8 Days of Happy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
8daysofhappy) wrote2011-07-30 06:04 pm
8daysofhappy) wrote2011-07-30 06:04 pm
Originally posted 7th May 2011: Day Three: Mindfulness
Day One: Fanfic
Day Two: Friendships
Day Three: Mindfulness
So, um. Mindfulness is a Buddhist concept and practice that has been used in the last thirty or so years in Western psychology to treat and manage depression, chronic pain, and many other conditions. While I have read the work of some Buddhist writers on mindfulness -- in particular, Thich Nhat Hanh has a lot of very accessible work written with a Western audience in mind -- my knowledge of and attitude towards mindfulness is one of someone using it as a tool to treat depression, rather than a spiritual or religious process.
I'm not trying to disclaim my use of mindfulness, but I do want to put it in context. What I am trying is not to be hurtful or disrespectful. If I'm failing and you feel up to telling me, I will do my best to listen.
Mindfulness as I know it is a way of guiding one's thoughts and attention in a natural and non-judgmental manner. It can be meditation or simply being in the moment -- "washing dishes in order to wash dishes". I suspect a lot of you who've ever received CBT, DBT or other types of therapy will have been introduced to mindfulness exercises at one point or another.
The following are eight mindfulness exercises that work for me out of the many, many I've met over the last nine (nine? wow) years. I hope some of you can find something useful in some of them, whether or not you've met the idea before.
Finding a smile
You know that incredibly annoying thing people say? That if you fake a smile you'll feel happier? Perhaps you don't find it incredibly annoying, in which case this exercise will be a piece of cake for you, but for years it really upset me. I couldn't work out which was worse -- the unpleasant sensation of forcing a rictus grin or the completely facile attitude to my unhappiness.
So, the first mindfulness exercise I want to talk about is about finding a smile that feels right on your face.
Try to consciously relax your face. This might take a moment; you might want to relax it a bit at a time, starting with your forehead, then your eyes, then your cheeks, then your mouth. Now spend a moment -- the length of two, maybe three deep breaths -- concentrating on what that feels like.
Now make the tiniest hint of a smile you can. It might not even show on your face, it might just be the quirking of a muscle, the potential for your mouth to change shape. Focus for a moment -- again, two, maybe three deep breaths -- on how that feels.
Now keep making tiny steps towards a smile. Don't worry about whether your steps are small enough -- if you can't just quirk one muscle, don't fret, just take whatever size steps you can do. Maybe you'll only take two or three to get from a slack face to a full grin; maybe you'll take ten. But at each step, stop for a moment to try to focus on what that feels like.
It really, honestly don't have to be making you feel better. In fact, it probably won't, especially not the first time. But what it will do is give you practice focussing your attention, and it will hopefully allow you to find some sort of smile that does feel okay on your face.
ETA: Great tip fromanotherusedpage on this one:
Flushing a smile through your body
This is my default exercise for when my mind is over-full with thoughts and my body is all "YOU WILL FEEL MISERABLE NOW" at me.
So, here I'm going to use "smile" as a shorthand for "facial expression that feels okay, maybe even nice?" For me, it's kind of a half-smile -- the sort of private smile I wear when I've just thought of an awesome pun but this would be a bad time to share it with other people. I've just looked in a mirror to see what it looks like to other people, and I just look calm and a little foolish, like someone doing a failed impression of the Mona Lisa. :)
This one will probably work best if you read all the instructions and then try it out with your eyes closed -- but whatever works for you.
First, I sit down and take a couple of deep breaths. Then I close my eyes and try to find my smile. At the start it used to take a while, but now it's like slipping into a comfortable old shirt. Now, with my eyes closed, I imagine the smile sitting on the top of my head. Then it's on the top of my head and my forehead. Then it covers my eyes, too. Then it slips over my face, until I'm imagining the sensation of that smile on my whole head. Each step takes a few moments -- first to imagine it, then to notice what it feels like.
I let the smile travel slowly down my whole body. My neck. Then my shoulders. Then my arms (bit by bit), then my chest, then my stomach. You get the idea. Each step takes a few moments -- imagine, then feel.
