I will approach mindfulness from an informational perspective, adding just a little brain physiology.
If you already know about mindfulness, you can directly skip to "The heresy"
Introduction
As many subjects that I approach in this blog, my knowledge about the subject is at hobby level, maybe a little more than the average guy. One of my childhood dreams was to discover something really new. The strategy that I considered then was to start on that subject without all the prejudice from the previous research done in that domain. I realize now that it is merely impossible to innovate something without having in mind the prior results and mistakes done on that study field. However, I still hope that one can derive new perspectives in a domain by combining common knowledge from various domains.
With that said, here is a little essay about how and why mindfulness might be working for humans. This might depart sometimes from the mainstream conception on mindfulness and even brain. This is especially expected as I merely studied these domains as a hobby. Remember, this is a blog of wild speculations, with the hope that some might be provable someday.
Mindfulness
Wikipedia say that "Mindfulness is the psychological process of bringing one's attention to experiences occurring in the present moment, which one can develop through the practice of meditation and through other training". Basic mindfulness training is available today as phone applications, and I tried one of these apps. In itself, Mindfulness is not a religious activity, while it was initially developed by the Buddhist tradition in searching for ways to achieve "the end of suffering", by detaching from human desires. Mindfulness can be used as a technique to "clear the mind" of the clutter that we accumulate during the day, hopefully achieving a more clear view about the reality we are in.
Mindfulness have the aim to "be in the present" - not thinking about past or future. However, I personally believe it can also help one achieving better clarity and setting priorities and planning, while these activities are really the opposite of what mindfulness targets (staying in the present). I think I have an explanation for this paradox, I will detail later.
For now, let's just say that clearing the mind is not in contradiction with the "full" from Mindfulness, you just clear the mind to allow more attention to the present moment, making possible to more fully experience the reality.
The most basic approach on mindfulness is to close your eyes, relax and focus on your breath. Because you might fall into sleep, it's better to have a secure position, like lying down or something like the classical "meditation" position. It seems that the position is not so important if it permits the body to relax. The objective is to clear your mind of thought, gentle. However, this is not so easy, as thoughts appear in the mind when it's silent. The general guidance is to just acknowledge the thought in your mind, not cling or fight it, just observe it and it will likely pass. If you analyze it it will create other thoughts and it will achieve the opposite of what is aimed.
Another technique is to "scan the body" from the top of your head to the toes (or reverse), like a giant scanner would light each segment of the body. Focusing the attention on each segment of the body can be very relaxing. It seems that even chronic or acute pain can be alleviated by meditation techniques, by just observing the pain with curiosity and not trying to fight with it.
How Mindfulness works
Someone explained mindfulness goal like this: the mind is normally like a bottle full of water and mud. Mindfulness aims to let the water to clear, by letting the mud to slowly go to the bottom of the bottle. The mind should stay still in order for the mud to settle and let the rest of the water still and clear.
It seems that the main trick in many meditation techniques (including Zen) is to give the mind something simple to focus on. It should be something that should not generate other thoughts. Some religions use a statue, icon or some other object. Observing our own body can be such focus that usually keeps the mind focused. Sometimes it helps to count the breaths to ten, just to keep the mind busy. You can still start to think about your body sensations, however the guideline is to let these thoughts to pass and gently move the focus back to the direct body sensations.
Everything in mindfulness must be gentle, as it is believed that any struggle or fight against unwanted thoughts goes against the mindfulness goal - to achieve a state of mind of harmony and detaching. Actually, fight and hate is a form of attachment, as you cannot fight or hate without clinging and sometimes following the object of your emotion. It is believed that any attachment is a potential source of unhappiness, while there might be other practical benefits for the mind to prevent fighting thoughts - I will detail below.
No matter how the mindfulness techniques are rationalized, they tend to have benefit in reducing stress, anxiety, even stress hormones, hopefully contributing to a better quality of life and maybe even better cognitive performance. We can say, at least, that mindfulness is a relaxation technique that helps to relax the body and mind.
Mindfulness and brain
Brain scans observed brain wave changes when doing meditation, while the exact process is not fully understood. We can imagine that mindfulness techniques put the brain in a more relaxed state, similar with the why you relax in a safe place, when all your worries are far away and the surroundings are peaceful and safe. Let's imagine, for example, that you are on a mountain, you come back from the snow and let yourself dream, drinking something hot near the worming fire, knowing that you can safely rest there until the next morning. When the mind relaxes, also the body relaxes, including physiological changes like heart rate, blood pressure, lower breathing rate. Why not, other hormonal and electro-chemical changes might happen.
