4 Healthful Benefits of Practicing Mindfulness
Why do we want to pursue mindfulness?
What are the benefits to us and the world?
Before we seek to integrate such a practice into our lives, these are good questions to ask.
In this article, we'll feature a few of the answers, but first, consider the question for yourself. What comes to mind?
Maybe mindfulness is of interest to you because you'd like to improve your overall health and wellness. It could be that you want to focus more in your academic or professional life. Perhaps it's something even more personal, like managing anxiety or improving interpersonal relationships.
Whatever your reasons, there is never a wrong or difficult time to begin being more mindful. Once you understand the basics, it's simply a matter of practice.
In the meantime, here is just a handful of the potential benefits a dedicated mindfulness practice can bring you.
Mindfulness improves holistic health.
Practising mindfulness can improve overall health—mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual—in several ways, almost too many to list here. That said, it all begins with awareness.
Think of how mindfulness works. It's awareness-based, which means you focus on the sensations in and around you in the moment, without judgement. Could this awareness of what is happening in your body guide you toward making more healthful choices?
Everybody wants to feel good and healthy. Knowing how our systems are working can help us pinpoint what we need to improve or the vitality we wish to maintain.
The article 23 Amazing Health Benefits of Mindfulness for Body and Brain presents these intriguing findings related to awareness:
"… a study of how the two facets of mindfulness impact health behaviors found that practicing mindfulness can enhance or increase multiple behaviors related to health, like getting regular health check-ups, being physically active, using seat belts, and avoiding nicotine and alcohol (Jacobs, Wollny, Sim, & Horsch, 2016).
Another study on mindfulness and health showed that mindfulness is related to improved cardiovascular health through a lower incidence of smoking, more physical activity, and a healthier body mass index (Loucks, Britton, Howe, Eaton, & Buka, 2015)."
How else can mindfulness improve our health? Let's look at some examples:
In this study, researchers asked a group of middle-aged men and women to supplement their regular hypertension therapy with MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction) therapy over two months. In nearly all cases, the addition of mindfulness contributed to a significant decrease in blood pressure in the participants.
In another fascinating two-year study, a control group was prescribed mindfulness practice, among other approaches, to monitor its effects on the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's disease. The results indicated that mindfulness training produced considerable improvements as measured by post-study cognitive testing.
An additional study focuses on how mindfulness meditation increases something called telomerase activity. This is an enzyme function that is crucial to preventing the onset of many diseases, including coronary heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, cancer, and osteoporosis.
These are just a few examples of the thousands of studies that link mindfulness practice to improved health. However, it's essential to note that mindfulness isn't a quick fix for all our ailments. In all cases, these are results that practitioners have produced through a sustained application over some time.
What's the moral? Any health-enhancing practice like exercise, diet, or mindfulness should be adopted as a lifelong journey.
Mindfulness builds compassion.
As we discussed, mindfulness involves awareness, just as much of others as ourselves. Becoming more aware of the suffering of others is how we begin fostering compassion.
In Zen practise, we become conscious of our interrelation to all living things; we are all connected. Our suffering and discomfort connect us as much as our joy. Neither is inherently good or bad, but rather exist as internal states in the journey of life.
When another person suffers, we can feel compassion by being present and non-judgmental, regardless of whether we know them or not. Empathy is free and plentiful and heals the heart of both the giver and the receiver.
“Any health-enhancing practice like exercise, diet, or mindfulness should be adopted as a lifelong journey.”
One consideration is that compassion is not about fixing problems for people. It is not meant as an antidote for suffering, and it doesn't require you to be a problem-solver or saviour to the other person.
Again, it involves awareness, acceptance, and acknowledgement. It is a way of saying, "I see you, I hear you, and I share your burden."
Sharing the burden of another, a high act of compassion, lightens that burden for all. The more we foster compassion through mindfulness, the more we ease the suffering of all—an ambitious gesture, perhaps, but worth every moment of our collective effort.
Mindfulness relieves stress.
Stress is pervasive in our frantic fast-food culture of immediacy. Today, as parents and working professionals, we often suffer from what Charles Hummel referred to in his famous 1960s business treatise as "the tyranny of the urgent".
Hummel suggested that we live in a state of tension due to our attention spans being divided between "important" and "urgent" things. More often than not, urgent things consume us, which leads to undue stress.
Mindfulness lets us take a step back from this unrelenting grip on our consciousness so we can deeply consider the things that are important in the moment.
Here is a simple exercise to try. Whenever there's a moment you are feeling stressed out or anxious about the tyranny of the urgent, stop and pause. Take a deep breath, and ask yourself: What is most important right now?
Chances are it will have nothing to do with what is causing your stress in that instant. Why? Because what is important is not necessarily urgent, and vice versa.
So what can we fit under the umbrella of importance? Think bigger concepts, such as your emotional wellbeing, security, the safety of your children, or real connection with your loved ones.
The more you use mindfulness to focus on what is important, the less you'll be a victim of stress-generating urgency.
Mindfulness can improve memory.
What can help us better understand how mindfulness enhances our memory is knowing what Zen refers to as the "monkey mind."
Being monkey-minded means having a mind that is unsettled, restless, and out of control. Our brains entertain thousands of thoughts every day, most of which are trivial and unimportant. Think of all the mental energy and focus we waste on such thoughts!
If we can use our mindfulness to filter out these thoughts by paying them no attention and focusing on the moment, we retain much more capacity for remembrance and retention. This takes a lot of practice, because most of us have lived with our monkey minds all our lives.
In Zen practise, we become conscious of our interrelation to all living things; we are all connected. Our suffering and discomfort connect us as much as our joy.
We have simply accepted that such mental frenzy is what possessing consciousness is all about. Another more scientific term for it is "proactive interference", meaning our past memories impede our brain's ability to retrieve and retain more recent information.
So, when we use mindfulness to focus on the present moment and attach no importance to past thoughts, we naturally improve our ability to retain important information and learning in our memory.
There is science behind this concept as well. In one 2019 study, the participants took either four weeks of mindfulness instruction or took a creative writing class. At the end of the study, each participant underwent a battery of memory tests. The results of the tests concluded the mindfulness-trained participants exhibited the most significant improvements in their short-term memory.
In another study published in 2018 in the peer-reviewed journal Brain Imaging and Behaviour, researchers discovered that regular mindfulness practice increased the density of the hippocampus.This is the part of the human brain that plays a crucial role in sustaining and improving both working memory and long-term memory.
So we know from all this that mindfulness practice, when done effectively, can indeed improve one's memory. We all forget things sometimes, but we can clearly reduce what we forget through a consistent mindfulness practice.
To Your Health
There are so many more reasons to practice mindfulness, but these are noteworthy enough as their influence can extend into other realms of health and wellness. Again, you just have to decide you're going to begin.
Rest assured, our community is here to support you. Reach out if you have any questions, and we'll be happy to help you get started. A mindful world is a better world, after all.
Here's to your health!