One thing that's nice about this is it doesn't matter if other thoughts flit through your head. Mindfulness is supposed to (and for me does) help with managing thoughts and focussing at one thing at a time, but it's a long process and the exercises are still useful even when you can only bring some of your attention to the task at hand.
Naming colours
This one is good for me when I keep on having the same conversation / argument / whatever over and over in my head, or I keep reliving an awful moment, or something like that. When there's a repetitive thought process that I want to stop -- but if I focus on it enough to try, I just get drawn in again.
The idea is simple. Just look around you and name the colours you see. Don't attach them to anything, and don't listen to your preconceptions. Don't look at the grass and think, "Grass: green." If you can see yellow-brown, name that, and if you look at the shadows and you see grey-green, name that, and if you look at the wet bit and it's closer to white-ish, name that, and name the light green and the dark green and the green-green as well. If I look at my light blue jeans right now, I see blue and sky blue and white and yellow and grey and dark blue and black and beige. If I look at my deep red top I see brown and black and red-black and plum and light brown.
It's about focussing your attention on visual input. You're not expected to, like, un-see that there's grass in front of you or un-know that grass "is" green. You just take the extra moment to pay attention to what your eyes are actually telling you, as well as what your brain says about it. It's good both to give your thoughts a concrete task and to practice guiding your focus.
I imagine you can do the same for other senses, too, though for me hearing, smell and taste are much less useful and doing it for touch actually makes me more uncomfortable and twitchy.
Ten deep breaths
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Breathe in for the count of five. Feel what it's doing to your throat, your lungs, your belly, your chest. Hold it for the count of five. Feel what it's doing to your body. Let it go for the count of five. Feel what it's doing to your body. And then pause for the count of two before taking your next breath.
Observe without judgment (But that's my least favourite kind of observation!)
This is a general mindfulness technique that can be practised on its own or as a frame of mind in which to do other exercises. I thought at first I should put it as the first exercise, because, y'know, very useful to keep in mind for all the exercises, but personally I only really understood the point of this after I'd tried out a whole bunch of other mindfulness ideas.
Observing without judging is the kind of simple concept that can be hard to execute. The idea is -- wait for it -- you observe the situation you're in without judging.
If it's hot, it's hot. If it's cold, it's cold. It's not good or bad, it just is. If you're trying out, say, the colours exercise, then you observe each colour without attaching a value to it -- if there's a stain on your shirt, it's not annoying, it's just a collection of different colours to name.
And then if you observe yourself judging, you note that without judgment. "Oh, I'm annoyed by that stain. Okay. That's what I'm feeling right now. I'm also feeling hungry, a little bored and slightly fretful that I'm not doing this exercise right. And part of my mind is wondering what to have for dinner. That's not good, that's not bad, that just is. And now I will try to name colours again."
An analogy that works for me is the idea of treating your mind like a puppy. It's easily distracted and off chasing seventeen things at once, and you just calmly, without blame, bring it back to the thing you're trying to do. There's no point in scolding it for being a puppy, but it's useful to be able to observe what it's doing and guide that. And just like a puppy, with time and training, your mind will get better at staying on the thing you're trying to stay on.
If you know the show Peep Show, it might be helpful to think of this as the anti-Peep Show. You want to avoid the kind of thoughts and thought processes that make the voiceovers in the show so funny -- guide yourself away from "Shit, shit, I just cocked up, oh cocking cock, shit, she's looking at me, say something, say something funny, NO NOT THAT."
Mindfully doing the washing up
This is the "washing dishes in order to wash dishes" thing. The idea is that in this moment, this is the only moment you are in. Instead of keeping your mind on the end goal or judging what you're doing as pleasant / unpleasant / useful / useless / etc, you're just doing it.
It's a good way to practice observing without judgment. You observe what you are doing, you observe what you are feeling/thinking, and you try to anchor your thoughts on the process of washing up.
