There are all kinds of studies describing the numerous benefits of mindfulness meditation practices. Sitting quietly, observing your breath, noticing the sensations in your body, and watching one’s thoughts pass by for some amount of time each day is undoubtedly beneficial for the mind and body.

Mindfulness is nonjudgmental present-focused emotion awareness.

Let’s start by discussing nonjudgment. Judgments artificially inflate emotions. As an example, imagine that I am crossing a street while a car is flying towards me. The fear I feel will urge me to run out of the way and it will save me. If afterwards I started piling on criticism, I would feel embarrassment in addition to fear. My embarrassment would be a manufactured emotion. When we learn to be nonjudgmental towards our emotion, we try to identify and stay with the first emotion without adding an addition emotion on top of it. Sometimes the additional emotion happens so automatically that we don’t recognize the first emotion. Sometimes the additional emotion feels really true. Identifying and staying with the first emotion is a skill you can acquire with practice. You can develop the skill through self-monitoring, through formal mindfulness meditation, and through mindfulness skills practice in everyday life.

Now, let’s discuss present-focused. Why would we want to be present-focused? Humans are unique in our ability to plan for the future and the way our thoughts can match our emotions to the past and the future. For instance, I can get really angry just thinking about something in my past. Sometimes it’s helpful to think about the past, but it crosses into rumination when I don’t turn my thinking into action. We can use our thoughts to generate feelings that gives us data about the past and prepares us for the future. If this is happening too frequently or automatically, our feelings stop being data and cause us distress and interference in everyday life. When we are present-focused we are noticing that our emotion, like anger, isn’t meeting the context of the present moment and we try to allow it to be there without fueling it.

Finally, let’s discuss emotion awareness training. When we pay attention on purpose to the present moment without judgment, we have the chance to get to know and respond effectively to our real emotions. Mindfulness is like weight training in that practicing it changes the way that your brain works. In general, you want to think about mindfulness like weight training where every experience is a bicep curl. One bicep curl doesn’t change your body, but the habit of bicep curls over time makes you physically stronger. The habit of mindfulness over time changes how your brain pays attention.

To start a formal mindfulness practice, sit comfortably with your eyes open or closed, whatever is more comfortable. Try not to get too perfectionistic about how or where you sit. You can practice mindfulness sitting up or lying down wherever is easy and comfortable. You might start at your kitchen or desk chair and then move to a space that is specific to mindfulness meditation as you build the habit.

There are four steps to mindfulness practice:

• Attend

• Wander

• Notice your wandering

• Return

It’s as simple as that. Simple, not easy.

Start with attending. For many people, starting with attending to your breath is an easy and reliable anchoring sensation. The breath is always with you, so you can use it in formal mindfulness practice and use it to cue yourself to be mindful in everyday life. The breath can be triggering for those with panic disorder or trauma. If not the breath, consider another sensation, like your feet on the floor or your hands in your lap. Whether or not the breath is comfortable for you, you can always use other parts of your body, as you might do in the case of a body scan.

When you attend to your sensations, you’re trying to feel the sensations in your body as sensations. As you attend to the sensations, you’ll likely feel a moment of ease. If you have trouble getting in touch with your body or you are new to the practice, it may take some time to notice the moment of ease or you may not feel it at all. It’s a leap of faith to believe that you will feel ease over time and it’s worth it to keep practicing.

As you attend to your sensation, your mind is naturally going to wander. Wandering is what minds do. You aren’t doing it wrong. In fact, you should expect the wandering as part of the exercise. You have to wander in order to notice the wandering.

The opportunity for mindfulness is when you notice the wandering. Regardless of how long you were wandering, there will always be a moment that you notice that you’ve wandered. In that moment, you are accessing your observing self. Everyone has an observing self and accessing it is another moment of ease. The more you practice wandering and noticing the wandering on purpose, the more practice you are getting at accessing your observing self. When you access your observing self, whether in formal practice or in everyday life, you are having a mindful moment. It will generate ease and help you cope with any thought, sensation, feeling, memory or urge you experience.

