Liberating Your Mind
/The contemporary version of mindfulness originated in the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who in the late 1970s developed what he called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) to help patients cope with chronic conditions, especially chronic pain. In an influential HuffPost Contributor article, Purser and Loy offered a trenchant critique of what this work on mindfulness has become, which they refer to as ‘McMindfulness’, equivalent to a standard hamburger with little nutritional value.
Mindfulness has joined a long list of panaceas promoted as offering greater happiness and good health, from supposed ‘Palaeolithic’ diets to meditation. They all fade more or less quickly in popularity, defeated either by the discipline required to maintain them or being exposed as little more than fads. Like meditation, mindfulness is promoted in part by invoking the cachet of being ‘Buddhist-inspired’, but to make mindfulness more acceptable as a means for enhancing corporate productivity, there is an accompanying insistence that the modern version is not tied to its Buddhist origins.
You can’t have it both ways, and as Purser and Loy point out, the transformation of mindfulness into a marketable product divests it of its ethical roots. Buddhist mindfulness ‘was intended for far more than relieving a headache, reducing blood pressure, or helping executives become better focused and more productive’. A notable Buddhist teacher during the 20th Century put the desire for happiness in perspective:
“Even though you may be unhappy, it doesn’t matter. Is that unhappiness your ‘self’? Is there any substance to it? Is it real? Unhappiness is a mere flash of feeling that appears and then vanishes. Happiness is the same. Is there any consistency to happiness? Is it truly an entity? It’s simply a feeling that flashes suddenly and is gone.”
(Ajahn Chah: Food For The Heart)
Purser and Loy do acknowledge the benefits that some people gain from attending mindfulness training programmes, and it is undoubtedly true that happy people are more effective and efficient than unhappy ones. The important question, though, is what you think is the cause of your feelings of joy or misery. For example, if you believe that your job or your manager is the source of your stress, then when you’re at work you’re bound to feel stressed – a mistaken belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The mistake is the attribution of stress to stimuli such as work or your boss, which is the essence of why using life event scales to measure stress is so misguided. The methodological and statistical shortcomings of the approach have been demonstrated, but a more general problem is that it creates victimhood – we become victims of whatever circumstance we imagine is causing our stress. Many of the situations we find ourselves in are beyond our control, so we also end up feeling powerless.
Unfortunately, there is a persistent belief in the idea that there are ‘stressors’, mainly because it provides us with someone or something to blame for the way we feel. In contrast to this stimulus-based approach, the Challenge of Change Resilience Training focuses instead on the way we respond to events. Change is a constant of life, good times alternating with less good ones, and resilience is the ability to negotiate the changes without becoming stressed.
In practise, this means not ruminating about emotional upsets. Rumination is what stress is: in the absence of churning over what ifs and if-onlys, there is no stress. There is still pressure, but responding appropriately to pressure – the demand to perform – is motivating and energising. Pressure does lead to an increase in cardiovascular activation, mainly through an increase in adrenaline, but adrenaline is not a ‘stress hormone’, just a hormone doing what it’s designed to do: facilitate action.
The increase in heart-rate and blood pressure provoked by adrenaline is entirely natural, but activation is in turn normally linked to recovery and repair. Peaks of activation are followed by troughs of recovery, in a natural homeostatic cycle, but you need only think about emotional upsets to provoke and maintain an increase in adrenaline. Negative rumination provokes and sustains the peaks, preventing adequate recovery and repair. It also prolongs the misery of negative churning, which is why stress, defined properly as rumination, has a significant impact on both our physical health and our well-being.
The good news is that rumination is primarily a learned habit, and the Challenge of Change offers a simple four-step process for changing the habit. Although it is not aligned explicitly with mindfulness, a central component of the training is controlling attention – harnessing and focussing awareness in an intentional way, which is one of the features of mindfulness. The training also provides a clear resolution for the question begged by the name, ‘mindfulness’: what is your mind full of?
It might be filled with thoughts about your next holiday or tonight’s meal, which in the training is called waking sleep. A synonym for this is daydreaming, which we all do to some extent. It isn’t damaging, but it can impact on efficiency: if your attention has been captured by fantasies about your next holiday, the piece of work in front of you comes to a standstill. The real problem, though, is when negative emotion is added. When your mind is filled with scenarios about emotional upsets, daydreams are transformed into nightmares.
To free yourself from stress, the first two steps of waking up and controlling attention need to be followed by the final two in the sequence. Becoming detached is about being able to maintain perspective, not catastrophising and turning molehills into mountains. This allows you to know the difference between constructive thinking and rumination. Finally, just let go, not of the task itself but of the negative rumination that might accompany it. Your mind is then left filled with attention, available to be given intentionally wherever it is needed. In fact, it was never absent, it was just hijacked by rumination.