What makes practicing mindfulness so challenging is also what makes it liberating. The ability to choose where to direct your focus without becoming overwhelmed by thoughts and feelings is a powerful skill.
However, the positive outcomes of mindfulness often go unnoticed by those around you. I encourage you to explore this practice for yourself and discover whether the intrinsic rewards are worth the effort.
I don’t run on treadmills to get better at running on treadmills. I do it to challenge my heart, lungs, and muscles, which gives me more energy and vitality.
There's something very similar at play with mindfulness practice. I don’t practice every day to improve my ability to sit still in quiet rooms. I do it to savor pleasant moments more, to escalate inevitable discomforts less, and to keep an appreciation of our shared humanity alive.
This is way more complicated than just trying to stay calm all the time. Attentional skills are interconnected, and similar to physical exercise, cross-training can enhance your development.
Being able to savor what feels good sets the stage for becoming more comfortable being uncomfortable. Observing how difficult it actually is to fully enjoy pleasant moments without clinging to them—while also trying not to amplify sad or anxious feelings into misery—can continually remind us of the universal challenges we all face in navigating our lives.
Changing how you relate to your feelings in real-time changes everything. It won't happen overnight, and you’ll need to work on the related attentional skills for the rest of your life, but it is unquestionably worth the effort.
What I'm describing doesn't replace therapy or the development of interpersonal skills, but it can enhance both of these aspects and many others in life. It's not a conceptual or intellectual exercise, but more like developing muscle memory.
If I had to choose one key lesson that could significantly improve your life, it would be the cultivation of paradoxically neutral responses to unpleasant sensations and perceptions.
The exercise below allows you to dip your toe into noticing unpleasant emotional waters. Practicing it a couple of times a week could give you plenty to work on throughout the rest of the year.
If you start now, you will gain an advantage in navigating the challenges that often arise during the holiday season. Even without the added stress of family obligations, this effort can gradually transform how you engage with work, dating, making friends, using social media, consuming news, and determining where to invest your energy in improving your corner of the world.
Just because it's not popular doesn't mean it's not liberating.
If you're curious about exploring it, here are some tips:
Take it slow. Emotional regulation takes time to develop, and there is always room for improvement. Instead of expecting dramatic results in just ten days and rushing to demand a full refund, try practicing for a few months. You may be surprised to notice a reduction in drama in your life—not immediately, but much sooner than you think.
Scale down. Don't wait for a major crisis to start addressing your emotions, and don’t begin with the most intense or frustrating challenges. Instead, start by focusing on the mild and moderate unpleasant feelings that are part of everyday life. Pay attention to subtle annoyances before they escalate.
Investigate pleasant feelings, too. Although subtle pleasant emotions will never insist on your attention, catching them anyway can add a delicious texture to your life. Smiling and laughing, even when they're not entirely sincere, can enrich your emotional awareness palette. The ability to observe any feeling, regardless of the particular flavor, impacts your capacity to experience a full range of emotions.
Ease up. When observing your feelings escalates or drains you, try easing up. You might unintentionally be trying to eliminate the feeling instead of simply observing it. This can be especially tricky because it's so counterintuitive, but trying to make a feeling go away usually makes it worse.
The only way to get better at regulating problematic feelings is to be willing to experience them more often, regardless of whether they fade, persist, or even intensify. Scale down instead of giving up. Give it time.
Practice to prepare for social situations. Emotional regulation becomes significantly more challenging when we are interacting with others. As social creatures, we often struggle to remain objective about our own thoughts and feelings when trying to understand those of other people. Timed mindfulness practice done alone in stillness can equip us to recognize emotional clues when we're making our way through the world and interacting with others.
Just like working out, training your attention can be inconvenient. At times, it might seem like it takes too long before you see substantial results, which can be frustrating. However, when you start to manage your emotional reactions more effectively, you'll be grateful for the effort you invested.
Exercise
This exercise cultivates a paradoxically neutral quality of attention to change how you relate to unpleasant emotional feelings in the body.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
disrupting your doomscrolling
anticipating a difficult conversation
getting ready for an anxiety-generating party or meeting
watching the news or listening to a podcast
