Mindfulness offers another tool to improve mental health
By Deborah Jeanne Sergeant
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 42.5 million adults in the US have anxiety and 21 million have depression, including more than six million aged 12 to 17 who have major to severe depression. In addition to other treatments and practices, mindfulness may offer one means of helping those afflicted with anxiety and depression.
Autumn Gallegos Greenwich, PhD., licensed clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychiatry at URMC, has led several mindfulness-base stress reduction programs with the Center for Community Health and Prevention.
“With depression, you might ruminate on the past,” Greenwich said. “Anxiety is about anticipating what may happen in the future. It’s only in the present that we can learn, change something or grow. Mindfulness is about staying present. We train the mind as to how to pay attention in a particular way.”
This begins with paying attention to the body, beginning with breathing. Slowing breathing helps support the parasympathetic nervous system and calm the “fight or flight” response. People are better able to sensibly respond rather than react.
Mindfulness “teaches to stay present with mundane activities like washing dishes and brushing your teeth,” Greenwich said. “It’s staying close to your life and not going back into the past. The practice of attention with the senses and then we move into awareness. What is the story I’m telling myself? That allows us to move into the possibility of acceptance and allow things to be what they are. It doesn’t mean we like it. We say, ‘It is what it is.’”
The results are impressive. Many people in physical pain anecdotally report reduced physical pain through practicing mindfulness, as they are capable of accepting and moving through pain.
“Numerous clinical studies that have shown the benefits of mindfulness in all realms of life,” said Jean Sica, who leads tai chi and is a Mindful Movement instructor in Rochester. “For instance, the American Psychological Association has asserted that ‘mindfulness can help people avoid destructive or automatic habits and responses by learning to observe their thoughts, emotions and other present-moment experiences without judging or reacting to them,’” she said. “We can find similar information in documents from the National Institutes of Health, Harvard Med School and more. Study after study can be found about it.”
Slowing down is a key aspect of mindfulness and paying attention to sensory input: the feel of woolen mittens, the sound of snow squeaking under boots, the feel of snowflakes on the face and bite of cold in the air. It’s much easier to scurry through the weather on the way to the next errand while ruminating over the embarrassing incident at work yesterday.
“We all tend to be on automatic pilot, so getting yourself used to not being on auto pilot is mindful,” Sica said.
Kerri Howell, certified personal trainer and owner of The Hourglass Mom in Rochester coaches women on how to achieve better balance in life. She acknowledges the difficulty in creating space for mindfulness but encourages women to “incorporate time to be alone with your thoughts.”
One way to do this “is to align it with your spiritual life. Prayer is a form of mindfulness. If you struggle with committing to the time or get easily distracted, consider an app, such as Hallow or Calm, to help guide you. Peloton also has a mindfulness category. With an app, you can choose when to do it and for how long, plus you can explore different types of techniques.”
Sabrina Vogler, certified in professional executive coaching, life coaching and grief specialist, is also a certified teacher of mindfulness and owner of Heart in the Moment Mindfulness Coaching in Rochester, finds that mindfulness helps participants gain more perspective.
“Mindfulness lets us take a step back and get clear about what we’re most anxious about,” she said. “It gives us intel on the unmet need. Once we have that intel, we’re motivated to support ourselves to meet that need, whether within ourselves or whether we employ mindfulness tools for self-calming or outside to address relationships with people or resources we could access. That can be real game-changers for meeting that unmet need.”
It can be easy to over think an anticipated conversation coming up, for example. But mindfulness can help people better understand what is really bothering them.
“Once we feel more grounded and calmer, we adopt the perspective of a kind outside observer,” Vogler said. “We say, ‘What am I noticing about the emotions here? The thoughts here? Am I ‘time traveling’ and if so, how can I get clear on the unmet need?”
She calls emotional distress about the past or future “time traveling” because the brain “doesn’t know how to tell time” about stressful events.
“Whether we’re feeling depressed or anxious, there’s always the perception of a threat at hand, which makes us more stressed,” Vogler said. “Mindfulness helps us take a step back, rebalance the body chemistry and then look at ourselves through the perspective of a good friend which motivates us to meet ourselves in exactly the place we need to.”