It's easy to slip into a mindless trance while doing this, and to let your body just continue washing up while your mind flits around to what you want to do next, whose fault it is that there is gunk in the sink, how many more dishes there are, that really embarrassing thing you said yesterday, what's going to happen on next week's episode of Community, etc, etc, etc.
This is the opposite of what you want -- though if you observe yourself doing it, which you might well, then try to observe that without judgment. And if you find yourself judging, try to observe that without judgment, too.
Face massage
It occurs to me that three of these exercises now centre around sensations in the face. I guess that's just what works for me, but there's no reason I can think of that you can't try this, or the smile exercises, with some other part of your body.
This is an anchoring technique for me. I close my eyes and I firmly trace the lines of my face outwards, using a steady pressure from two fingers of each hand moving symmetrically. Man, that's a bad description. Um. This picture might help?
Anyway, the idea is it's a good way of focussing your attention on something easy and physical in your body that feels good. If it doesn't feel good and you can't find a way to make it feel good, then it might not be the exercise for you. It also helps me relax my face out of a tense frown or worried scrunch.
Radical acceptance
Before you can climb your way out of a ditch, first you have to accept that you're in one.
This is about not falling into the trap of "Yes, but it shouldn't be."
If you feel shitty, then you feel shitty -- it doesn't matter that you don't want to or that you think you ought to be able to do something about it or that you feel guilty for feeling disproportionately shitty or whatever. First you have to accept that you feel shitty, and then you can do something about it. If you spend your mental energy on judging your shitty state or denying that you feel bad or wanting to feel better, then you're still in the same damned ditch and you're no closer to getting out of it.
This is one of those things that took me a long, long time to grasp. Why the fuck would I want to accept bad things rather than struggle to change them or, at least, not dwell on them? But this isn't about dwelling, this is about being able to assess your situation mindfully -- without judgment -- before charging off in the wrong direction to fix what you want to be wrong, rather than what is wrong.
Day Two: Friendships
Day Three: Mindfulness
So, um. Mindfulness is a Buddhist concept and practice that has been used in the last thirty or so years in Western psychology to treat and manage depression, chronic pain, and many other conditions. While I have read the work of some Buddhist writers on mindfulness -- in particular, Thich Nhat Hanh has a lot of very accessible work written with a Western audience in mind -- my knowledge of and attitude towards mindfulness is one of someone using it as a tool to treat depression, rather than a spiritual or religious process.
I'm not trying to disclaim my use of mindfulness, but I do want to put it in context. What I am trying is not to be hurtful or disrespectful. If I'm failing and you feel up to telling me, I will do my best to listen.
Mindfulness as I know it is a way of guiding one's thoughts and attention in a natural and non-judgmental manner. It can be meditation or simply being in the moment -- "washing dishes in order to wash dishes". I suspect a lot of you who've ever received CBT, DBT or other types of therapy will have been introduced to mindfulness exercises at one point or another.
The following are eight mindfulness exercises that work for me out of the many, many I've met over the last nine (nine? wow) years. I hope some of you can find something useful in some of them, whether or not you've met the idea before.
Finding a smile
You know that incredibly annoying thing people say? That if you fake a smile you'll feel happier? Perhaps you don't find it incredibly annoying, in which case this exercise will be a piece of cake for you, but for years it really upset me. I couldn't work out which was worse -- the unpleasant sensation of forcing a rictus grin or the completely facile attitude to my unhappiness.
So, the first mindfulness exercise I want to talk about is about finding a smile that feels right on your face.
Try to consciously relax your face. This might take a moment; you might want to relax it a bit at a time, starting with your forehead, then your eyes, then your cheeks, then your mouth. Now spend a moment -- the length of two, maybe three deep breaths -- concentrating on what that feels like.
Now make the tiniest hint of a smile you can. It might not even show on your face, it might just be the quirking of a muscle, the potential for your mouth to change shape. Focus for a moment -- again, two, maybe three deep breaths -- on how that feels.
Now keep making tiny steps towards a smile. Don't worry about whether your steps are small enough -- if you can't just quirk one muscle, don't fret, just take whatever size steps you can do. Maybe you'll only take two or three to get from a slack face to a full grin; maybe you'll take ten. But at each step, stop for a moment to try to focus on what that feels like.
