What is mindfulness?

Another word for mindfulness is awareness. When you are engaged in a state of mindfulness, you are aware of what is happening in your direct experience of the moment you are in. This means you think, and know you are thinking. This means you feel sensations in your body, and know you are feeling sensations in your body.

As you may have noticed, much of our day-to-day thinking happens almost as if we are on “autopilot.” Certain sentences or images arise in our heads and we immediately take them to be true, and act accordingly. Because we fail to recognize that we are thinking, we tend to get lost in the stories of our thoughts without being able to see them clearly.

An initial rough example of what it might look like when you are being mindful would be the difference between the following two moments of experience: First, you are just sitting in a chair and the thought “I am a failure” comes to you, and you feel sad. Second, you are sitting in the same chair but with the intention to wait for whatever thought comes next to you. Soon you see the same failure thought happen once again, but this time it’s experienced more like “I am having the thought that I am a failure.” Because you see that it is just a thought that came to you, that you did not ask for, you take it less personally. Instead of it being something true that you believe about yourself in that moment, it can be seen more like an impersonal program that came into your head, and thus you don’t feel quite as distressed by it. Sadness may still arise, but you feel like there’s a bit more space between you and the thought itself. A metaphor for this experience might be the difference between looking up at the sky and seeing a cloud that looks exactly like a middle finger, and reacting by thinking either “I’m being flipped off” or by recognizing “that’s a cloud that looks like it’s flipping me off.”

Mindfulness is all about waking up to the fact that the content of your thoughts is just that—content. And much like you can be unbothered by a radio that is playing in the room you’re in without identifying with the words being said by the DJ, you can let thoughts come and go, and see them for what they actually are: just noise or images in your head, rather than absolute truths of the way things are. Mindfulness can also be applied to feelings (both sensations in the body and also emotions, which are ultimately just sensations with a label in your thinking attached to them) in exactly the same way as described above for thoughts. With time, mindfulness helps you systematically recognize that your identity does not have to be fused with your thinking. In fact, you can identify as the observer of your thoughts rather than the thoughts themselves.

The difference between your normal state of experience and a “mindful” state is comparable to that of a lucid dream—each night when you fall asleep you can be in a dream in any number of absurd scenarios that you automatically believe and take for granted, or (as has happened to many people a few times in their lives) you can realize that you are dreaming in the middle of the dream. The content of the dream does not necessarily change when you realize that you are dreaming, but after you realize the dream is just a dream, the content of the dream loses its grip on you. For example, imagine something that would typically anger you happens in the dream. If you hadn’t realized you were dreaming, you’d probably get angry. However, because you knew it was just a dream, you don’t get angry, because you know it’s just a dream. In the same way you can “wake up” within a dream, you can also “wake up” from your thinking by using mindfulness.

When initially applied, mindfulness becomes a useful component of therapy, as it helps you recognize when you are lost in your mental stories about yourself, the world, or the way things should or shouldn’t be. Training the “recognition/awareness” muscle of the mind makes it easier to catch yourself when you are thinking, and apply some of the cognitive reframes discussed in therapy. This is why mindfulness is a useful component of CBT, as it helps you remember to apply the concepts discussed in therapy. This is not the end-all-be-all of mindfulness, however, as you can combine it with “radical acceptance” to dramatically shift your relationship with both your mind and the world around you.

The end result of long-term mindfulness therapy is that you will slowly experience more and more freedom in the way that you define your own sense of identity, and the way that you relate to the world around you. Ultimately, psychological flexibility is the result, enabling you to accept and exist in many situations where you previously would have suffered, now without experiencing any distress.