THAT'S MEN: Mindfulness may be just the thing to stop you 'catastrophising' unnecessarily,writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN.
OVER THE past decade, sales of books such as Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Nowor Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are, have boomed. These books promote the concept of mindfulness, or living in awareness of the present moment as a path to a better life.
Will all this be blown away by the current economic storms? If your job is under threat, your pension plan seriously dented and your mortgage based on a purchase price which is now history, could you be bothered with The Power of Now, present-moment awareness and the rest of it? And what do men care about this kind of stuff anyhow?
Actually, I think mindfulness will turn out to be more than a fad. It could have been designed for the times we live in now and it doesn’t cost anything to do – which is currently a large plus. I’ll give you the instructions later on and you can try it out for yourself.
As for men, I know men who work as trade union officials, who run big and small businesses, who are fathers or who are retired and who use mindfulness every day. All right, it’s more accurate to say I know one of each, but I still think it’s an impressive range.
Essentially, mindfulness involves returning your attention to the present whenever you find you have wandered off into fantasies about the future or memories of the past.
This is psychologically healthy at any time, but especially now.
Prophets of doom proliferate on TV screens, the internet, the radio and the newspapers. They are having a field day. Repent, they say, the end is nigh – actually, some of them say, don’t bother repenting, it’s too late, you’re all going to be swallowed up by a big, black cloud.
They are wallowing in an orgy of catastrophising, to use a word borrowed from rational emotive behavioural therapy (REBT). Catastrophising is a word invented by Dr Albert Ellis, who developed REBT, and it means going over and over the gloomiest possibilities of what may happen in the future.
The trouble with catastrophising is that it achieves absolutely nothing, except serving to make people depressed, scared or even suicidal.
By breaking the cycle of catastrophising, mindfulness can help us to get through this crisis in far better emotional shape than might otherwise be the case.
There is nothing magical about this. Crisis or no crisis, we still have to go through a certain amount of pain because that’s life. The trick is to avoid adding extra upset and pain to what we have to experience anyway.
If your job is under threat, that’s painful, no doubt about it. But if you keep yourself and everyone else awake at night catastrophising about it, you may be adding extra distress that makes things even worse than they are.
There are a few ways to get into a mindfulness state quickly. One is to do a quick scan of what your senses are experiencing: what are the sounds around you, are your feet on the ground, what do you actually see with your two eyes, what’s your breathing like?
Another is to pick something you do every day routinely with your head in the clouds, like going up and down the stairs, getting dressed, having a shower, drinking tea, driving a car, and so on and to decide that every time you do it, you will come back into awareness of the present moment.
Quite useful, that, when you’re driving.
Another is to spend a minute just noticing your breathing, maybe counting the number of in-breaths and out-breaths, though not when you're driving. (If you want to e-mail me at pomorain@ireland.com I'll e-mail you back a sheet of mindfulness exercises free, gratisand for nothing.)
These are just ways of getting you into a mindfulness state. The essential thing is to keep bringing your attention gently back to the present when it wanders into a fantasy or a memory.
Simple? Yes – though, as you’ll find out, it doesn’t come naturally and you have to keep reminding yourself to do it.
But try it. The mindfulness approach has been around for at least two-and-a-half millennia, so it’s not going to be obsolete by Christmas. And it’s worked for people in tougher times than these.
- Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor. His blog is at justlikeaman.blogspot.com