How Successful People Stay Calm

The ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance.

The tricky thing about stress (and the anxiety that comes with it) is that it’s an absolutely necessary emotion. Our brains are wired such that it’s difficult to take action until we feel at least some level of this emotional state. In fact, performance peaks under the heightened activation that comes with moderate levels of stress. As long as the stress isn’t prolonged, it’s harmless.

Research from the University of California, Berkeley, reveals an upside to experiencing moderate levels of stress. But it also reinforces how important it is to keep stress under control. The study, led by post-doctoral fellow Elizabeth Kirby, found that the onset of stress entices the brain into growing new cells responsible for improved memory. However, this effect is only seen when stress is intermittent. As soon as the stress continues beyond a few moments into a prolonged state, it suppresses the brain’s ability to develop new cells.

“I think intermittent stressful events are probably what keeps the brain more alert, and you perform better when you are alert,” Kirby says. For animals, intermittent stress is the bulk of what they experience, in the form of physical threats in their immediate environment. Long ago, this was also the case for humans. As the human brain evolved and increased in complexity, we’ve developed the ability to worry and perseverate on events, which creates frequent experiences of prolonged stress.

Besides increasing your risk of heart disease, depression, and obesity, stress decreases your cognitive performance. Fortunately, though, unless a lion is chasing you, the bulk of your stress is subjective and under your control. Top performers have well-honed coping strategies that they employ under stressful circumstances. This lowers their stress levels regardless of what’s happening in their environment, ensuring that the stress they experience is intermittent and not prolonged.

While I’ve run across numerous effective strategies that successful people employ when faced with stress, what follows are ten of the best. Some of these strategies may seem obvious, but the real challenge lies in recognizing when you need to use them and having the wherewithal to actually do so in spite of your stress.

They Appreciate What They Have

Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the “right” thing to do. It also improves your mood, because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. Research conducted at the University of California, Davis found that people who worked daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude experienced improved mood, energy, and physical well-being. It’s likely that lower levels of cortisol played a major role in this.

They Avoid Asking “What If?”

“What if?” statements throw fuel on the fire of stress and worry. Things can go in a million different directions, and the more time you spend worrying about the possibilities, the less time you’ll spend focusing on taking action that will calm you down and keep your stress under control. Calm people know that asking “what if? will only take them to a place they don’t want — or need — to go.

They Stay Positive

Positive thoughts help make stress intermittent by focusing your brain’s attention onto something that is completely stress-free. You have to give your wandering brain a little help by consciously selecting something positive to think about. Any positive thought will do to refocus your attention. When things are going well, and your mood is good, this is relatively easy. When things are going poorly, and your mind is flooded with negative thoughts, this can be a challenge. In these moments, think about your day and identify one positive thing that happened, no matter how small. If you can’t think of something from the current day, reflect on the previous day or even the previous week. Or perhaps you’re looking forward to an exciting event that you can focus your attention on. The point here is that you must have something positive that you’re ready to shift your attention to when your thoughts turn negative.

They Disconnect

Given the importance of keeping stress intermittent, it’s easy to see how taking regular time off the grid can help keep your stress under control. When you make yourself available to your work 24/7, you expose yourself to a constant barrage of stressors. Forcing yourself offline and even — gulp! — turning off your phone gives your body a break from a constant source of stress. Studies have shown that something as simple as an email break can lower stress levels.

Technology enables constant communication and the expectation that you should be available 24/7. It is extremely difficult to enjoy a stress-free moment outside of work when an email that will change your train of thought and get you thinking (read: stressing) about work can drop onto your phone at any moment. If detaching yourself from work-related communication on weekday evenings is too big a challenge, then how about the weekend? Choose blocks of time where you cut the cord and go offline. You’ll be amazed at how refreshing these breaks are and how they reduce stress by putting a mental recharge into your weekly schedule. If you’re worried about the negative repercussions of taking this step, first try doing it at times when you’re unlikely to be contacted — maybe Sunday morning. As you grow more comfortable with it, and as your coworkers begin to accept the time you spend offline, gradually expand the amount of time you spend away from technology.

They Limit Their Caffeine Intake

Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the source of the “fight-or-flight” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you’re responding to a curt email. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyperaroused state of stress, your emotions overrun your behavior. The stress that caffeine creates is far from intermittent, as its long half-life ensures that it takes its sweet time working its way out of your body.

