“Mindfulness involves paying attention to something, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally….You actually have to tell your brain that is your intention. It won’t know what you’re doing, and it will priorities its activities based on your emotions or your mental energy or your physical needs.”
Stan Rodski, The Neuroscience of Mindfulness, (2019)
Another good book released earlier this year on mindfulness. A psychologist/cognitive neuroscientist, talks about the basics of mindfulness.
Unless you take control of your thinking mind, it will run you. Your conscious awareness needs to direct your thinking mind to stop. It doesn’t need to stop for long to de stress your over cluttered thinking thoughts. But stop it must.
Without conscious attention to stopping, your brain will run on auto-pilot and continue to rehash all the unresolved traumatic events of your past.
This fast paced period of time in our history is stressing your fight/flight emergency system out. Most of our stress is from past traumas where our nervous system has not fully come down from the high alert state, created by one event or the high level of continued pressure from many events, in our current environment.
TV news is traumatic to your body. Video and satellite crosses and instant transfer of bad news from any part of the globe was never there one hundred years ago. Now it is on tap, through TV, social media, radio, newspapers etc. And your body responds as if it is a secondary traumatic event happening to you now.
Witnessing a traumatic event can be just as traumatic to your body as actually being in the event.
So it is very important to consciously each day have the awareness to switch off and stop at some point, or at a number of points.
De stressing daily is vital to your health.