Happy "in" Your Life: Mindfulness

Happiness Encyclopedia VI from the Happiness PhD Project...

Consider this. Your thoughts and emotions – let’s call that your state of being – are really what you experience all day, every day, right?

There’s nothing truly “outside” of that to experience. If you’re a multimillionaire and you spend all day stressed and anxious, what’s the quality of life there? Rich and miserable. Your experience of reality passes through your psychological state.

So, how do we experience more of the positive and less of the negative in our day-to-day, moment-to-moment experience? First, it’s worth saying that we should be careful when categorizing emotions as “positive” and “negative” or “good” and “bad.” If you’re nervous before a talk and it compels you to prepare, is that negative? If you’re grieving the death of a friend, is that bad? We don’t want to attach too much judgment to any emotion, and we don’t want to get in the habit of obsessing over the positive while repressing the negative. But at the same time, there’s a place for discernment. We can ask: are certain states beneficial or not? Do they serve us? Are they pleasing or painful?

And on the whole, we’d like a greater balance of useful, nourishing, pleasant psychological states – and to limit destructive, diminishing, painful ones. Fair enough?

The main way we can do this is through emotional intelligence – which starts with mindfulness.

Mindfulness: Be Where Your Feet Are.

There’s a lot of suspect research out there about what actually leads to happiness. But one of the most robust, well-constructed studies comes from the paper “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” by Killingsworth and Gilbert.

The title gives it away: the more your mind wanders, the less happy you are. Conversely, a focused mind leads to higher levels of happiness.

This paper, published in Science, studied a sample of 2,250 adults and devised a way to contact them throughout their daily lives.

The primary questions they asked were: What are you doing? and What are you feeling? For example, someone might respond, “I’m cleaning up the house,” or “I’m watching TV,” or “I’m doing work tasks,” or “I’m exercising.” These were real-life, natural environments – not laboratory conditions.

Then they asked about emotional state – happy, unhappy, or neutral. And interestingly, they also asked where attention was: were participants focused on what they were doing or distracted by something else?

So, you have three points of inquiry: What are you doing? What are you feeling? And where is your attention?

They found that regardless of activity type, the tendency to mind-wander – to have attention drift from the current activity – predicted lower happiness. Most fascinating: this was true even during unpleasant activities. It was better to remain present or focused on the task – even if you didn’t necessarily enjoy it.

They also examined whether the mind tends to wander toward pleasant or unpleasant things. Interestingly, we tend to mind-wander toward pleasant topics about 43% of the time, unpleasant ones about 27% of the time, and neutral ones about 30%.

But – and this is crucial – even when minds wandered to pleasant topics, people were no happier than when they were simply focused on their current activity. Being focused on what we’re doing is incredibly potent for happiness. Regardless of whether the activity itself is pleasant or not, and regardless of whether the mind is wandering to pleasant or unpleasant thoughts, we are better off when we’re present with whatever we’re doing.

That may sound counterintuitive. You might think that if you’re doing something unpleasant and your mind wanders to something enjoyable, you’d be happier. But that’s not the case. The researchers’ evidence strongly suggests that mind-wandering is the cause – not the consequence – of negative emotions.

When we’re not focused, not present, and not engaged, we tend to be less happy. So, what can we do about it?

The paper itself doesn’t go too far into that, but it sets us up to discuss meditation and mindfulness practice.

Mindfulness meditation is essentially training your “attention muscle.” Now, “the mind is a muscle” is an oversimplification of neuroscience, but it’s a useful analogy.

Imagine focusing on your breathing. Your mind wanders into thoughts of the day, lunch plans, and your to-do list, and then you bring it back to your breathing. Every time you bring it back, you’ve just done a repetition. You’ve grabbed the wandering mind and anchored your attention back to where you want it. You’ve regulated your attention. As you do this over and over again, it reshapes and rewires your neural circuitry to have a greater tendency toward attentiveness in the present moment with more capacity to regulate one’s own attention.

Let’s briefly examine the mechanism behind this.

Remember the piano study I mentioned at the beginning of the book in our discussion of neuroplasticity and learning?

In that study, volunteers practiced a simple piano rhythm for two hours per day for five days. (1) They wore a metal strip running from the crown of the head toward each ear through which a brief magnetic pulse was sent to detect neuron activity (the patterns of activity in the brain). After a week of practice, they found that the activation area of the brain corresponding to the piano-playing muscles had rapidly expanded.

This was in line with other observations of neuroplasticity – the brain changes based on how it’s used. It allocates more neurological resources to a given brain area the more that area is used.

In the piano study, the experimenters took another step. They had a second group just think about practicing the piano for two hours per day.

Surprisingly, this thought-only group showed just as much reorganization and increased activity around the piano-playing muscles as the group that had actually played the piano. This speaks to the power of thought alone to produce significant changes in the physical brain.

