What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness can be a powerful tool for taking control of your thoughts, enabling you to concentrate on the positive and filter out the negative, and with practice, you’ll find it helps greatly to ease anxiety and stress.
It is essentially about concentrating on the ‘now’. Which may sound a little strange - right? But it’s about taking the time to focus on our senses, paying attention to what we are feeling and being in the present moment, kind of like a simpler version of meditation.
By being more aware of where we are, by noticing what we are doing and what we are thinking, we can actually have greater control of our lives by changing the way we react to situations, other people’s emotions and other external influences.
You know how sometimes you’re watching Netflix but you’re also on your phone, and then suddenly the movie or episode is over but you don’t even remember what it was about? Or that block of chocolate you were just going to have a couple of nibbles of is actually all gone, but you can’t remember what it tasted like? Or saying something and then thinking- I didn’t really mean to say that. Mindfulness would be about giving Netflix your full attention with no distractions, or eating the chocolate while only thinking about how delicious it is, or being more deliberate with words we use - because you will only gain the maximum enjoyment from these activities by focusing on one thing at a time.