They Sleep

I’ve beaten this one to death over the years and can’t say enough about the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence and managing your stress levels. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough — or the right kind — of sleep. Sleep deprivation raises stress hormone levels on its own, even without a stressor present. Stressful projects often make you feel as if you have no time to sleep, but taking the time to get a decent night’s sleep is often the one thing keeping you from getting things under control.

They Squash Negative Self-Talk

A big step in managing stress involves stopping negative self-talk in its tracks. The more you ruminate on negative thoughts, the more power you give them. Most of our negative thoughts are just that — thoughts, not facts. When you find yourself believing the negative and pessimistic things your inner voice says, it’s time to stop and write them down. Literally stop what you’re doing and write down what you’re thinking. Once you’ve taken a moment to slow down the negative momentum of your thoughts, you will be more rational and clear-headed in evaluating their veracity.

You can bet that your statements aren’t true any time you use words like “never,” “worst,” “ever,” etc. If your statements still look like facts once they’re on paper, take them to a friend or colleague you trust and see if he or she agrees with you. Then the truth will surely come out. When it feels like something always or never happens, this is just your brain’s natural threat tendency inflating the perceived frequency or severity of an event. Identifying and labeling your thoughts as thoughts by separating them from the facts will help you escape the cycle of negativity and move toward a positive new outlook.

They Reframe Their Perspective

Stress and worry are fueled by our own skewed perception of events. It’s easy to think that unrealistic deadlines, unforgiving bosses, and out-of-control traffic are the reasons we’re so stressed all the time. You can’t control your circumstances, but you can control how you respond to them. So before you spend too much time dwelling on something, take a minute to put the situation in perspective. If you aren’t sure when you need to do this, try looking for clues that your anxiety may not be proportional to the stressor. If you’re thinking in broad, sweeping statements such as “Everything is going wrong” or “Nothing will work out,” then you need to reframe the situation. A great way to correct this unproductive thought pattern is to list the specific things that actually are going wrong or not working out. Most likely you will come up with just some things — not everything — and the scope of these stressors will look much more limited than it initially appeared.

They Breathe

The easiest way to make stress intermittent lies in something that you have to do everyday anyway: breathing. The practice of being in the moment with your breathing will begin to train your brain to focus solely on the task at hand and get the stress monkey off your back. When you’re feeling stressed, take a couple of minutes to focus on your breathing. Close the door, put away all other distractions, and just sit in a chair and breathe. The goal is to spend the entire time focused only on your breathing, which will prevent your mind from wandering. Think about how it feels to breathe in and out. This sounds simple, but it’s hard to do for more than a minute or two. It’s all right if you get sidetracked by another thought; this is sure to happen at the beginning, and you just need to bring your focus back to your breathing. If staying focused on your breathing proves to be a real struggle, try counting each breath in and out until you get to 20, and then start again from 1. Don’t worry if you lose count; you can always just start over.

This task may seem too easy or even a little silly, but you’ll be surprised by how calm you feel afterward and how much easier it is to let go of distracting thoughts that otherwise seem to have lodged permanently inside your brain.

They Use Their Support System

It’s tempting, yet entirely ineffective, to attempt tackling everything by yourself. To be calm and productive, you need to recognize your weaknesses and ask for help when you need it. This means tapping into your support system when a situation is challenging enough for you to feel overwhelmed. Everyone has someone at work and/or outside work who is on their team, rooting for them, and ready to help them get the best from a difficult situation. Identify these individuals in your life and make an effort to seek their insight and assistance when you need it. Something as simple as talking about your worries will provide an outlet for your anxiety and stress and supply you with a new perspective on the situation. Most of the time, other people can see a solution that you can’t because they are not as emotionally invested in the situation. Asking for help will mitigate your stress and strengthen your relationships with those you rely upon.

P.S. If you liked this post then you’ll like my books as well. You can get them on Amazon.

If you’re a human and you have a brain, then you probably like using your brain. And if you like using your brain, then you love having those epiphany moments where your hair blows back and you go “Whoa” you like to change how you see the world every now and then.

My favorite moments reading non-fiction are when a book bitchslaps my brain and reconfigures my entire understanding of reality and my place within it.

I love that. It’s like a mind orgasm.

