30 Apr Interested in how mindfulness can reduce stress? Then read this…
Happiness – it’s a positive emotion.
Happiness – it’s also an absence of, or the effective management of negative emotions.
Happiness – it’s not necessarily then or when but now.
All of which hints at why mindfulness can be so helpful and useful…
via The Power of Ideas
It’s easy to get distracted in today’s world. There are a million things always going on at once and we’re always struggling to focus on them all with the same amount of attention. I’m sure at some point you’ve been so overwhelmed with a large number of things to do that you actually don’t get anything done because you’re bouncing back and forth between all of them. Being mindful isn’t exactly on that list of things to do.
But what does it mean exactly to be “mindful”?
This simply means that you’re focusing on what’s happening in that very moment you’re in. You’re paying attention to that one thing and one thing only. Buddhism is where the idea of being mindful came from originally. Eventually it made its way around to the West.
The idea is simple, although it’s easier said than done. When your mind is so rattled with thoughts, it can be hard to organize them. When you’re taking time to focus on one thing at a time, you’re removing a stress out of your life and you’re also allowing yourself to be more productive and positive.
You can finally switch out of autopilot and and pay attention to your surroundings. According to Dr. Kabat-Zin, mindfulness does just that for your mind. It allows you to become more aware of your habits and patterns that are causing you stress so that you can focus on that and work to change it.
The idea of open focus
Open focus is just allowing your focus to be flexible rather than narrow. A neuroscientist and psychologist at Princeton University named Dr. Lester Fehmi says that stress and anxiety actually causes our attention to become too narrow and can even stress us out more! By focusing too much on one thing, you can end up feeling distant. Dr. Fehmi also came up with a helpful idea called The Four Attention Styles theory.
This theory spells out the four different and unique was that we all pay attention. The four are narrow, objective, immersed, or diffused. Narrow and objective seem to interchangeable and the same goes for immersed and diffused. When you’re practising open focus, you’re able to touch on all four subjects and balance them accordingly…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE