What is Mindfulness & Does it Matter?
Mindfulness has been everywhere the past few years. This word has had a meteoric rise in the wellness space but I think the intent of it has gotten a bit lost and polluted along its journey to fame.
Normally, I wouldn’t care if some scam wellness concept had gotten brutally mutilated in the social media churn, but this one is a little bit different. I actually do believe mindfulness is extremely important. Mindfulness, as defined by the Oxford dictionary, is a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.
This can easily sound like a pile of fluffy, zen, self help type of nothing. What does it MEAN?
Personally, I interpret this definition as being aware of yourself. Its focus is on getting to the root of what you are, what you like, what you don’t like, how you affect people, what you want, etc, - separate from external influence.
This awareness sounds pretty abstract, but I’d argue it is one of the most important things you can work towards. If you are aware of what defines yourself, it becomes so much easier to pursue the things that are in line with that, despite what society or others may try to push on you.
However, achieving that is much easier said than done. External influences shape our lives from day one. The first thing that influences us is other people. There’s really no getting around this one since we are born completely helpless and immediately rely on others to ensure our survival. Perhaps in exchange for their support, we are inundated with our caretakers’ messages about what it means to be a person. They largely define our ideologies of what we should be during an extremely formative period of our lives. Sometimes, this works out. What they’ve taught us is not too far off of what we want to be. But sometimes, it’s not. We can feel it too. We can feel the tension, the conflict, the unrest when we know we’ll have to unlearn something from before in order to get closer to a better understanding of ourselves.
Furthermore, humans are also social beings by nature. We form groups - sometimes clearly, sometimes not - and each of those groups has beliefs, and rules that may affect how we progress. This can be detrimental to our development if we don’t feel we truly fit with any of the groups available to us. However, in some cases, people have many options of groups available to them and can instead spend time trying out different ones. Either way, we will absorb a continuous stream of ideas about what makes up a successful person.
The second big thing that influences us is, broadly, our environment. Allow me to lump together an insane amount of things: your socioeconomic class, your education, your hometown, current events, the media, and your job can be the major aspects that make up this category.
The major difference between this category and the first one is that the messages we can get from this category might be from people we don’t even know very well. We are told a million messages everyday from advertisements, or from teachers, or bosses, or through a friend of a friend, or from Youtube success gurus, or from books, or from scientific studies being plugged on the local news, or from politicians, or from blogs, or from instagram influencers - the list goes on and on. This category is arguably much harder to deal with than the first because it is relentless. Everywhere we look, we are receiving some sort of message about what we should be.
This is an insane amount of content. Between family, friends, social groups, news, education, environment, and social media, we are constantly receiving ideas and information that can influence us. It’s impossible to act on all of it, nor do we even necessarily want to, but we might feel like we should. The end result is that many of us are left feeling directionless, distracted, and dissatisfied.
I believe that mindfulness is the key to being able to filter through all of these ideas effectively for yourself. If you can filter through the millions of messages you have received and will receive throughout your life, you’ll be able to more easily discover paths of action and development that feel in tune with your true nature and desires, and you’ll be able to stick to those decisions and actions much better. You’ll also achieve a higher sense of satisfaction and gratitude for the things you already have because you’ll have that much more confidence that these are the things that are right for you.
Although it may sound fluffy, mindfulness has been insanely helpful for me. For example, I used to struggle a lot with messaging around ‘success’. I grew up doing all the ‘right’ things that adults told me to do. I got good grades, went to a good school, and got a well paying job. I didn’t really think about it too much because I had been told this was the right path. As an adult, I would feel intense jealousy for random people I would see on LinkedIn who had gotten new jobs or gotten recognition for something career related. I would waste hours and hours researching getting into careers I didn’t even really want because I saw someone post about how successful they have been doing it so I thought I should look into it. Practicing mindfulness helped me shut out these extra messages and hone in on the jobs or careers I actually wanted to explore or pursue. It also helped diminish the jealousy I would feel towards others who were successful or doing something different.
Ok so how do you start. Mindfulness is woefully abstract, and can feel impossible to tackle. It often gets lumped in with meditation, which is a way to practice it, but meditation is honestly kind of hard and feels pointless at first. I have done it and for me, it wasn’t the most effective method for developing mindfulness although it worked wonderfully as a supplement.
The way I started was by first picking a category of my life that felt distracted. For me, this was work/career/external success. As I described above, I would feel myself getting pulled in many directions and would always feel vaguely dissatisfied no matter what I chose. So to hone in on how I really felt, I would recall moments where I had felt intense emotions. Maybe I had been insanely proud of myself for a certain presentation or interaction, maybe I had been insanely bored by a specific task. But I started only with the strongest emotions as these were the most useful. For each joyful moment, I would write down what made it joyful. Maybe it was that I got the satisfaction of crossing off a task, of learning a new skill, of convincing a client to do something. For each moment that brought me a negative emotion, I would write down what brought it on. Maybe I was doing something outside what I was naturally interested in, or maybe I had too little feedback. I would repeat this process for as many intense memories as I could get, and I would continue to add to the list if something came up in the present.
Once I got enough of these written down, I started to notice patterns. I started to notice that I enjoyed doing certain tasks, in certain projects, with certain types of people. I also noticed what major things I didn’t seem to like no matter in what form they appeared. This seems simple, but once I was able to write everything down and notice the patterns, it created an enormous sense of clarity for me. I was able to see what I liked, what I didn't like, and what I should do next. It also made it easier to recognize when these moments would occur on an ongoing basis.
This is what mindfulness means to me and why it’s so important. You can repeat these steps for any area of your life whether it’s romantic relationships, work, hobbies, finances, fashion - anything! By simply learning to recognize the moments that I loved or hated, I was able to more clearly see how to incorporate more moments I loved and how to avoid or mitigate moments I would hate. I also have way more confidence in the paths I pursue for myself and am less distracted by what others are doing. I’m able to easily recognize what paths are for me, and as long as I’m constantly working towards more moments I love, then I’m on the right track.
To be mindful, you don’t have to read a ton of self help books, or meditate an hour a day, you simply have to learn to recognize the moments that make you feel some type of way, figure out the reasons why, and incorporate what you’ve learned moving forward. It takes a little bit of repetition but the peace of mind it can provide is unparalleled.
Exploring and Travel are two things that bring me tons of joy - so I include them as much as I can.
Pic is in Arches National Park near Moab, Utah.