I get asked a lot about book recommendations and I have done a few already but here goes another one because I never know what the hell to say because so many of the books that have influenced me have done so not because they’re so good or brilliant, but mostly because they addressed the issues I was going through at the time I was reading them.

So instead of divulging what my favorite books are, I’ll leave you with something better: seven of the most mind-fucking, reality-reshaping,“Whoa” inspiring books that I’ve ever read.

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

What It’s About: Stumbling on Happiness is like the red-headed stepchild of happiness books. It doesn’t fit in with the rest because it basically tries to convince you that you don’t even know what the hell makes you happy in the first place, so why stress out about it?

Gilbert is a famous Harvard psychologist who has a knack for coming up with zany experiments that show just how flawed and biased the human mind is. In the book, he shows you time and again that as humans, we inaccurately judge, among other things, what made us happy in the past, what will make us happy in the future, and even what is making us happy right at this moment.

In fact, decades of Gilbert’s research on happiness all points to the same unsettling fact: happiness has little to do with what happens to us in our lives, and more to do with how we end up choosing to see things.

Gilbert’s theory is that we each have a “psychological immune system,” basically a bullshit generator where our minds explain away our past experiences, our future projections and our current situations in such a way that we always maintain a baseline level of mild happiness. And it’s when this “immune system” fails that we fall into prolonged depression and/or existential crises.

Quotes

“We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy… But our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.”

“Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.”

Read This Book If… …you enjoy Harvard professors who reference The Beatles in every chapter and make jokes about quadriplegics. …you are interested in behavioral economics and irrational decision-making. …you’ve always had a hunch that you are completely full of shit but would like 400 pages of psychological research to confirm it for you.

…you want to read a book that explains happiness without mythologizing it or worshipping it.

On The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche

What It’s About: Hidden beneath the bombastic prose, the angry rhetoric, the shameless blasphemy and a mustache the size of a small child’s leg, Nietzsche wrote with a cold and stark logic. On The Genealogy of Morals, perhaps his shortest and most influential work, was starkest of all. In three essays totaling around 100 pages, he lays out the following:

1. In any population, you are going to have a group of people who are more talented/gifted/intelligent than average. Let’s call them The Strong. You are also going to have a group of people who are less talented/gifted/intelligent than average. Let’s call them The Weak.
2. The Strong will naturally accrue the power in society for no other reason than they are more capable and talented than the others.
3. Because The Strong won their greater power and influence through outsmarting or outperforming others, they will come to adopt ethical beliefs that justify their position: that might makes right, that they are entitled to their privileged position, that they earned what is theirs. Nietzsche calls this “Master Morality.”
4. Because The Weak lost their power and influence by being outsmarted and outperformed, they will come to adopt ethical beliefs that justify their position: that people deserve aid and charity, that one should give away one’s possessions to the less fortunate, that you should live for others and not yourself. Nietzsche calls this “Slave Morality.”
5. Master/Slave Moralities have been in a kind of tension in every society for all of recorded history. Many political/social conflicts are side effects of the struggle between Master and Slave Moralities.
6. Nietzsche believed that the ideas of guilt, punishment and a “bad conscience” are all culturally constructed and used by The Weak to chip away at the dominance and power of The Strong. He also believed that Slave Morality is just as capable of corrupting and oppressing a society as Master Morality. He used Christianity as his primary example of this.
7. Nietzsche believed that Slave Morality stifled man’s greatest characteristics: creativity, innovation, ambition, and even happiness itself.

Quotes

“Above all, there is no exception to this rule: that the idea of political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority.”

“Without cruelty, there is no festival.”

Bonus Points For: Claiming that the weak people had to invent God so that they could believe their suffering actually meant something. Nietzsche was a pretty hardcore dude.

Read This Book If… you’re the kind of sicko like me who finds obtuse 19th century German philosophy to be excellent beach reading. you won’t be offended if some angry German dude rhetorically punches Jesus Christ in the vagina and calls your God a sissy over and over again.

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Taleb

What It’s About: Taleb has a handful of amazing ideas. I’m talking potentially life-changing, world-affecting ideas. These ideas can be explained well in about 50 pages. The other 450 pages are mostly him trying to prove how cool and cultured he is while explaining how much smarter he is than the following groups of people: academics, politicians, Nobel Prize winners, Wall Street analysts, economists, journalists, statisticians, historians, soccer moms, teachers, anybody who uses the bell curve, anybody in the social sciences, and anyone who disagrees with him.

