as it goes against our instincts and culturally how we are taught to navigate in life. It can also be rather unpleasant at times, or straight out boring. BUT take my word for it, the effort is well worth it.

So, please do yourself a favour and truly investigate what mindfulness can offer you beyond McMindful relaxation and mindful colouring books.

Parts of this post also appear in the upcoming book Ageing Upwards - a mindfulness-based framework for the longevity revolution.

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[1] The term McMindfulness was first used in the article by R. Purser and D. Loy, Beyond McMindfulness, HuffPost (2013). Available from: www.huffpost.com/entry/beyond-mcmindfulness_b_3519289. It also appears in the title of Ron Purser’s McMindfulness: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality (Repeater, 2019)

[2] E.D. Tifft, S. Underwood, M.Z. Roberts and J.P. Forsyth, ‘Using meditation in a control vs. acceptance context: A preliminary evaluation of relations with anxiety, depression, and indices of well‐being’ in Journal of Clinical Psychology, 78 (7), 1407–1421 (2022).

[3] M. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The psychology of optimal experience (Harper and Row, 1990).

[4] Y-Y. Tang, Y. Ma, Y. Fan, H. Feng, J. Wang, S. Feng, Q. Lu, B. Hu, Y. Lin, J Li, Y. Zhang, Y. Wang, L. Zhou and M. Fan, ‘Central and autonomic nervous system interaction is altered by short-term meditation’ in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106 (22), 8865–8870 (2009). doi: 10.1073/pnas.0904031106