UPDATED: May 1, 2025
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Are you stressed-out by politics, the price of eggs, what you see on the evening news and read in click-bait headlines? Are you caught up in daily doom-scrolling? These days in particular, it can be a challenge to deal with all the stresses of modern life without feeling like you need something to take the edge off. Fortunately, mindfulness can act as a bulwark against stress by helping us deal with it constructively and find more enjoyment with the little things in life, such as a ray of sunlight poking through the rainclouds.
Inescapable Stress
For most of us, stressful events are an inescapable feature of our daily lives. Stress becomes even worse when our situations are changing rapidly. Any changes are stressful, even when those changes are for the better. In case you haven’t noticed, everything changes, except for the obvious fact that everything changes.
A Life Change Index has been used to predict the risk of illness in the absence of healthy coping strategies. We are also deliberately bombarded with stressful stimuli through news headlines, TV shows, and social media. That’s because things that generate fear and anger capture our attention. A primitive survival mechanism is being exploited by algorithms to generate advertising revenue.
Chronic stress produces adverse psychological and physiological effects, with major consequences for the body and mind. It elevates the level of the stress hormone cortisol, messes with our metabolism, increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, amplifies pain, lowers immunity, and interferes with sleep and digestion, among other effects.
Almost one in five Americans suffer from an anxiety disorder, which can lead to unhealthy attempts to seek relief, such as binging on sweets and comfort foods, or turning to alcohol and street drugs. Depression affects about one in ten adults in any given year. It Is a major cause of disability and death, with about 41,000 people committing suicide annually.
Getting Lost in the Changes
The United States is currently experiencing political, economic, and social upheavals. Anticipating the worst is creating additional emotional turmoil and generating dangerously high levels of stress. Uncertainty about the future is in itself stressful, and nobody seems to know what will happen next.
Being pro-health, pro-science, pro-education, and pro-democracy, I am bracing myself for unfavorable outcomes on all those fronts. The challenge is to remain appropriately engaged, carry on with daily life, and not give in to fear and anger. We certainly don’t need all that stress.
It makes no sense to get upset about things over which we have no control. What is happening in the nation’s capitol and elsewhere in the world are far beyond our reach. One coping strategy that I’ve successfully employed is to go on a “news fast” and cultivate a willful ignorance about current events. Everything I really need to know on a day-to-day basis can be found in my local weather report and the health professionals I follow on Substack. The rest of the information avalanche is background noise.
Disappointments need to be acknowledged, and then let go. Losses need to be grieved, and grief-work takes time. After the shock and denial have worn off, people can expect to go though anger, sadness, and wishful thinking, before eventually accepting the painful reality. But, it is what it is, and it is futile to waste any energy arguing with it.
Finding a Way Through
We can find respite from mental turbulence, and experience calm in the midst of emotional storms, by practicing mindfulness.
Mindfulness involves being mentally aware while physically present. With mind and body synchronized in the same place at the same time, we can mentally focus on what our body is doing, observe our internal states, and notice our surroundings. Simply witnessing what is happening doesn’t involve reactivity or judgment, but if that occurs, just notice it too, and let it go.
An online Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course is available at no cost, with no strings attached. This eight-week program is recommended for people who have had no prior experience with mindfulness practices, or may need a refresher.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is a psychotherapeutic approach that combines cognitive behavioral therapy with mindfulness training and other psychological strategies. It has been shown to be quickly effective for people suffering from mild depression,.
Mindfulness occurs when our attention is focused on what is here and now, and the entirety of our being is acting in concert. It is all about letting go of distractions. We can then calmly notice what we are thinking, feeling, and perceiving in the present moment, and not become lost in thoughts, or carried away by our emotions. We can endure difficult experiences if we mindfully approach life one breath at a time.
It is also a day to stand against the corporatocracy that has replaced the American Republic, and the kleptocrats and oligarchs who profit from the theft of our democracy.
The opposite of mindfulness is being distracted, inattentive, absent-minded, spaced-out, and unaware of what is happening within and around us.
An unfocused mind wanders and chatters in order to keep itself busy. It wants something to think about, to chew on, and to ruminate over. Unless the task at hand demands its full attention, an unoccupied mind flits from memories of the past to fantasies about the future.
The mind is easily distracted by its own thoughts and images. Consequently, we go about our daily activities mostly on autopilot, in a trance-like, mind-body disconnect. We sleep and dream, wake up, and then daydream, while going through the motions and pretending to be present.
Most of the time, we’ll manage to get by, until a rude awakening occurs. There may be unpleasant consequences to not paying attention. Perhaps we didn't notice that the car in front of us had unexpectedly stopped, and almost didn't slam on the brakes in time to avoid a collision.
We might not notice our errors in thinking or judgment until they come around to bite us. Perhaps we've imagined that we were doing a good job at work, or had been doing right by our relationship, and are taken by surprise when we are fired. This is less likely to happen when we are paying attention.
Cultivating Mindfulness
We can become better at being mindful through deliberate and repeated practice. Exercises intended to cultivate our ability to sustain a state of mindfulness fall under the catch-all term, “meditation.”
However, we need not meditate in any formal sense in order to be mindful. We can practice mindfulness just about any time, in any place, in any way. We certainly don’t have to sit in a specific position with our eyes closed in order to be mindful.
The most simple and efficient form of meditation involves paying attention to the act of breathing, in any of its many aspects, such as air moving through our nostrils, the movements of our chest or abdomen, etc. A short, secular, guided meditation on the breath can serve as an introduction, and a reminder about approaching life one breath at a time.
Researchers have identified a specific brain circuit that links breathing to emotional and behavioral states. One such study provides a neurological basis for practices such as mindfulness, and highlights how slowing one’s breathing can positively influence mental well-being.