So what are his handful of earth-shattering ideas in Antifragile? Well, here’s the starting point:

1. Often the most influential events in history are, by definition, the least anticipated. These are called “Black Swan” events.
2. As humans, we are inherently biased against noticing both the number of random events in our lives and the impact these random events have on us.
3. That due to the exponential scaling of technology, Black Swan events are becoming more common and influential than ever before.
4. Therefore, we should build up systems (and ourselves) to be “antifragile,” that is, to construct our lives and our societies in such a way as to benefit from major unanticipated events.

Quotes

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

“The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”

“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.”

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

What It’s About: The True Believer discusses why people give in to fanaticism, fundamentalism, or extremist ideologies.

The book is perhaps the most to-the-point and non-bullshitty philosophical work I’ve ever read. And the power of Hoffer’s short sentences can take your breath away. See below.

Quotes

“The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.”

“The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”

“Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual. And as freedom encourages a multiplicity of attempts, it unavoidably multiplies failure.”

Read This Book If… you want to know why people give up their identities for some insane cause. …you wonder how war and revolutions are even possible.

…you want to read something smart but don’t want to wade through hundreds of pages of gibberish and academic jargon to understand it.

Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

What It’s About: Freud was an academic sensation at the beginning of the 20th century. He had invented psychoanalysis, brought the science of psychology to the mainstream, and was highly regarded in intellectual circles around Europe. Then World War I broke out, and destroyed, well, just about everything. Freud was deeply moved by the devastation and fell into a deep depression and secluded himself for much of the 1920s. Civilization and Its Discontents was the result of this depression.

The book makes one simple argument: that humans have deep, animalistic instincts to eat, kill or fuck everything. Freud argued that civilization could only arise when enough humans learned to repress these deeper and baser urges, to push them into the unconscious where (according to his model) they would fester and ultimately generate all sorts of neuroses.

Freud basically came to the conclusion that as humans, we had one of two shitty options in life: 1) repress all of our basic instincts to maintain some semblance of a safe and cooperative civilization, thus making ourselves miserable and neurotic or 2) to let them all out and let shit hit the fan.

Quotes

“It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.”

“A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object.”

Bonus Points For: Basically arguing that we’re all fucked and there’s no hope for any of us. And doing it convincingly.

Read This Book If… …you like the explanation that the only problem any of us have is that we want to fuck and/or kill everybody in sight, yet we’re not allowed to. …you basically hate humans and think they’re a bunch of rape-hungry assholes waiting to stab each other over a sandwich.

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

What It’s About: In the beginning of The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil shows that the processing power of computers and technology has increased exponentially through history and is likely to continue doing so.

He then argues that because of this, in the year 2046 all of our brains are going to be digitally encrypted and uploaded to the cloud where we will all form a single, immortal consciousness that will control all computing power on the planet.

No, seriously.

And the fucked up part is that some of his explanation of how this is going to happen makes sense. Kurzweil claims, among other things, that baby boomers are the first generation that will conquer aging and death, and that he wants to digitally transcribe his dead father’s brain into computer software so he can like, you know, Skype chat with good ol’ dad again.

The technological possibilities presented in this book are truly mind-boggling. And we will undoubtedly see a significant percentage of them in our lifetime. Medical nanobots that live in the blood stream that we wireless upload vaccines to. Genetic programming for newborns so parents can choose not only the physical characteristics of their children but their talents as well. Uploading and downloading consciousness onto the internet, so that you could download somebody else’s life experiences as your own.

The whole immortality, one-computerized-world-consciousness thing? I’ll believe it when I see it. But if you can trudge through hundreds of pages of technical explanations of genetic engineering, quantum computing and artificial intelligence to see the implications of some of what we’re likely to experience in the next 50 years — well, get ready son: shit’s going to get wild.

Notable Quotes:

“One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.”

“Can the pace of technological progress continue to speed up indefinitely? Isn’t there a point at which humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up? For unenhanced humans, clearly so. But what would 1,000 scientists, each 1,000 times more intelligent than human scientists today, and each operating 1,000 times faster than contemporary humans (because the information processing in their primarily non-biological brains is faster) accomplish? One chronological year would be like a millennium for them. What would they come up with?”

