Waking Up Together: a mindfulness blog

What is mind up to when we are not focused on the task at hand? Research suggests that we are highly prone to mind wandering. Given the long list of benefits from mindfulness, or being present, lack of focus or wandering must be an undesirable state we need to avoid. But like most things in life, the answer is far from black or white. A deeper dive into the research reveals the subtlety of this question.

Research by Matt Killingsworth reveals mind wandering is a common occurrence.  Up to 47% of the time, we are lost in thoughts rather than focused upon the task at hand. His research reveals this occurs whether we like the current activity or not. Even when we do not like the activity, mind wandering results in less happiness than being present with the unpleasant experience. Score one for “no!” to mind wandering.

Amisha Jha’s research reveals our mind wandering tends to be comprised of self-reflection and negative affect. In other words, we think about ourselves and get depressed! Again, mind wandering looks like something to avoid.

But what about times when we find ourselves slipping off into a creative wandering mode. Consider...

Tags: mind wandering

Pick up an object, such as a pen, coffee mug, or iPhone. Pull back your arm and prepare to throw - now stop! Before the object leaves your hand, can you predict where it will land? Thanks to good ol’ Mr. Newton (of apple fame), we can predict where the object will come to rest.

OK, how about a coin toss?  Surely a coin toss is too random to know the outcome. Again, thanks to the wonders of mathematics, once we know all the initial conditions before the toss, we can predict heads or tails (coin tossing machines can generate a predictable toss 100% of the time). 

OK, you say, maybe we can predict the outcome of some simple physical objects in motion, but surely my happiness is beyond prediction. Or is it?

In our life, we also experience causality (aka Karma).  Every action results in an outcome. My reaction to an event will lead to a particular outcome, resulting in another reaction and another outcome and the cycle continues.  Just as we can predict that releasing an object will result in it dropping to the floor, we are capable of recognizing that clenching our teeth all...

Tags: happiness, suffering

Upon receiving a sensation (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and ideas) and weaving a narrative, we experience an emotion. Often, we are not even aware of this flow until we find ourselves in some unexpected mood.  And our typical reaction, as thinking beings, we ask, “Why?” Why am I feeling this way? Sometimes, the answer is apparent - something deemed either good or bad just happened and we immediately connect the dots. Wonderful! 

But what about the all too frequent occasions when the emotional math does not add up? How do we typically react? Do we double down on thinking our way out of this feeling, continuing to ask “Why?” When that still fails, we start to pave our path forward with shoulds: “I should be feeling…!”

In the end, we dig a deeper hole as we try to think the feeling.  If digging deeper fails to reveal the answer, perhaps a new approach is called for.  Instead of a problem to be solved, emotions are an energy to be experienced.

Mindfulness invites us to linger a little longer with unpleasant emotions. In doing so, we discover a powerful shift...

Tags: emotions

…but do I really want to stick to it?  Once we receive information through our six sensory doorways (taste, touch, smell, hear, see, think), the story-telling begins. The new information is not contained within a vacuum but immediately referenced against our history. Our internal referencing is far from accurate, as we recall similar experiences from our past that seem relevant to this information received in the moment. Typically occurring at a level of awareness far too low to be consciously acknowledged, we weave a tale that may or may not accurately assess the current experience. In essence, we become scriptwriters, spinning an internal narrative.  Any downstream effects, be they emotional or behavioral, are dependent upon these internal narratives.   We easily become lost in the emotional reactions deeply carved into these old stories, retold over and over, instead of opening to the fresh new scenario unfolding before our eyes (and ears, noses, skin, tongues, minds).

So, how accurate is your internal storyteller? When was the last time you reality-tested your internal narrator?  The first step in reality testing requires a gap between receiving and reacting. Mindfulness creates just such a gap. By developing the capacity to witness our internal storyteller, we...

Tags: imagine

Look around - what do you see? To our eyes, we appear to see solid objects before us, unchanging in this moment. But this stability is an illusion. Seeing is a creation of our brain. And research at MIT and Berkeley reveals this creation of seeing is an amalgamation of the information arriving at our eyes over the past 12 seconds. 

Now take a moment to count: "1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi"… all the way up to 12 Mississippis. How long did you remain focused on the task of counting? Did you drift off during a “Mississippi?” According to research by Matt Killingsworth, 43% of the time our mind wanders or drift off. And where do we drift off to? Research from Amisha Jha reveals we drift into a rumination about ourselves and experience a negative mood.