Mindfulness and the mind
I think that what makes mindfulness work is cleaning the mind from many of the parasite thought, at least for a while. I often find myself with many thinking threads - that makes me tired and makes the clean thinking way harder. It's like having too many programs open in the same time: most of them don't really do anything useful, but it makes the whole computer to work slower, so the program you really need works very slow. Often the solution is to close all the programs and often restart the whole computer. You cannot restart the brain, however you can put to sleep many of the not-important mind threads. And mindfulness techniques seems to be good at that.
Continuing the metaphor, interacting with an open program, giving some clicks, only makes it to run even more agresive. It might also start other programs - this is even more likely for a thought that triggers other thoughts and ideas. It's better to just click close and just wait for it to close. The brain is not a computer, but somehow recent thoughts accumulates in the brain, making new thoughts harder to process. Sometimes thoughts hunt us for weeks and even years, interrupting the train of thought for the tasks that we have decided to address. It would be easier to just clean our short term memory of these rumination thoughts.
Attention to your breathing seems to create a certain bio-feedback that puts the body to it's natural rhythm. Often the body in a state that is not suitable with the real situation, like breathing too fast after the stressful situation long finished. Breathing slower is very likely to also relax the mind.
The brain seems to keep a set of "todo" thoughts, that will not easily go away unaddressed. It's like a reminder that you cannot dismiss, you can only "snooze". The way to make it stop is to just let it pop up and acknowledge it's message. Sometimes this is enough for the "reminder" to "think" that he did his job and go to sleep, at least for a while. This might explain why the mindfulness technique that recommends to just acknowledge the thought when the mind "starts to wander". Pushing the thoughts back only makes it to pop again soon. It's unknown how this is implemented in the brain, however it seems that acknowledging a though is more calming than rejecting it. It's just that you should not also act on it, for example if you feel hungry you must not leave everything and go to eat.
Having less parasitic thoughts should help the mind better focus to a specific task you decide to follow. Moreover, when gently dismissing the talkative thoughts, the mind might be able to process deeper signals, allowing the person to prioritize better what is worth to work on. For example, with a clean, silent mind, you might better feel what is important for you and concentrate in that direction.
The heresy
I believe that the Buddhist "end of suffering" is not the final purpose of a human being. Sometimes there is suffering that serves to a higher purpose, like doing something very tiring to help someone. There is also the altruistic sacrifice that can be really painful. I don't believe that we can re-frame any experience so that it will cease to be felt as suffering.
I think that our live goal should be to only prevent un-necessary suffering, the meaningless suffering that just cripples us, making us less able to do other meaningful actions. Other than this, I think that less suffering should only be a mean to a higher goal. It's just that this higher goal often corresponds with the lack of suffering: it's better to be healthy than sick and in pain, it's better to have something to eat than agonizing in famine. Most of the mainstream morals would agree that helping to prevent such suffering in others is a good thing. A man in pain is often less able to do any other tasks that he might find important. So less suffering is usually a good think, unless suffering is the only way to achieve a higher good - think, for example, about a painful medical procedure that actually saves your life.
Even if the "end of suffering" is not the higher goal, mindfulness can still help to keep our mind and body more able to focus on our goals, including the ones that are aligned to our higher goals. It's like eating: it's not a great moral achievement to feed yourself, but if you don't eat for days it might make you unable to serve any other higher moral goal you may have.
Being in the present is overrated
Mindfulness tradition greatly appreciates "being in the present". However, I don't think this is really a goal in itself. While being present might provide a more satisfying experience of life, it could be dangerous to only live in the present, and never think about future and not learn from the past.
It's very useful to predict what could go wrong in the future and prepare contingent plans. This is not exactly "being in the present", should we avoid it? I think not, thinking about past and future is also an important function of the brain. We just need to prevent unimportant thought to interfere with the current goal we have now. The current goal could be sometimes to decide the 3 priorities for the next year. Only overt-thinking is bad, thinking about the future is useful.
Still, being in the present can be a good goal to clear the mind. A clear mind is one with a minimal "todo" list that is active, that is the same with having a very limited temporary short memory footprint. Making plans or remembering can add a very complex state in the temporary memory - with possible ramifications, possible counter-reactions, while focusing on body sensations is like the minimum state that can be kept in the brain. Focusing on the present is a tool to clear the mind from most of the complex thoughts that are hard to stop - because one will generate another.
With a clean mind, things and methods that we learned and automate will be more effective, not risking to be contaminated by other concurrent thoughts. Being "in the moment" we can also process the maximum external stimulus bandwidth. This would make, for example, a musician to have the best performance, after he repeated extensively.
Creativity
It is not always desirable to have a "clean mind". When we are doing creative work, or we try to make new mental connections between facts that cannot be ordered algorithmic, it is desirable to have as much available facts as we can "loaded" into the short term memory. In this way, we can make the best connections about facts. Also, making a plan requires to keep in mind a complex state regarding the possible outcomes and planned countermeasures.
