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Yuval Hadash[/caption]
Imagine being asked to sit alone in a quiet room for 15 minutes with nothing to do – no phone, no music, no external distraction. In a well-known 2014 study, many participants found that task so challenging that they chose to press a button to give themselves an unpleasant electric shock instead of continuing to sit with their thoughts.
Because being with their own thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations can be so difficult, people often turn away from them. Smartphones offer constant distraction from boredom or stress, allowing users to disengage from their present-moment sensations and thoughts.
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J. David Creswell[/caption]
But avoiding unpleasant internal experience can backfire. Studies show that doing so is associated with a range of mental health problems.
Mindfulness is a mental state that people can learn to cultivate through training. When people are mindful, they direct their attention toward their moment-to-moment bodily sensations, emotions and thoughts, and they meet those experiences with an attitude of curiosity and open acceptance.
Mindfulness can be cultivated through “mindful moments” in which people intentionally stay present with what they do, hear, see or feel. However, formal mindfulness meditation involves sustained practice that systematically trains attention and acceptance. Our research shows that training acceptance during mindfulness meditation can substantially improve your emotional well-being.
We’ve found that mindfulness practice can often feel surprisingly difficult. In one of our studies, participants who directed their attention to their thoughts and feelings during a 20-minute mindfulness meditation noticed six times more unpleasant experiences than pleasant ones.
This doesn’t mean they were doing it wrong. Turning your attention inward can feel challenging. Often, it brings you into contact with experiences that you normally try to push away. However, we’ve also found that facing difficult experiences during mindfulness training can have positive effects.
Adopting an accepting attitude toward your experiences seems to drive many of the positive effects of mindfulness. Our research shows that developing the capacity for acceptance through mindfulness meditation can reduce feelings of loneliness and increase positive emotions. It also reduces stress hormones and helps people notice more positive experiences during stressful situations.
We have found that acceptance is the critical driver.
A key part of mindfulness practice involves turning toward difficult experiences, such as stress, boredom and pain, rather than seeking distractions. It means noticing feelings and thoughts as they arise and approaching them with an attitude of acceptance.
In mindfulness practice, the goal is not to stop having unpleasant sensations and feelings. Instead, mindfulness helps people accept the unavoidable difficulties and to soften the reaction to unpleasantness by letting go of struggle with those experiences and reactions.
For example, let yourself feel bored without immediately reaching for a distraction. Acknowledge anxiety, sadness or grief with openness, instead of trying to suppress those feelings or fueling them with harsh self-criticism.
One way to cultivate this attitude is to treat thoughts, emotions and sensations as guests in your inner landscape. Instead of fighting them or clinging to them, notice when they arise. Acknowledge and welcome them, and when they naturally change, let them go.
Our findings suggest that meaningful change comes through consistent, ongoing practice. Mindfulness offers a different path: not escaping that experience but learning to stay with it. In doing so, what once felt unbearable can become something you can meet with greater emotional balance and well-being.
Yuval Hadash is a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. J. David Creswell is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University. Distributed by The Conversation and The Associated Press.