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

What It’s About: Speaking of being afraid of dying… Here’s The Denial of Death in a nutshell:

Because man is the only animal capable of conceptualizing his own existence — thinking about his life, questioning it, imagining future possibilities — man is therefore also the only animal capable of conceptualizing his own non-existence, i.e., his own death.

In other words, humans were given the gift of being able to imagine the future and who we want to be, but the price we pay for this gift is the realization that we will one day die. A dog doesn’t realize that he’s going to die. Neither does a fish. Or a roach. But we do.

This knowledge of our own inevitable death leads to a kind of ever-present “terror” that underlies everything we do. Becker argues that this terror inspires us all to take on what he calls a “hero project,” where we attempt to immortalize ourselves through our deeds and actions, to create something bigger than ourselves that will live beyond our own lives.

It’s when people’s hero projects contradict one another that we get conflict, violence, bigotry, and evil. It’s when hero projects fail that we fall into deep despair and depression because we’re once again confronted with the inevitability of our own death and meaninglessness of our lives.

Quotes

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.”

“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”

“What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such a complex and fancy worm food?”

Read This Book If…

…you plan on dying one day. …you think you take life a little bit too seriously sometimes and need to chill.

…you want to read a convincing argument for why we should embrace our pain and our fear rather than avoid it.

Hope you enjoyed these recommendations and until next time.

15 Thought-Provoking Ram Dass Quotes

I recently stumbled upon Ram Dass and found his words quite interesting and thought provoking so in the following you’ll read some of the quotes I remembered and wrote down, hope you enjoy!

1)“After meditating for some years, I began to see the patterns of my own behavior. As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance more clearly, struggles, inner dialogues, the way in which you procrastinate and develop passive resistance against life. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You don’t have to change them. Things just change.”

2)“We’re all just walking each other home.”

3)“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”

4)“It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.”

5)“The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can’t have it. The minute you don’t want power, you’ll have more than you ever dreamed possible.”

6)“Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.”

/)“The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it’s in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I’m caught in an unstable situation. Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.”

8)“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”

9)“A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there’s work to be done.”

10)“Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.”

11)“In our relationships, how much can we allow them to become new, and how much do we cling to what they used to be yesterday?”

12)“Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.”

13)“The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that’s happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization.”

14)“Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.”

15)“There’s much more in any given moment than we usually perceive, and that we ourselves are much more than we usually perceive. When you know that, part of you can stand outside the drama of your life.”

If you liked them then I also recommend you those books by him I found them to be quite enjoyable!

Books by Ram Dass:

Be Here Now

Polishing the Mirror

Journey of Awakening

P.S. If you liked this post then you’ll like my books as well. You can get them on Amazon.

P.S. If you liked this post then you’ll like my books as well. You can get them on Amazon.

How To Exercise the Mind

Almost every week we hear new ways that mindfulness and meditation can help with our problems. Anxiety, insomnia, depression, stress, binge-eating, substance abuse, ADHD… the list goes on. In some workplaces such as Google, mindfulness has become ubiquitous in the culture, with on campus meditation rooms and mindfulness seminars offered.

It’s a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot as a solution for distress, but it still feels out-of-reach for many. How do I know this? When I mention mindfulness to patients, I often hear agreement with a hint of dismissiveness. “Of course, of course…” followed by an excuse (i.e. can’t sit still), “it doesn’t work for me (I can’t make my mind blank),” or “I like to go to yoga sometimes,” as if that should be the end of the discussion. Some people might admit that being left alone with their thoughts is the last thing they want to do.

Not surprisingly, when asked to explain what they think meditation entails, most people talk about making their mind blank or they might say it is focusing on breathing, which are both misleading. If you search the web about mindfulness, you will find many resources promoting a path to mindfulness, but it is hard to get a clear, concise description of what it is and how it works. What is the actual definition of mindfulness and meditation? How are they related to each other? Do you have to go to an ashram and fast in order to be a legit practitioner (No)?