The respiratory function takes place at an intersection between voluntary and involuntary control, and can serve as a two-way connection between mind and body when we pay attention to it. That's why research found that long-term mindfulness practices are associated with lower resting respiration rates.
Consciously changing our breathing pattern enables us to influence how we think and feel. According to one study, it only takes about five minutes of practice a day for a month to have a significant effect on our psychological well-being. Our natural respiratory rate is 12 to 20 cycles per minute, and can serve as a physiological correlate of psychological well-being.
By deliberately slowing our respiratory rate to about six breaths per minute we are able to quiet the mind and calm the body. After a period of intentional slow breathing, we can notice the impulse to accelerate our respirations. We can then relinquish control, and become a passive observer of whatever is happening with our thoughts, mental images, emotions, physical sensations, and perceptions. Paying attention to one's breathing is a fundamental aspect of both contemporary and traditional mindfulness practices.
With no conscious effort on our part, breathing simply happens. All we need to do is witness it happening, without the mind wandering elsewhere.
Giving our deliberate attention to something so mundane that it occurs on its own and can be taken for granted soon becomes extremely boring. The mind wants to amuse itself and goes elsewhere. Before we even notice that it has happened, the mind has abandoned its chosen task.
When we “wake up” and recognize that we haven't been paying attention to our breathing, all we need to do is resume our agreed upon assignment. We quickly realize that the mind keeps itself very, very busy. When we are asleep, the mind engages in dreaming. When we are awake, and attention is distracted by the mind’s activities, it’s as if we are daydreaming.
The cycle of forgetting, then remembering what we are supposed to be doing, and then resuming the task, gets repeated over and over again. There’s no shame, no guilt, no scolding. Each time we become aware that the mind has wandered, we gently redirect our mental attention to the body's rhythmic breathing, even though the mind keeps rebelling and returning to its chattering. With practice, we become increasingly able to pay attention to the breath for longer and longer periods of time, before the mind wanders off, or we become lost in feelings.
Beyond the Breath
Turning attention toward the breath anchors awareness in the present moment, but we don’t have to stop what we are doing in order to notice breathing taking place. Attention can be zoomed in for a narrow focus, or zoomed out for a wide-angle view. We can notice the breath while walking about and simultaneously experiencing many other sights and sounds.
Once we become adept at selectively paying attention to the breath as dispassionate observers, we can take the next step and develop our meta-awareness. We do so by witnessing the incessant display of mental activity, consisting of words that produce thoughts, mind’s-eye images, and sounds, such as tunes that get stuck in our head. We can also notice any associated emotions, without allowing our attention to be captured by the content of the mind’s productions.
The next step is to “get out of our head” and turn our attention towards external sensory inputs and the physical sensations experienced by the body, observing how the raw sensory information is interpreted as perceptions. Everything we are aware of is an “object” that subjectively appears in the field of awareness. Everything that we personally experience is a production of body-mind.
We can choose to pay attention to an object, or ignore it by directing our attention elsewhere. Objects that spontaneously appear in awareness can be briefly noticed, and then unceremoniously dismissed. Bringing our attention back to the present moment, and being immediately aware of what the mind and body are doing, is powerfully liberating. There are a number of other ways to go about cultivating an inner tranquility:
Noticing Awareness
The next step in becoming more mindful is to notice the gaps that briefly appear between one mental activity and the next. It’s like being aware of the momentary pauses that occur between an inhalation and exhalation, and between an exhalation and the next inhalation. The quietness of non-activity found in gaps that appear among the productions of the mind can be a source of inner tranquility.
We can even glimpse awareness itself by allowing attention to rest in the silent, spacious emptiness in which thoughts and feelings spontaneously appear and then disappear. The key is to relax into a non-conceptual non-doing and simply let everything be just as it is. Notice and accept the present moment as it unfolds, without judgment or intervention, and be aligned with the natural flow of things.
By noticing what we physically and mentally experience with the detachment of an impartial observer, we can temporarily break the emotional spells that they cast. During those periods of greater clarity, we no longer feel compelled to identify who we are with our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Our sense of self then becomes more expansive, and less ego-bound.
What’s important is to recognize that from an experiential perspective, there exists only our unbounded awareness and the myriad objects that make their transitory appearances in it. There is nothing else, and the two are indivisible.
Our attention is so easily distracted by the objects of our awareness, while recognizing awareness itself (ie. being aware of awareness) requires a radical shift in our perspective. That shift can occur spontaneously, but most often it involves a process that turns awareness back upon itself. That’s would be a good subject for another article.
Letting-in, Letting-go
As the song goes, “Yesterday is done and gone, and tomorrow's out of sight.” We cannot control what is beyond our grasp. What can't be changed must be accepted, with humility and grace. We can deal with disappointment and loss by living fully in the present, without resorting to maladaptive psychological coping mechanisms, such as denial, repression, rumination, and projection.
In summary, mindful attention comes and goes. Simply remember to notice that you are still breathing, and rejoice in being alive. Think of these as ah-ha moments. Then inhale (ah), and exhale (ha). Repeat ad lib.
Frequently checking in with what the body and mind are experiencing, and witnessing the objects of awareness with detachment, can produce an inner stillness. From that calm place, let go of any “stinking thinking” and all the unnecessary mental and emotional baggage.
With greater mindfulness, we can more easily recognize what needs to be done, give those things our full attention, and accomplish our tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible. Distance yourself intellectually and emotionally from what is then and there, and just be here, now, in the peaceful center of the present moment. It may be a cliché, but the present really is a gift.
Dwelling on the past makes very little sense.
Visions of the future may be a mere pretense.
So let us truly value the immediate appeal,
Of everything we see, and smell,
And taste, and hear, and feel.
― ― ―
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