After you notice your wandering and have access to your observing self, you have the opportunity to bring yourself back, to return. Depending on the stickiness of your thought or the intensity of the feeling your thought generated, it may be challenging to return to attending to your sensations. This will give you a sense of what kind of day you are having especially if you practice regularly, around the same time, regardless of how you feel. If you don’t judge your experience, but rather use it as data, it can help you build self-awareness and become more mindful, even if it’s hard and you feel stuck or pain.

Returning to your sensations may be a commitment to letting your thoughts or your feelings be there in the background, while you go back to paying attention to your breath or another sensation on purpose. When you go back to attending to your sensations, you again have a moment of ease. The returning can be a challenge, so remember that you have the opportunity to begin the mindful cycle again, when you choose to return to attending.

And so, you are practicing a mindful cycle: you attend to your sensations and have a moment of ease; you wander, as minds do; you notice wandering with your observing self, generating a moment of ease; you commit to returning to your sensations, giving yourself the chance to start the mindful cycle again.

Even three to five minutes of formal mindfulness meditation can help make you more mindful in everyday life. The mindful cycle of attending, wandering, noticing the wandering, and returning to attend can happen every five to ten seconds, depending on how quickly your mind wanders, when you are doing a mindfulness exercise. Just three to five minutes of practice can be 30-40 repetitions of the mindful cycle. It will prime your mindful muscle and help you access your observing self more readily in everyday life.

So, what do you do when you are stuck in a thought – worrying, obsessing, or ruminating – or you are overcome by a sensation, an emotion, or an urge? Try using a technique called anchoring in the present to bring yourself into a nonjudgmental present-focused state of emotional awareness. This may not mean that your painful experience will pass, but it will not escalate and you will have more awareness of its triggers and its beginning next time.

In everyday life, as you notice a painful internal experience, cue yourself to anchor in the present. A cue is anything that tells you that you’re starting your anchoring in the present skill. Your breath is always with you and can be a great anchor. You can also use your feet on the ground or any other sensation that grounds you in the present.

Next, do a three-point check. That is, ask yourself:

• What thoughts am I having?

• What sensations am I experiencing?

• What am I doing or do I have the urge to do?

Your three-point check will help you recognize the emotion you are experiencing, be it anxiety, anger, sadness, guilt or any other feeling. The more often you self-monitor and then do three-point checks, the faster you will get at noticing what you feel.

After your three-point check, ask yourself:

• Is my response in line with my present context? Does my response meet the demands of my present moment?

• If my response is anything other than meeting the demands of the present moment, what can I do to change my behavior?

There are always demands in the present moment. Whether it is attending to your work, your family, or the social situation you are in, your effort is to notice what you feel, allow it, and refocus on engaging in your external environment. There are demands in the present moment even when you aren’t in an actively engaging activity. That is, you can watch TV, read something, walk, shower, do the dishes, and brush your teeth mindfully if you notice what you feel and turn your attention to the activity and the sensations it generates.

This can feel time-intensive at first, but will get faster as you practice. Eventually, this process will be:

• What do I feel?

• Am I meeting the demands of the present moment? If not, I return to the present.

Formal mindfulness practice is nice and all, but sometimes you have to grab the present moment like it is a life-saving drug.

When your mind is out in the future, you lose perspective on what’s currently happening. It’s a biological process. When you are searching for a problem to solve, your brain pumps you with extra adrenaline to fight, flee, or figure out and fix. The extra adrenaline will make whatever you think seem more likely and like a bigger threat. Since your anxious thinking now feelings likely and threatening, it will get harder and harder to stop thinking about it, even if you want to. You are being tricked by anticipatory anxiety. Suddenly the uncertainty of the future gives you anticipatory anxiety and it feels like a prediction and a threat.