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a state of mind in which you become the observer to your thoughts and feelings so that you no longer have to react to them. This might make more sense with the use of imagery. You can think of most people as swimming in the river of their thoughts and feelings at any point in time. Some people can go their whole lives swimming in that river without a problem, assuming that anything they think, feel, or do is valid and consistent with who they are. But most people will at some point experience rough currents, often precipitated by stress. And if you have a predisposition for mood dysregulation, anxiety, or other mental illness, the waters can get quite turbulent. For example, Johnny gets passed up for a promotion and feels worthless. His mind fixates on thoughts of his worthlessness, which triggers a downward spiral of negative thinking and depression. This is Johnny being swept away by his unexamined mindstream. Mindfulness, on the other hand, is the state of mind in which he can stand on a bridge overlooking the river of his thoughts and feelings so that he doesn’t get swept away. Johnny can see his negative thoughts go by and choose not to react or pay attention to them.

What is meditation?

While mindfulness is a state of mind, meditation* is the practice that leads one to be able to achieve mindful states more easily. There are other ways to access and exercise mindfulness states (nature meditation, guided meditation, visualization, body scanning), but meditation cuts straight to the core of it. You can think of it like training for a race. It would be nice to be in shape and be trained to run when you need to (some people may need to often). Similarly, meditation is the practice of standing on that bridge so that the mind muscles are in shape to be able to stand on that bridge when needed. At first it is tedious and painful. Meditation involves sitting still for longer periods of time than you are used to, so the back muscles might also have to get trained. But just like training for a marathon, little by little, over time, you can begin to sit for stretches of time.

What exactly are you doing when practicing meditation?

A lot of what you are doing is focusing attention on your breathing. It is a useful sensation to focus upon because your body does it automatically and it can feed back into the nervous system to change your autonomic state. Slower diaphragmatic breathing puts us into more of a rest and digest state conducive to mindfulness states. Much of mindfulness and meditation involves focusing on body sensations because it is a grounding experience that gets us out of our heads (that river of thoughts and feelings) and into the present. The breath is used as the grounding experience that we can return to in order to let go of the thoughts that are generated in our mindstream. So, while focused on the breathing, thoughts will inevitably come up. It is important to keep in mind that you cannot stop thoughts from coming up. They just bubble up from somewhere in the mind machinery.

After the thought surfaces you focus your attention on that particular thought and label it as a thought. Then you examine it like a compassionate scientist and handle it gently. Oh, this is a thought that my mind came up with. Hmmm, look at that. If it’s a negative thought, you might recognize it as such. The goal is to remain in the observer stance to give space to examine the thought without reacting.

Next, you let the thought go. How do you do that? By focusing back on the breath. You might even imagine your exhale as blowing the thought out of your attention. Why is this important? Because if you can intentionally shift your focus and let go of a thought (after looking at it) then the thought loses power over you and becomes like any other thought. Like water under the bridge.

Now back to the breathing… and then another thought pops up… label… examine… let go… focus on breath… rinse, repeat. Unfortunately, you may have to get past boring thoughts of your to-do list before more interesting thoughts occur. And you may only be able to sustain this for 5 minutes at first, but that’s ok. You will gradually train the mind muscle to tolerate and maybe even enjoy longer stretches.

Mindfulness during distress

When we are in distress there is often a component of negative thinking that is perpetuating distress. These thoughts can be powerful and intrusive, commanding our attention. It is highly compelling to react to these thoughts by avoiding, lashing out, pushing down, or distracting oneself. You can think of these thoughts as terrorists hijacking your mind. For example, Johnny thinks that everyone in the room is judging him negatively. He is highly tempted to flee (calling negative attention to himself) or drink heavily (shutting down thoughts). Instead, he takes a time out in the bathroom and uses mindfulness concepts. He looks at his anxious thought that everyone is judging him negatively. He recognizes that these are the same old terrorist thoughts that hijack his mind and lead him to bad outcomes. He refuses to negotiate with terrorists. He chooses instead to focus on his breathing, shift his attention to more reasonable thoughts, and wait for his anxiety to subside. He then returns to his function in a calmer state of mind. This process is much easier once the mind has been trained through mindfulness practice.

How does mindfulness fit into your life?

While meditation cuts to the core of mindfulness practice, it may not be the right fit for everyone, especially to start. You may need to walk before you run, and some people are just fine with swimming. There are other forms of mindfulness practice that use body sensations or visualizations to help focus attention away from the mindstream and there are plenty of ways to explore this. But now that you have read the nuts and bolts of what mindfulness is, how you can do it, and what it can do for you, I challenge you to leave the theoretical world of the mindstream and experience it for yourself.

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