What do we discover when we combine these findings: our current perception is created over the past 12 seconds; about half of those past 12 seconds we are not even present; during those 5 seconds of mind wandering, we are ruminating about ourselves and feeling depressed. Let’s extrapolate that out to 24 hours - now that sounds like a fun...

Tags: perception

Early in life, it’s simple. Our days are filled with playing, eating, and sleeping.  As we grow older, new tasks to do appear. With only twenty-four hours, we cut back on the play, eat, and sleep to make room for these tasks - but we still make time for playing, eating, and sleeping. We know, on an intuitive level, that playing, eating, and sleeping are vital to our well-being.

At some point, like the proverbial boiled frog, our To Do list overflows, and the tasks become a higher priority than playing, eating, and sleeping. While the drivers for this flip are many, the outcome is the same: playing, eating, and sleeping are relegated to the “Later List.” A funny thing about this list - like the horizon, we never arrive in Later land. Our field of vision becomes a narrow slit, focused on the ever-demanding tasks of the To Do list.  Any activities that divert from these tasks receive the pre-requisite knee jerk of “I don’t have time for that!”  Welcome to the “Too Busy” trap - where playing, eating, sleeping or any activity that promotes health, creativity, and re-energizing...

Tags: balance, stress

A friend offers you three apples but discovers they only have two to give.  At another time, a friend initially offers you only one apple but then discovers they actually have two for you.  

Now the question: do you feel differently about these two exchanges? The outcome is the same – from a simple numbers perspective. But in multiple studies, the loss of the former item outweighs the gain of the latter one from an emotional perspective. Not only has this reaction been replicated several times with humans, but our primate cousins also demonstrate loss aversion. In other words, this tendency to feel loss more than gain goes way back in our evolution! 

We seem to have evolved to avoid loss.  We can easily see how this would be of benefit to us when our very survival depended on getting adequate food, shelter and clothing. Loss could easily mean death. But despite our nice cozy homes and overflowing grocery stores, this evolutionary fear remains. The same neurological networks are applied to any loss, be it tangible (“Who ate my cookie?!”) or less tangible (“Why has he not called me?!”). 

When these old emotional connections begin to ring out,...

Tags: loss

How will you engage this moment?  Will you flip the switch into autopilot? Or will you accept the invitation to step fully into the here-now?

Within every moment, we have an opportunity. We can continue to reinforce the habitual, the tried and true, the known. And in doing so, we will continue to arrive at the same outcome of all the past moments.

Or we can accept the invitation to step fully into this moment. To completely inhabit body.  What might we discover in this exploration of the here-now?  Who knows? And this is exactly the point. For it is in this moment that Life is unfolding. It is only in this moment that the answers dwell. It is only in this moment that we experience all that Life offers.

Leaving the familiarity of auto-pilot can be scary. Even though auto-pilot leaves us at the whim of our thoughts, at least the territory is known. At least the demons that dwell there carry no surprises as we have done battle time and time again. But what would it be like to drop the sword, expose those demons for the illusionary wisps of thought that they are? What...

Tags: freedom, mindfulness, thoughts

Tags: health behavior change

What is our brain up to when we are doing nothing?  Just like a car in idle, studies reveal an idle mode for our brain, as well. Amisha Jha’s research demonstrates a default network active at rest.  This network includes regions of our brain associated with self-referencing and negative affect. In other words, when we are doing nothing, we think about ourselves and become depressed! And just like a car's engine, we do not actively choose this mode. We naturally slip into the default network when we are not actively engaging our brain in a task.  Our typical escape from rumination is the denial/distraction reaction.

Except the denial/distraction reaction is a lousy alternative. Studies by Matt Killingsworth reveal denial and distraction are of limited benefit. Forty-three percent of the time, we are mind-wandering – not focused on the present moment. So even when we are doing something, we are off somewhere else as far as our brains are concerned!  We mind-wander during pleasant (even sex!) and unpleasant activities. And our wandering does not even make our unpleasant moments any less unpleasant.  We just (mentally) leave the unpleasant task and instead go ruminate about ourselves and feel...

Tags: meditation, mind, rumination