Having a clear mind is not useful in itself, however it might be helpful to start such process with a "clear mind", in order to have as much temporary memory as possible that is free for our complex thinking task.
Even that multi-tasking results in poor overall performance on each task, sometimes is useful to multiplex tasks that cannot wait for more efficient serial execution. This can be very consuming for the brain, however it might be the optimal approach, at least for a limited periods of time.
Living in the present
There is an emphasis in mindfulness to not cling to our wishes about reality, but just take reality as it is. At the first look, this seems to favor self-contempt, that can result in less effort and prevent progress. While this can be true if we put it to extreme, I think there is an important lesson to learn from this.
Comparing the Now with our wishes might be a good way to settle a direction, to find the next baby steps to make it better. However, emotionally assessing the Now in comparison with our big wishes has all the chances to confuse our internal compass. If today is good enough, or slightly better than yesterday, it's dangerous to remorse on what it's not yet there.
This pain about what is not here yet can make our brain to disengage, lowering the motivation to invest in reaching the better. Having a negative feedback, the brain can even change direction to the opposite - even if the direction is the right one but we just need more time to get there.
A possible caveat
I often feel the need to re-think the day's events, sometimes even for longer periods. Not sure what happens with these "notes to myself" when using mindfulness. While after meditation I should be better suitable to focus on what is important, I have this feeling that it pushes my "notes-to-myself" deeper, so I don't feel the need anymore to process them. But they don't seem to disappear. Actually, they seem to accumulate, that could make the problem worse.
Sometimes rumination could be a healthier habit for a certain state of mine. In some other times, mindfulness could give us the mind "space" to be able to cope with the the day.
I believe that mindfulness is not the solution to all problems. Mindfulness might sometimes be the opposite of the solution. Use any tool with care, for what it is best for, and without exaggerating!
Dear reader, please leave a message if you exist! ;) Also, please share this article if you find it interesting. Thank you.
Mindfulness and brain
Brain scans observed brain wave changes when doing meditation, while the exact process is not fully understood. We can imagine that mindfulness techniques put the brain in a more relaxed state, similar with the why you relax in a safe place, when all your worries are far away and the surroundings are peaceful and safe. Let's imagine, for example, that you are on a mountain, you come back from the snow and let yourself dream, drinking something hot near the worming fire, knowing that you can safely rest there until the next morning. When the mind relaxes, also the body relaxes, including physiological changes like heart rate, blood pressure, lower breathing rate. Why not, other hormonal and electro-chemical changes might happen.
Mindfulness and the mind
I think that what makes mindfulness work is cleaning the mind from many of the parasite thought, at least for a while. I often find myself with many thinking threads - that makes me tired and makes the clean thinking way harder. It's like having too many programs open in the same time: most of them don't really do anything useful, but it makes the whole computer to work slower, so the program you really need works very slow. Often the solution is to close all the programs and often restart the whole computer. You cannot restart the brain, however you can put to sleep many of the not-important mind threads. And mindfulness techniques seems to be good at that.
Continuing the metaphor, interacting with an open program, giving some clicks, only makes it to run even more agresive. It might also start other programs - this is even more likely for a thought that triggers other thoughts and ideas. It's better to just click close and just wait for it to close. The brain is not a computer, but somehow recent thoughts accumulates in the brain, making new thoughts harder to process. Sometimes thoughts hunt us for weeks and even years, interrupting the train of thought for the tasks that we have decided to address. It would be easier to just clean our short term memory of these rumination thoughts.
Attention to your breathing seems to create a certain bio-feedback that puts the body to it's natural rhythm. Often the body in a state that is not suitable with the real situation, like breathing too fast after the stressful situation long finished. Breathing slower is very likely to also relax the mind.
The brain seems to keep a set of "todo" thoughts, that will not easily go away unaddressed. It's like a reminder that you cannot dismiss, you can only "snooze". The way to make it stop is to just let it pop up and acknowledge it's message. Sometimes this is enough for the "reminder" to "think" that he did his job and go to sleep, at least for a while. This might explain why the mindfulness technique that recommends to just acknowledge the thought when the mind "starts to wander". Pushing the thoughts back only makes it to pop again soon. It's unknown how this is implemented in the brain, however it seems that acknowledging a though is more calming than rejecting it. It's just that you should not also act on it, for example if you feel hungry you must not leave everything and go to eat.
Having less parasitic thoughts should help the mind better focus to a specific task you decide to follow. Moreover, when gently dismissing the talkative thoughts, the mind might be able to process deeper signals, allowing the person to prioritize better what is worth to work on. For example, with a clean, silent mind, you might better feel what is important for you and concentrate in that direction.