It really, honestly don't have to be making you feel better. In fact, it probably won't, especially not the first time. But what it will do is give you practice focussing your attention, and it will hopefully allow you to find some sort of smile that does feel okay on your face.
ETA: Great tip from
anotherusedpage on this one: A tip to add to the smile one: remember it's not just about your mouth! There are muscles in all sorts of places in your face that do different things depending on what you are feeling and that can get into positive or negative feedback loops with your emotions. Other important places to experiment with how they are when you are smiling include your eyebrows, the line of muscles between your ears and your eyes, and the line of muscles between the bridge of your nose and the top of your forehead.
I am terrible at being able to smile when I feel miserable. But now I know is that a good first step is to raise my eyebrows and remember there's lots of space between my eyes and my ears. It doesn't feel as 'false' as smiling when I'm sad, and it stops the negative feedback loop of 'unhappiness = tight facial muscles = tension and decreased blood flow = unhappiness'
Flushing a smile through your body
This is my default exercise for when my mind is over-full with thoughts and my body is all "YOU WILL FEEL MISERABLE NOW" at me.
So, here I'm going to use "smile" as a shorthand for "facial expression that feels okay, maybe even nice?" For me, it's kind of a half-smile -- the sort of private smile I wear when I've just thought of an awesome pun but this would be a bad time to share it with other people. I've just looked in a mirror to see what it looks like to other people, and I just look calm and a little foolish, like someone doing a failed impression of the Mona Lisa. :)
This one will probably work best if you read all the instructions and then try it out with your eyes closed -- but whatever works for you.
First, I sit down and take a couple of deep breaths. Then I close my eyes and try to find my smile. At the start it used to take a while, but now it's like slipping into a comfortable old shirt. Now, with my eyes closed, I imagine the smile sitting on the top of my head. Then it's on the top of my head and my forehead. Then it covers my eyes, too. Then it slips over my face, until I'm imagining the sensation of that smile on my whole head. Each step takes a few moments -- first to imagine it, then to notice what it feels like.
I let the smile travel slowly down my whole body. My neck. Then my shoulders. Then my arms (bit by bit), then my chest, then my stomach. You get the idea. Each step takes a few moments -- imagine, then feel.
One thing that's nice about this is it doesn't matter if other thoughts flit through your head. Mindfulness is supposed to (and for me does) help with managing thoughts and focussing at one thing at a time, but it's a long process and the exercises are still useful even when you can only bring some of your attention to the task at hand.
Naming colours
This one is good for me when I keep on having the same conversation / argument / whatever over and over in my head, or I keep reliving an awful moment, or something like that. When there's a repetitive thought process that I want to stop -- but if I focus on it enough to try, I just get drawn in again.
The idea is simple. Just look around you and name the colours you see. Don't attach them to anything, and don't listen to your preconceptions. Don't look at the grass and think, "Grass: green." If you can see yellow-brown, name that, and if you look at the shadows and you see grey-green, name that, and if you look at the wet bit and it's closer to white-ish, name that, and name the light green and the dark green and the green-green as well. If I look at my light blue jeans right now, I see blue and sky blue and white and yellow and grey and dark blue and black and beige. If I look at my deep red top I see brown and black and red-black and plum and light brown.
It's about focussing your attention on visual input. You're not expected to, like, un-see that there's grass in front of you or un-know that grass "is" green. You just take the extra moment to pay attention to what your eyes are actually telling you, as well as what your brain says about it. It's good both to give your thoughts a concrete task and to practice guiding your focus.
I imagine you can do the same for other senses, too, though for me hearing, smell and taste are much less useful and doing it for touch actually makes me more uncomfortable and twitchy.
Ten deep breaths
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Breathe in for the count of five. Feel what it's doing to your throat, your lungs, your belly, your chest. Hold it for the count of five. Feel what it's doing to your body. Let it go for the count of five. Feel what it's doing to your body. And then pause for the count of two before taking your next breath.
