Looking after yourself, as well as your body
Looking after yourself, as well as your body
Monash Life | Thriving Communities | So how are you really? | 2 minute read
Professor Craig Hassed OAM, from the Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies, says that mindfulness can help us fight negativity – one bear at a time.
Wouldn’t it be great just to switch off from the excessive worry that drives stress and anxiety, whenever you choose? Well, it turns out that if you master the art of mindfulness, you can.
“Research into mindfulness and its techniques and benefits is growing exponentially, and it’s becoming clearer that there are potential benefits it brings to our mental health,” says Professor Craig Hassed from the Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies.
“We need to train ourselves to unhook attention from worrying about the things that we can’t control and engage it instead in the present-moment things we can control.”
While mindfulness has been around for thousands of years, the first clinical trial into its effectiveness for depression was published only 23 years ago. “The therapy called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy was inspired by the work of Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn from the US.
“It was proven to help prevent the relapse of depression – the biggest single burden of disease in developed countries around the world – so it was very big news in healthcare,” says Hassed.
Today, we know this one generic skill of mindfulness has an incredible number of applications – improving mental health, reducing depression, anxiety and stress, and generally helping people function and communicate more effectively.
“But are we there yet, have we cracked it? No, there’s more work to do around who in the mental health space it helps most, how to deliver it most effectively, how to engage people – and of course how to understand that there are people for whom it is not appropriate. There is still much to learn.”
Listen to What Happens Next Podcast part 1
Mindfulness is the act of switching your exclusive focus to the here and now, being present in the current moment – and thereby dropping all thoughts of anything else. “In depression, there’s a lot of rumination, negative self-talk, endless commentary running in the mind, and that feeds particular attitudes, moods and our way of looking at the world,” says Hassed.
“The term for that internal dialogue is default mental activity – and it is abundant in states such as anxiety or depression. When the attention is continually drawn to that, it feeds anxiety and depressive mood and influences how we see the world.”
Our reactions to a major threat stem from our human fight-or-flight response, says Hassed. “That’s a vital part of survival, making you adapt instinctively to a clearly perceived present-moment threat – think about our ancestors facing a bear, a tiger or whatever.
“The unfortunate thing is that when we’re not mindful, we often activate that stress response when we don’t need it – for example, when we imagine what might happen in the future: ‘What if the traffic’s bad and I miss the meeting?’ ‘What if the presentation doesn’t go well?’ ‘What if I fail the exam?’
“We’re stressing about a future that may not even happen. There is no bear in the room – the bear is in the imagination, but we take the imagination to be real and, boom, that’s the fight-or-flight response.
“That anxiety is an inappropriate activation of a fantastic response, and when we’re needlessly activating that stress response again and again, it produces an effect on the body called allostatic load, a literal physiological wear and tear.
“A lot of the symptoms of depression are the result of inflammatory chemicals formed as a result of unnecessary and excessive activation of the fight-or-flight response.”
But with mindfulness, he says, we can detach ourselves and look instead at the world around us – life, people and things we’re doing, even if that’s something mundane like just walking down the street or doing the dishes.
“From being in a world of negative self-talk in our head, we’re seeing and noting the sun coming through the trees, or that the birds are singing, or concentrating on tasting the food we’re eating or the car we’re driving.”
Listen to What Happens Next Podcast part 2
Shifting that focus from worry and rumination, says Hassed, also requires a change in our attitude. “Emotional negative activity – criticising something, hating it, wishing it wasn’t there, getting reactive, judging it – just fixates our attention on it even more, giving it attention it doesn’t deserve. That escalates the intrusiveness in our thoughts and shifts our focus off what we can do to deal with a situation.
“But mindfulness switches off the default circuits, quietens the amygdala – a turbocharge button in the brain that helps us to escape threatening stimuli – and develops in us a naturally more accepting, non-reactive, kinder, more self-compassionate attitude. Worry may still come into our field of awareness, but it passes more easily, and so creates less disturbance on the way through.
“With practice, the mind gets better at choosing what thoughts to engage the attention with, and you learn to be less controlled by unhelpful patterns of thought. It helps us fight that one bear we may occasionally see but stop running from all the other bears and tigers that exist only in our imagination.”
Professor Craig Hassed works in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, is Director of Education at the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies, and is coordinator of mindfulness programs across Monash.
So how are you really? Professor Hassed’s top tips:
- Punctuate your day with two full stops. “Sit in a chair and be mindful for a few minutes at the beginning and end of the working day, to give yourself some space between work and life outside it.”
- Punctuate the working day with little commas. “After you’ve finished a meeting, just stop for 30 seconds, be present, connect with where you are, to prepare your mind for what comes next. Mindfulness can simplify life enormously. It focuses you on one thing, one moment, one step at a time.”