Now, meditation is distinct from thinking or visualizing, but it shows that we can intentionally direct the development of our brains – even when we’re not “doing anything.” Meditation may seem like doing nothing, but it’s practicing a certain mode of being: “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally” (quoting Jon Kabat-Zinn).

When we practice mindfulness, we’re intentionally spending time in the mode of awareness, openness, curiosity, and attention. This causes a gradual “rewiring” of the brain to naturally favor this state. That’s what’s really meant to happen in a bout of meditation.

Here are a few popular science references that explain this (if the spirit moves you):

• Mindful Meditation and the Brain from psychologist Shauna Shapiro, Greater Good Science Center (YouTube)

• How the Brain Rewires Itself by Sharon Begley, TIME Magazine palousemindfulness.com/docs/brain-rewires.pdf

• How Meditation Changes the Brain from neuroscientist Sara Lazar (TEDx, YouTube)

Nearly anything can be meditation if we get the fundamental mechanism right: bringing your attention back again and again to something in the present.

Meditation starts with an object of meditation to anchor your attention to. This can be breath, body, sounds, movement (e.g., yoga or walking), or even awareness itself. Notice each of these “objects of attention” exists in the present. You can only breathe in and out right here, right now. Your mind, on the other hand, can be back ten years ago, or at dinner last night, or in your meeting three hours from now. Every time you lose awareness of your object of attention, you come back to it.

So, I’m sitting on my cushion focusing on my breathing. I realize I’m ten minutes into a fantasy about something or other, and I go back to breathing. I’m doing walking meditation and realize that I’m planning my lunch. I go back to walking.

Every time you bring yourself back to the object of meditation, that’s like a repetition on the bench press. It’s a rep of building your focus, awareness, or mindfulness “muscle.” In fact, the thing that most people miss with meditation – that leads them to think they “can’t do it” – is that every time you fail, you actually succeed. Every time you notice your attention has wandered off and you bring it back, you’ve just engaged in attention regulation. As you do that again and again, you build your capacity for attentiveness.

And I estimate that in a 10-minute bout, you might experience this forty or more times.

The nature of the mind is to secrete thoughts just as your salivary glands constantly secrete saliva. So again, it’s not about “clearing your mind” or relaxing necessarily. If you have no thoughts for more than five minutes, you’re probably sleeping (or worse).

It’s about noticing and observing your own attention so that you can bring it back to the present again and again. In doing this, you effectively train your awareness. As the titan of psychology William James said, “The education of attention would be an education par excellence.”

Any activity that you engage in with this intention becomes meditation. When you wash dishes, washing the dishes is meditation. Every time you drift into thought or daydream, come back to the dishes. When you’re playing with your kids or hanging with your friends – being there for your kids or friends is the meditation. When you’re eating or lying down for bed – two of the most wonderful forms of meditation – those are the objects of meditation.

To summarize what we’ve discussed: mind-wandering reduces happiness. Staying with our theme of study and practice, we can address that. With regular mindfulness practice (meditation), we can develop a greater capacity to remain engaged in the present moment.

In fact, 13 minutes per day over eight weeks decreased negative mood states and enhanced attention, working memory, and recognition memory, while decreasing anxiety scores on the TSST. (2)

Brief instructions for mindfulness practice.

Make and schedule a simple plan for daily practice. For example, I will do seated meditation for 15 minutes before breakfast on a cushion in my living room because I want to experience my life more fully. I will do a 20 minute walking meditation at 8am on the street outside my house because I want to learn to be where my feet are. I will listen to a guided meditation for 25 minutes on my way home from work in my car at 5:30 because I know it will bring me happiness.

Remember going from knowing to doing with a clear implementation plan is key!

As you begin, simply bring your attention to your breathing, to your footsteps, or to the instructions in the audio if you’re following along with one. Pay attention. And whenever your mind wanders off (it will!) gently bring your attention back to the object of focus. As you do this, have a little attitude of celebration - because you just did the meditation. Continue on and bring the attention back again and again. If you really struggle with the simple walking or breathing consider breathing to a count: 4-6 seconds in, 8-10 out or counting steps to 10 then starting over.

Upon completing your time period (which is best marked with a timer) smile and acknowledge your practice session.

For further support in starting and sticking with meditation, consider reading How to Stick to Meditation by Jackson Kerchis.

(1) Pascual-Leone A. The brain that plays music and is changed by it. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2001 Jun;930:315-29. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2001.tb05741.x.

(2) Basso JC, McHale A, Ende V, Oberlin DJ, Suzuki WA. Brief, daily meditation enhances attention, memory, mood, and emotional regulation in non-experienced meditators. Behav Brain Res. 2019 Jan 1;356:208-220. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2018.08.023. Epub 2018 Aug 25. PMID: 30153464.