The Benefits Of Mindfulness In A Person’s Life
The term “mindfulness” has become a buzzword used almost everywhere around us at our workplaces, schools or even our homes but what does it really mean?
In simple terms, mindfulness suggests that the mind is fully present when we carry out an activity. It is the concept of being present in the moment, focussing on what is happening in the environment around us. Being mindful is about ‘carpe diem’, or seizing the present moment, without worrying about what the future might bring.
Mindfulness, in itself, isn’t quite a hard thing to practice. After all, it does sound quite simple to follow doesn’t it? All you have to do is just carry out what you’re currently doing, like reading this article, in a conscious manner. However, our mind is quite a complex machinery to operate. Sometimes, without us even knowing, our mind ventures off to other thoughts like what you might have for dinner tonight, or maybe even think back to a beautiful memory that you cherish. We end up losing the connection that we built with what we’re doing and suddenly, this simple concept about being mindful in what we do ends up becoming quite a difficult task to carry out.
But being mindful is something that improves with practice. Although it’s an innate skill that is present in all of us, there are a few ways to hone this skill of ours: meditation (while being seated, standing or moving), short breaks in our busy schedules to take a breath and relax, and physical activities such as yoga and sports with meditation integrated into them.
Not only does this practice help us become more aware of our surroundings but being mindful also has a lot of other benefits. Mindfulness helps us to reduce stress, make ourselves more productive, gain unique insights into our surroundings and our own state of mind and also to be aware of the well-being of those around us. These benefits not only impact our day to day performance in schools, colleges, universities or our workplaces, but they also help improve our interpersonal skills to become more empathetic and compassionate to the people we choose to be with.
However, don’t these benefits sound too good to be true for an act so simple to follow? Is receiving all these wonderful qualities that companies spend millions of dollars to teach their employees so easy to just acquire?
In fact, all the benefits mentioned above due to being mindful have been proven by scientific research as well. In a study done by psychologists Lutz, Dunne & Davidson (2008), it was concluded that participants who practiced mindfulness regularly tended to have amygdala (an organ which deals with strong emotions such as fear) which were less activated while having a hippocampus (an organ which is critical to learning and memory) and a prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain is which most associated with higher order thinking) more dense and more activated. This suggests that people who practice mindfulness are more likely to be able to think clearly, learn faster and control their emotions than those who weren’t as mindful. In another study done by neurologists Lazar et al. (2005), they concluded that regular practice of being mindful is associated with increased thickness of cortical regions of the brain which are responsible for visual, auditory, somatosensory and internal physiological processing. Furthermore, these practitioners also showed slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex than those who didn’t practice mindfulness as often. This helps those individuals to not only gain the ability to think more critically but also retain that capacity as they grow older. With these two researches being only some of those that are published, there are many more which suggest that practicing mindfulness helps to enhance the performance of our brain leading to better memory, focus, critical thinking and also our relationships with others. These benefits not only help us live our daily life in a much better manner but also to become much more capable of living a healthy life as we grow older.
Armed with this knowledge, we can only conclude that practicing mindfulness is greatly beneficial to us without having any side effects to it. It is definitely not something exotic but a skill we have within ourselves. Out brain consists of billions of neurons (nerve cells) that communicate with each other and with other parts of our body in a cohesive manner. When we practice being mindful, we strengthen these connections in our brain. When we think of positive thoughts, we tend to reinforce the connections associated with those thoughts, whereas, thinking about negative emotions will affect us by reinforcing those negative connections. By being mindful, we can become conscious of our thoughts and only choose to engage with the pleasant ones, affecting our lives in a much more positive manner. We can also start to fully understand our own emotions, thoughts and feelings and how they have an effect on our lives. Now that we understand how such a simple task of being mindful has such significant benefits in our lives, why don’t we start practicing the art of mindfulness right away?
