How to fill your mind with your mind: Mindfulness meditation and taking your mind back from anxiety

Hello to you reader,

Two things I'm stoked to share with you today.

Firstly, today I revisited a very powerful technique called mindfulness. You may have heard of it before, but if you haven't, a boiled down version is that it is a form of mediation. Now, for those who instantly think 'Yeah right, like I have an hour a day to stare at a lit candle making 'Ommmm' sounds,' bear with me a second.

Stock Photo: Mindfulness can help reduce the need to put your head in your hands.
Unless your full time job is Hide and Seek Champion.

The great thing about this little tool is that it can be used, quite drastically in some cases, to reduce stress in ten minutes or less a day. More importantly, it KEEPS it down. Mindfulness has been around as early as the sixties. So if you're still not convinced by its legacy, a woman sat next to me at the session today legitimately let out of a snore. Took my tickled mind quite a few long breaths to resist the urge to laugh at that point!

The university I attend have an excellent student and staff wellbeing department, and they hosted an resourceful workshop on the topic of mindfulness today. When I received counselling as a teen, we brushed very briefly over this, but CBT was the main course of action taken. So to come back to this today and get to know more about it was really helpful and I feel sad that before I sort of brushed it off. 

The workshop involved some short but effective exercises. It showed us the power of mindful eating with raisins and using all our senses to really examine them. It's crazy, but this also included listening to the raisin as you pressed between your fingers (FYI, raisins crackle).

As expected, mindfulness involved concentrating on the rhythm of our breathing and listening to our thoughts for around three or four minutes to some relaxing music. I've always thought of meditation as a bit of a futile exercise: I live in my head all day, every day. I know what's going on in there. 

Well, actually, I don't. And the basic goal of mindfulness is to entirely concentrate on the present. How your body feels, smells, sounds, even acknowledging pain in your body. I didn't actually notice that my right knee was aching until I stopped and paid attention. And your mind has the habit of being a bit pesky. I almost got frustrated that I couldn't keep my brain on one subject! It would wander quite often, thinking about things I had done, things I would need to do. And that's where depression and anxiety live.

Depression lives in the past, forging regrets, making neutral situations in your life negative. Anxiety lives in the future, making you stressed about what you need to do, what you are scared of doing, birthing doom.

Mindfulness teaches you to forget it all. It helps put your mind in a place of complete sanctuary and away from this barrage of negativity that can drag your mood down. And my favourite aspect of mindfulness?

There is no judgment. If you mind wanders, so what? Acknowledge the thought and then just bring it back to the present. In mindfulness, there is no success or failure. It's a completely peaceful place away from all judgment, not just from other people, but most importantly yourself. It's a chance to say to yourself, okay, let's just stop. Pause. This is where I am, right now. And that is it.

I'm super excited to start to incorporate this into my daily routine. And we were shown an excellent resource to keep ourselves on track too!

Get Some Head Space offers you a challenge: ten minutes of meditation for ten days. Why ten days? Apparently, it's the minimum amount of time needed to feel results. It's definitely on my agenda for the next ten!

Here's a great video to get you started on the basic principles:

I'll let you know how I feel after I've given it a go! My ultimate goal in incorporating this will to be help control symptoms of IBS. I've had a couple of bad episodes of late, all involving car journeys. Even the prospect of driving 15 minutes into University honestly makes me scared. I genuinely fear getting into a car. Traffic jams and red lights are almost becoming phobias. It's ridiculous because as long as the car is still moving I am generally fine. But I'm not going to let this get the better of me. The biggest thing to tackle anxiety is to push back. Push yourself to do what your mind is telling you can't do.

The second (and most exciting thing) is there's a perfect Wayne's World quote to suit this situation.

Tumblr: Wise and quotable words from our friend, Garth.

Why don't you sign yourself up and give some mindfulness meditation a go? It could be ten minutes a day that changes your life forever!