1st week: mindfulness and depression
Before tackling this week’s actual subject matter, stop for a moment. Using the audio recording below, perform a three-minute “mini meditation” that will help you settle into the present moment.
3-minute meditation
What is mindfulness?
At its simplest, mindfulness (i.e. conscious presence) means focusing your attention consciously on something. The video below provides more detailed information on what mindfulness actually is.
What is mindfulness?
The three areas of practising mindfulness are:
- refocusing your attention,
- maintaining your attention, and
- shifting your attention.
Refocusing your attention means being able to focus on what you want to focus on. It sounds easy, but our attention has a tendency to automatically focus on either familiar things or things that clearly stand out from the environment.
Maintaining your attention refers to the skill that is commonly called concentration. It is about being able to keep your attention on what you want it to stay on. However, it is perfectly normal for our mind to act on its own and our attention to shift onto other things as if by itself. This calls for the ability to shift your wandering attention back to where you want it to be.
Another key aspect of mindfulness is how we look at things or what our attention is like. Examining something with a critical eye is entirely different from being curious about it. Correspondingly, the aim of practising mindfulness is to have a friendly and accepting attitude towards essentially everything.
In principle, conscious presence is simple, but many people find it difficult. Today, the hectic nature of our environment and the enormous amount of stimuli in it cause many to live in a constant state of hyper-arousal in which the body and the mind are on overdrive and it can be very difficult to be present. Therefore, it is good to bear in mind that practising mindfulness does not require having a calm mental state. You can try to have a friendly and curious attitude towards hecticness, stress and other unpleasant experiences as well.
As with learning almost any skill, what is key in learning mindfulness is active engagement. Mindfulness cannot be learned by merely reading and listening – doing exercises is the best way to learn.
Our behaviour and thought patterns tend to become more or less automatic, which is useful to humans. This automation enables us to multitask, e.g. drive and talk at the same time. However, this automation can also cause us to fail to notice many things in our experience. The more familiar something is, the more we tend to take it for granted.
Do the following exercise, which involves examining something very familiar consciously.
Raisin exercise
Think about your experience regarding the exercise. What kinds of thoughts were going on in your mind during the exercise? Did your mind start to criticise or wonder about the exercise? What kinds of sensations or emotions did you notice?
Think about how eating a raisin could be related to depression or depression sensitivity. Having done the exercise, are you able to notice things about yourself and your mind that could affect your mood in some situations?
We cannot promise you with certainty that you will benefit from this programme or predict what your potential benefits could be. However, we do know that research results show that mindfulness has been of help to many, especially in the treatment of depression. That is why we encourage you to invest yourself in going through this programme and practising mindfulness, even if you are sceptical about its benefits.
Our mind has a tendency to overanalyse, dwell on or worry about certain things, as well as a tendency to avoid, repress or push away different things. We can call these tendencies harmful thinking and avoidance. They make us focus our attention on everything that is difficult. The more we think about difficult things or the more we seek to get rid of them, the more power and influence they have over us.
By practising mindfulness, we can learn to notice these harmful tendencies of the mind and learn to use our mind in a new way. It sounds abstract, but this is what the whole thing is about. By practising, we can gradually learn that we can refocus our attention, flexibly in a way that supports wellbeing, onto both challenges and everything that we would otherwise fail to notice.
Mindfulness is an ability to focus our attention with an open mind on what we are doing while we are doing it. It is about tuning into what is happening in our mind, body and environment moment by moment.
Depression affects how the mind works – and how the mind works affects depression. You could think of depression as looking at the world through the screen of a camera. This camera zooms in on worries and troubles, focusing on everything that is difficult. Everything else in the view is blurred and grainy or cropped out entirely. The camera also has a filter activated that tints the image in unpleasant colours or desaturates it altogether. Practising mindfulness is like learning to use this camera in a different way: changing the angle, zooming out or focusing on pleasant things as well, and turning off the unpleasant filters.
Exercises for the week
This week, try refocusing, maintaining and shifting your attention. You can do this anytime and anywhere, but do it consciously. Focus your attention on your senses, interaction, activity – whatever you want. Try to keep your attention on these things for a while and then shift it consciously onto something else. Try to observe how this goes and what thoughts these trials arouse in you.
Do the conscious eating exercise every day as well. Write down your observations regarding the exercise: what kinds of thoughts, emotions and sensations you notice during the exercise.