Mindfulness in Therapy is relevant for everyone. It can be particularly helpful for people with Anxiety, Depression, ADHD, and relationship difficulties.
A key technique is to take a step back in your own mind and then observe your thoughts as they come and go. If you are engaged in an activity, try to be present with the activity. When a thought occurs, gently acknowledge the thought and bring your attention back to what you were doing.
Becoming mindful of our own thoughts can alleviate the suffering they cause. People often think that they are incapable of mindfulness due to difficulties with concentration.
This misunderstanding is caused by beliefs that mindfulness requires you to sit cross legged for hours focusing on your breath undisturbed by thoughts. While such a practice may work for some, it is not necessary.
The essence of every mindfulness practice is accessible to us all, and this essence is nothing more than becoming present in the moment, observing what is going on. To start with, presence may not last long, as thoughts about the past and future soon come rushing in, but that doesn’t mean you have failed. The short moments of consciousness are like seeds that grow into more mindful living.
What Is Mindfulness In Therapy?
Many who come to therapy reporting unwanted experience in one form or another. Racing thoughts, turbulent emotions, reactive behaviours, and confusing bodily sensations are forms of experience which can drain one’s energy. There may be all sorts of reasons for the chaos, and a person may already have formed ways of dealing with it.
Regardless of which therapy approach one takes to start addressing a difficulty, there is a common element which anyone can start practicing at any time. This mindful awareness of one’s mind.
Therapies and self-help approaches typically start with making sense of a difficulty, which involves bringing awareness to thoughts and behaviour. For example, by analysis, formulation, or diagnosis. These are ways of changing perspective on what is going on.
The person being given a diagnosis may go from thinking ‘everything in my life is hopeless’, to ‘I experience symptoms of depression, which include hopeless thoughts.’ Someone undergoing analysis may go from thinking ‘everyone hates me’ to ‘experiences in my childhood lead me to feel bad about who I am. Now I am looking for confirmation of this this feeling in relationships with certain others.’
One drawing a formulation diagram with a therapist may go from thinking ‘something bad is going to happen’ to ‘I am having thoughts telling me that something bad will happen, even when there is no evidence to suggest that this is true.’
When observing our thoughts from a different perspective, we realise that the thoughts that pass through our minds are not who we are. We do not choose to have them. We see that they occur out of seemingly nowhere and are difficult to predict. An exercise to illustrate this is to pause for a moment and wait for the next thought.
See if you can predict when it will come and what it will be. The experience you have when you wait for the next thought to come, and the moment you observe it, is mindful awareness of your thoughts. You experience taking the perspective of an observer of what’s going on in your mind.
A question you may then ask is ‘so which one am I, the creator of the thoughts or the observer of them?’ If you what to answer this, I suggest engaging with mindfulness practice and see for yourself.
Why Practice Mindful Awareness Of Thoughts?
When we can observe our own thoughts, they lose power over us. We may still choose to act on them, and they may still cause difficult emotions, but they have less of a say in how we react.
Say for example you are having the thought ‘something bad will happen.’ Before you have become aware that this is a thought that entered your mind, you are likely to feel identified with it. That is, feeling like the thought is your own statement about a truth in the world. This would likely make you feel compelled to take safety precautions.
You would also likely interpret the accompanying anxiety as another indication of danger and seek ways to escape it. Thus, you are caught in a spiral or struggling in response to your thought.
Once you can take a step back and observe the flow of thought, however, you realise that these are just thoughts. You can then see that you are not the throughs, they are not necessarily true, and you do not always have to react to them. Even if the thoughts are difficult to have and causing you to feel difficult emotions, simply observing this in a non-judgemental way will take power away from them.
What Will Change When I Am Mindful?
You gain access to fuller experience of the present moment when you embrace mindfulness. That is, not what happened yesterday or what is going to happen tomorrow, but what is happening right now.
This may sometimes mean being present with difficult emotions. However, staying present with difficulty better enables us to accept what is and allow it to pass.
Because we seize to be reactive, we can also save energy on unnecessary reactions. Although we are often unaware, we continually react to a stream of thoughts and emotions as we go through our day.
Often, a large proportion of these are unnecessary or even counterproductive. When you become mindful of the stream, you can see which reactions are helpful to you and others, and which ones are better changed.
You may notice that your thoughts at times lead you into patterns of thinking, feeling and acting that drain you of energy. By observing this instead of reacting to it, energy can be saved or redirected elsewhere. Energy is an important component in wellbeing.
The Bottom Line
Incorporating mindfulness into therapy and everyday life offers transformative potential for us all. It can also help alleviate anxiety, depression, ADHD, or relational difficulties.
By cultivating mindful awareness of our thoughts, we gain the ability to observe rather than identify with them, reducing their power over us. This shift fosters a sense of peace, clarity, and calm, enabling us to break free from reactive patterns that drain our energy and well-being.
Mindfulness not only alleviates mental chaos but also creates space for thoughtful, intentional responses to life’s challenges. In doing so, it empowers us to nurture healthier relationships with ourselves and others.
There is no need for fancy techniques to get started. Mindfulness is available in the present moment wherever we are and whatever we are doing at the time.
Further reading:
- Sam Harris’ book ‘Waking Up.’
- Echart Tolle’s books ‘The Power of Now’ and ‘A New Earth.’
- Michael A. Singer’ book ‘The Untethered Soul.’
- Tenpa Yeshe’s book ‘The Zen Monkey and the Lotus Flower.’