Observe without judgment (But that's my least favourite kind of observation!)
This is a general mindfulness technique that can be practised on its own or as a frame of mind in which to do other exercises. I thought at first I should put it as the first exercise, because, y'know, very useful to keep in mind for all the exercises, but personally I only really understood the point of this after I'd tried out a whole bunch of other mindfulness ideas.
Observing without judging is the kind of simple concept that can be hard to execute. The idea is -- wait for it -- you observe the situation you're in without judging.
If it's hot, it's hot. If it's cold, it's cold. It's not good or bad, it just is. If you're trying out, say, the colours exercise, then you observe each colour without attaching a value to it -- if there's a stain on your shirt, it's not annoying, it's just a collection of different colours to name.
And then if you observe yourself judging, you note that without judgment. "Oh, I'm annoyed by that stain. Okay. That's what I'm feeling right now. I'm also feeling hungry, a little bored and slightly fretful that I'm not doing this exercise right. And part of my mind is wondering what to have for dinner. That's not good, that's not bad, that just is. And now I will try to name colours again."
An analogy that works for me is the idea of treating your mind like a puppy. It's easily distracted and off chasing seventeen things at once, and you just calmly, without blame, bring it back to the thing you're trying to do. There's no point in scolding it for being a puppy, but it's useful to be able to observe what it's doing and guide that. And just like a puppy, with time and training, your mind will get better at staying on the thing you're trying to stay on.
If you know the show Peep Show, it might be helpful to think of this as the anti-Peep Show. You want to avoid the kind of thoughts and thought processes that make the voiceovers in the show so funny -- guide yourself away from "Shit, shit, I just cocked up, oh cocking cock, shit, she's looking at me, say something, say something funny, NO NOT THAT."
Mindfully doing the washing up
This is the "washing dishes in order to wash dishes" thing. The idea is that in this moment, this is the only moment you are in. Instead of keeping your mind on the end goal or judging what you're doing as pleasant / unpleasant / useful / useless / etc, you're just doing it.
It's a good way to practice observing without judgment. You observe what you are doing, you observe what you are feeling/thinking, and you try to anchor your thoughts on the process of washing up.
It's easy to slip into a mindless trance while doing this, and to let your body just continue washing up while your mind flits around to what you want to do next, whose fault it is that there is gunk in the sink, how many more dishes there are, that really embarrassing thing you said yesterday, what's going to happen on next week's episode of Community, etc, etc, etc.
This is the opposite of what you want -- though if you observe yourself doing it, which you might well, then try to observe that without judgment. And if you find yourself judging, try to observe that without judgment, too.
Face massage
It occurs to me that three of these exercises now centre around sensations in the face. I guess that's just what works for me, but there's no reason I can think of that you can't try this, or the smile exercises, with some other part of your body.
This is an anchoring technique for me. I close my eyes and I firmly trace the lines of my face outwards, using a steady pressure from two fingers of each hand moving symmetrically. Man, that's a bad description. Um. This picture might help?
Anyway, the idea is it's a good way of focussing your attention on something easy and physical in your body that feels good. If it doesn't feel good and you can't find a way to make it feel good, then it might not be the exercise for you. It also helps me relax my face out of a tense frown or worried scrunch.
Radical acceptance
Before you can climb your way out of a ditch, first you have to accept that you're in one.
This is about not falling into the trap of "Yes, but it shouldn't be."
If you feel shitty, then you feel shitty -- it doesn't matter that you don't want to or that you think you ought to be able to do something about it or that you feel guilty for feeling disproportionately shitty or whatever. First you have to accept that you feel shitty, and then you can do something about it. If you spend your mental energy on judging your shitty state or denying that you feel bad or wanting to feel better, then you're still in the same damned ditch and you're no closer to getting out of it.
This is one of those things that took me a long, long time to grasp. Why the fuck would I want to accept bad things rather than struggle to change them or, at least, not dwell on them? But this isn't about dwelling, this is about being able to assess your situation mindfully -- without judgment -- before charging off in the wrong direction to fix what you want to be wrong, rather than what is wrong.