In fact, uncertainty is just that… uncertain. Uncertainty means that we don’t know either way. The future could be worse, but it also could be better. Either way, adrenaline pumping through your body now doesn’t make you more prepared for that future. Just like any other times in your life, it’s reasonable to take problem-solving steps to prepare for an uncertain future. As a teenager, you didn’t know who you would become, so in the presence of uncertainty, you earned an education. That’s problem-solving. You can problem solve now too. But don’t get tricked by anticipatory anxiety. You don’t need to engage every thought about what could happen in the future in order to be prepared.

What do you do if your mind is preoccupied with the future? Grab the present moment. In the present moment, your body is breathing and working to keep you alive just fine. Try to watch your sensations as sensations. Try to observe your thoughts like words on a screen, not predictions or threats that you need to engage. Try to notice the urgency in your body and consciously slow yourself down.

It might be uncomfortable to try this. That’s fine. You’re doing it correctly.

If it’s hard to stay with your internal experience, you can also bring your attention to your external environment as it is in the present moment. You could describe ten things you see around you. You could feel the textures of your clothes or the seat where you are sitting. You could find something to eat or drink and eat or drink very slowly so that you notice how it feels. Washing your hands is a good time to notice the sensations that come with it.

Some people think that the present moment is silly and doing things to practice reminding yourself of the present moment is even sillier. Even if you’re been skeptical of it in the past, it might be worth it to try it right now. After all, the present moment is here now and that’s certain.

Dr. Claire Weekes was an Australian physician and an anxiety treatment pioneer who started writing about acceptance-based methods for relating effectively to anxiety in the 1960’s. She used the concept of floating through anxiety, as opposed to swimming through it, to emphasis the need to let go of control, rather than focusing on coping with it. The concepts “don’t just do something, sit there!” and “let time pass” come from Dr. Weekes. She explained how to approach thoughts and feelings nonjudgmentally.

Mindful emotional awareness occurs when you bring your attention to your emotion in the present moment with a nonjudgmental stance. It is a skill that is developed through practice.

To understand who to be nonjudgmental, let’s look at ways we can judge our emotional reactions. There are many ways you could judge your emotional experience. Here are some examples:

• Judging yourself for having an emotion in the first place: I shouldn’t be anxious. Other people aren’t anxious or aren’t anxious about this type of thing.

• Judging yourself for having the wrong emotion: I should feel excited, not fearful. I shouldn’t feel jealous or angry. I should feel guilty. I might be or become irresponsible if I don’t feel guilty.

• Judging yourself for the strength of the emotion: I could handle this if it wasn’t so intense. Other people don’t feel this. I’m weak or broken.

• Judging yourself for the timing of the emotion: I should have gotten over this. I shouldn’t still be having this feeling.

When you’re practicing a nonjudgmental stance, you are learning to catch the way that your mind judges your emotional experience and letting yourself feel whatever you feel. By accepting what you feel, you aren’t approaching the emotion as though you want it or expect it to be that way forever. Rather, your approach is, In this moment, this is what I feel and I’m not going to judge or resist the experience.

Mindfulness will not necessarily reduce your suffering in the present moment, but developing a habit of mindful emotional awareness will help you relate to yourself effectively. You’ll have memories of having an emotion that ebbs and flows without escalating and it will reduce the secondary reactions that cause your suffering.

A nonjudgmental mind is a curious mind. Rather than fearful or critical, a curious mind finds joy in experiencing and exploring what’s occurring.

Mental illness often makes people afraid of their minds. You might be afraid you’ll think something that means something bad about you. You might be afraid that you’ll think something that will give you sensations that are aversive and painful to you. You might feel something that is uncomfortable regardless of what you think. Your memories might cause you pain. Your thoughts might cause you to fear.

If not fearful, many people are critical of their internal experience. You might have expectations about what you should think and feel under certain circumstances. You might intellectually understand the path to experience less suffering and feel critical of yourself when the thoughts and feelings that cause you suffering occur anyway. You might believe that you have to be critical with yourself in order to live up to your own expectations and standards.

A curious mind manages fear with compassion and criticism with skepticism.

