The Science Behind Mindfulness and Mental Clarity
Are you interested in mindfulness? Perhaps you’re a touch stressed about work or things in your personal life. Or maybe, you just feel as though you’re not truly living in the present, and that you could pay more attention to the here and now.
Whatever the case, you’re in the right place. This article will explore the scientific basis for mindfulness practices and how they contribute to improved mental clarity, emotional regulation, and stress reduction. We’ll include practical examples of how to implement mindfulness, such as mindful breathing, meditation, and body scans.
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present in the moment. Being mindful means being aware of where we are and what we’re doing. It also helps us avoid feeling overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s happening to or around us.
Many people find that they either dwell on the past or project into the future, by worrying about mistakes they’ve made, or stressing about scenarios that may happen. When we’re in this frame of mind, we’re not mindful of what is happening right here, right now.
Mindfulness practices embrace the present moment, help to ground us in the now, and help us to be aware of our thoughts, emotions, responses, and reactions to events in our lives.
How Mindfulness Works
Mindfulness practices have their roots in the Eastern traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Today, folks all over the world practice a range of mindfulness techniques, both traditional and modern, in all sorts of settings. Mindfulness is used to manage anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, chronic pain, stress, and more.
Mindfulness meditation practice asks us to suspend all judgment of the workings of our mind and unleash our natural curiosity and interest about what is happening for us at the moment. We allow ourselves to be fully present in each moment with awareness, warmth, and kindness to both ourselves and others.
While this may sound wacky to some, the research actually suggests that developing the capacity to observe ourselves and our surroundings deeply, non-judgmentally, and with compassion has a deeply nurturing effect on our wellbeing that can ripple out into our daily lives and communities.
Benefits for the Brain and Body
When you sit down to practice mindfulness, you intentionally place your internal focus of attention in the practice. You can induce a unique state of brain activation during this practice.
With repetition, this intentionally created state of mind can become an enduring trait in our minds, resulting in long-term changes in brain function and structure. This is a fundamental property of the scientific concept of neuroplasticity, which is how the brain changes in response to experience.
With mindfulness meditation, the experience is focusing your attention in a particular manner on the present moment and your thoughts and emotions within that.
A growing body of evidence from research supports the theory that mindfulness practice can measurably alter your brain’s structure and function. These changes are thought to be responsible for improvements in emotional regulation, memory, stress response, learning, perspective-taking, and even more.
Mindfulness may even help the body fight disease. Meditators who went through an eight-week mindfulness training program were found to have significantly more flu antibodies than their non-meditating peers after they received a flu vaccine, according to a peer-reviewed, randomized controlled study published in Psychosomatic Medicine, a leading journal.
After measuring the brain activity of both meditators and non-meditators, the researchers found increases in both positive feelings and antibody responses to immune system challenges.
Mindfulness Techniques
There is a range of mindfulness practices we can attempt.
One of these is mindful breathing, which is an activity that asks you to pay attention to your breath – a core foundation of most meditation practice.
Meditation is another method, too, and there are heaps of resources available for mindfulness meditations, including apps and guided meditations on YouTube.
Meditation can lead to improved mood and greater well-being, and an ability to navigate the pressures of modern life successfully. There are even stories of high-powered corporate executives using meditation to bring balance and calm to their lives, enabling them to deal with the demands of a high-pressure job more aptly.
Finally, a body scan is an excellent mindfulness technique that involves scanning your body from head to toe, identifying zones of tension and stress, and aiming to release these.
If you’re keen to learn how to implement mindfulness into your self-care practices, professionals qualified through courses like an online social work program are trained to guide clients on evidence-based mindfulness techniques.
Counselors, therapists, mindfulness meditation coaches, and other professionals are also able to support people with mental health and other issues to implement mindfulness practices, with the proven impacts on mind and body that we’ve discussed above.
And that’s the science behind mindfulness and mental clarity.