The heresy
I believe that the Buddhist "end of suffering" is not the final purpose of a human being. Sometimes there is suffering that serves to a higher purpose, like doing something very tiring to help someone. There is also the altruistic sacrifice that can be really painful. I don't believe that we can re-frame any experience so that it will cease to be felt as suffering.
I think that our live goal should be to only prevent un-necessary suffering, the meaningless suffering that just cripples us, making us less able to do other meaningful actions. Other than this, I think that less suffering should only be a mean to a higher goal. It's just that this higher goal often corresponds with the lack of suffering: it's better to be healthy than sick and in pain, it's better to have something to eat than agonizing in famine. Most of the mainstream morals would agree that helping to prevent such suffering in others is a good thing. A man in pain is often less able to do any other tasks that he might find important. So less suffering is usually a good think, unless suffering is the only way to achieve a higher good - think, for example, about a painful medical procedure that actually saves your life.
Even if the "end of suffering" is not the higher goal, mindfulness can still help to keep our mind and body more able to focus on our goals, including the ones that are aligned to our higher goals. It's like eating: it's not a great moral achievement to feed yourself, but if you don't eat for days it might make you unable to serve any other higher moral goal you may have.
Being in the present is overrated
Mindfulness tradition greatly appreciates "being in the present". However, I don't think this is really a goal in itself. While being present might provide a more satisfying experience of life, it could be dangerous to only live in the present, and never think about future and not learn from the past.
It's very useful to predict what could go wrong in the future and prepare contingent plans. This is not exactly "being in the present", should we avoid it? I think not, thinking about past and future is also an important function of the brain. We just need to prevent unimportant thought to interfere with the current goal we have now. The current goal could be sometimes to decide the 3 priorities for the next year. Only overt-thinking is bad, thinking about the future is useful.
Still, being in the present can be a good goal to clear the mind. A clear mind is one with a minimal "todo" list that is active, that is the same with having a very limited temporary short memory footprint. Making plans or remembering can add a very complex state in the temporary memory - with possible ramifications, possible counter-reactions, while focusing on body sensations is like the minimum state that can be kept in the brain. Focusing on the present is a tool to clear the mind from most of the complex thoughts that are hard to stop - because one will generate another.
With a clean mind, things and methods that we learned and automate will be more effective, not risking to be contaminated by other concurrent thoughts. Being "in the moment" we can also process the maximum external stimulus bandwidth. This would make, for example, a musician to have the best performance, after he repeated extensively.
Creativity
It is not always desirable to have a "clean mind". When we are doing creative work, or we try to make new mental connections between facts that cannot be ordered algorithmic, it is desirable to have as much available facts as we can "loaded" into the short term memory. In this way, we can make the best connections about facts. Also, making a plan requires to keep in mind a complex state regarding the possible outcomes and planned countermeasures.
Having a clear mind is not useful in itself, however it might be helpful to start such process with a "clear mind", in order to have as much temporary memory as possible that is free for our complex thinking task.
Even that multi-tasking results in poor overall performance on each task, sometimes is useful to multiplex tasks that cannot wait for more efficient serial execution. This can be very consuming for the brain, however it might be the optimal approach, at least for a limited periods of time.
Living in the present
There is an emphasis in mindfulness to not cling to our wishes about reality, but just take reality as it is. At the first look, this seems to favor self-contempt, that can result in less effort and prevent progress. While this can be true if we put it to extreme, I think there is an important lesson to learn from this.
Comparing the Now with our wishes might be a good way to settle a direction, to find the next baby steps to make it better. However, emotionally assessing the Now in comparison with our big wishes has all the chances to confuse our internal compass. If today is good enough, or slightly better than yesterday, it's dangerous to remorse on what it's not yet there.
This pain about what is not here yet can make our brain to disengage, lowering the motivation to invest in reaching the better. Having a negative feedback, the brain can even change direction to the opposite - even if the direction is the right one but we just need more time to get there.
A possible caveat
I often feel the need to re-think the day's events, sometimes even for longer periods. Not sure what happens with these "notes to myself" when using mindfulness. While after meditation I should be better suitable to focus on what is important, I have this feeling that it pushes my "notes-to-myself" deeper, so I don't feel the need anymore to process them. But they don't seem to disappear. Actually, they seem to accumulate, that could make the problem worse.
Sometimes rumination could be a healthier habit for a certain state of mine. In some other times, mindfulness could give us the mind "space" to be able to cope with the the day.
I believe that mindfulness is not the solution to all problems. Mindfulness might sometimes be the opposite of the solution. Use any tool with care, for what it is best for, and without exaggerating!
Dear reader, please leave a message if you exist! ;) Also, please share this article if you find it interesting. Thank you.
Comments