Compassion is gentle and kind. It holds your painful thoughts, feelings, and memories with openness and tenderness. Your experience is bigger than any particular painful thought, feeling, or memory. If you get curious about your pain, you may find that it peaks and passes and it has edges. It isn’t bigger than you and it isn’t forever. Compassion reminds you that you are part of the human community. Everything you feel has been felt by other people and you are not alone in what you feel.

Skepticism wonders if there might be another way. Is it true that you have to beat yourself up in order to become who you think you should become? If it were not true, could you become your ideal self by getting in touch with your values and becoming curious about the ways in which you stray from your values. You, like other humans, probably have difficulty living by your values in areas of your life that you have painful or aversive thoughts and feelings. Overcoming avoidance requires that you face your avoidance, not be more critical of yourself. Facing avoidance takes skill, practice, motivation, and courage. Criticism zaps your courage when you most need it. With curiosity, you can get skeptical of your strategy of criticism and consider courage and values-driven behavior instead.

In the present moment, your mind can focus on what’s happening now, rather than what has been painful for you in the past or what you fear happening in the future. If you were in an emergency situation, your mind would know it and you’d be actively problem solving. At times when you are not actively problem solving, your mind wanders to memories of the past and ruminates on past thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and the consequences that those experiences have had on your life course. Your mind wanders to the future, fearing or excitedly anticipating what may happen and how it will impact the course of your life. Whether this experience is painful or not, it’s pulling you away from the freshness of the current moment, which is the place where you actually live.

Fixed attentional focus is the opposite of flexible, present moment awareness.

The attentional bias in worry, OCD, and mood symptoms tends to be threat-related stimuli. Social anxiety is maintained by a self-focused attentional bias. Depression is maintained by a ruminative attentional bias.

When you are worrying, ruminating, or stuck in obsessive content, your mind is hyper-vigilantly scanning for potential threats. As you scan for mistakes, uncertainties, and potential catastrophic possibilities, your mind will generate more possibilities and you will feel more depressed, uncertain, and anxious. The sensations that come with anxiety create thought-action fusion, making the possibilities your mind generates seem more and more likely. Ruminating, worrying and mental compulsions create more possibilities and the possibilities feel more and more likely, creating more and more depression and anxiety and possibilities.

When you are experiencing social anxiety, your mind will become self-focused. Rather than focusing on your task (such as speaking in a meeting or joining a conversation), your attentional focus shifts to what you are thinking and feeling. Many people get tangled in their self-focused attention and fight with themselves about whether or not they can complete the task while thinking and feeling whatever they are thinking and feeling.

When you are experiencing depression, your mind will ruminate about the past. This is often triggered by the feeling of guilt, shame, or regret. If you didn’t already feel hopeless, helpless, or worthless, ruminating will get you there.

The opposite of fixed attentional focus is flexible, present moment awareness.

To shift your attentional focus during worry and mental compulsions, first, challenge the function of worry. When you notice hyper-vigilant scanning, bring yourself back to the present and describe what is actually occurring around you, rather than what you fear.

To shift your attentional focus during social anxiety, focus on your original task. Set behavioral goals rather than feeling based goals. An example is committing to talking to two people at a meeting or party before leaving rather than leaving if you feel anxious.

To shift your attentional focus during depression, resist the urge to ruminate. Try to identify the original feeling you felt prior to feeling hopeless, helpless, or worthless. Consider whether you were feeling angry, lonely, guilty, ashamed, or regretful and work towards accepting those feelings without adding rumination and the feelings that come with it.

Shifting your attentional focus to the present is always worth doing. To get there,

● Try thinking of a recent occasion that you were present and reflect on what you were doing to make that state possible.

● Use your senses to come into the present moment. What do you see, smell, hear, and taste?

● Take a deep breath and use your breath to come back to the present moment.

● Oftentimes, we having trouble being present when we are stuck in one of these other processes. If you’re having a lot of trouble using your breath or your senses to bring yourself intentionally into the present, discuss where you might be stuck in psychotherapy.

Mindfulness is a really challenging exposure for a person with a fear of their mind and body. On the one hand, if somatic avoidance is one mechanism that maintains your anxiety, OCD or mood symptoms, it will be very helpful to you to do the opposite. That is, sitting with your mind and your body and allowing yourself to experience whatever arises is an amazing exposure. On the other hand, mindfulness as an exposure can be so challenging that you are really prone to feeling self-critical and demoralized.

Here’s how to work with your attitude so that mindfulness isn’t torturing for you.

Expect this to be challenging. You might have the feeling of boredom at some point, but noticing and allowing boredom is not a boring task. It’s a very challenging task.

If you are constantly trying to control what your mind does and how your body feels, sitting quietly with yourself and just noticing what’s happening will, in fact, be really anxiety-provoking. You might feel afraid of what you notice. You might feel helpless about not changing what’s occurring. The process itself might trigger the feeling of worthlessness. Be ready for it. This is your work. If any of that shows up for you, know that you are doing your exposure correctly rather than incorrectly. Remember that you aren’t trying to fix anything. You are trying to stay present and observe on purpose, without changing anything.

Notice that you will have the urge to judge what you are experiencing:

● Am I doing this right?

● Is this enough time?

● How do I know if this will work for me?

● If it’s working, how do I know that it’s working?

● Is this a good use of my time?

● Why is my mind racing?

● Why am I so distracted?

● Why do I think these things?

● What if I can’t stop worrying?

● What if I have my intrusions and I get anxious?

● If I get anxious while I’m doing this does that mean that I am hurting myself or making things worse for myself?

● Maybe this isn’t for me. I’ll do this when I’m better.

Expect this to be challenging. It will trigger perfectionism.

Exercise of any kind is definitely better for your mind and body than no exercise at all. That said, if perfectionism is a mechanism that maintains your anxiety, OCD, or mood symptoms, then you are very prone to your perfectionism stealing your exercise and using it to reinforce your distress. This might sound like, I must exercise this way or no exercise at all! Then again, perfectionism can steal anything — be it your clothing choice, your work, your friendships, your romantic life — and you can’t stop putting clothing on or doing any of those other things.

My point here is that mindfulness of any kind can be a tool that helps you refrain from somatic avoidance and brings you back into the present moment awareness of your body. When you start practicing, notice the urge to test your progress based on how your mindfulness is going. Allow that thought to pass and refrain from any behaviors that your mind tells you that you must do.

Expect this to be challenging. It’s really hard to start a new habit.

There is a balance between starting a habit and doing something compulsively to alleviate anxiety. Only you know what is happening for yourself. Refrain from self-criticism and get curious about what your mind does as you start this. If you’re trying to start a mindfulness practice, choosing the same time each day and using a cue that is already habitual. For instance, you might use the cue, After I brush my teeth, I practice mindfulness for 5 minutes. It’s a good idea to commit to this habit (or something like it) for at least 2 weeks.

Start as small as possible to get momentum going. Notice what your mind does with trying to create the new habit. Does it minimize the task and lead you to avoid? Does it become obsessed with the task and lead you to get compulsive about it? Just watch this and add it to your self-awareness. We’re not going for the perfect habits. We’re just trying to give you some experiences of your direct reality so that you feel less afraid.

Also, you can access greater bodily awareness through more than just mindfulness meditation. Try using all 5 of your senses. Here is a list of other ways that you can bring more attention to your present moment bodily awareness. Try to think up some other ideas that are relevant to your everyday life.

● Listen to music you like and bring your attention to what you hear.

● Notice the smell of scented candles, incest, or the soap you use when you shower or wash your hands.

● Ask a loved one for a massage, get a professional massage, or massage your own arms, legs, feet, hands, and shoulders.

● Do a body scan meditation.

● Engage in exercise of any kind and bring attention to your breathing and your muscles on purpose.

● Practice dance, yoga, or stretching and bring your attention to your body and your muscles.