Mindful or Mindless: Where do your thoughts take you?

Yesterday I found myself picking through boxes in the loft storage space. I have the same thought every time I’m in there – that a precise inventory would save having to unpack each box to discover the contents. Some of them have moved around the world and back again, containing different possessions over the years; more than one set of labels crossed out and overwritten – none ever complete enough.

A good thing about unpacking and repacking boxes of memories are the things you find that you hadn’t realized were lost. In the end yesterday I didn’t find the things I was searching for – there’s a suspicion that they didn’t make the moving list for the last migration. What I did find was a collection of notebooks, from my 20s and 30s, largely full of poetry. Somehow, they had survived, despite me being sure I’d thrown them out. Reading through some of that early work I was pleasantly surprised at how ‘not bad’ I thought it was – sure there was some pretentiousness and melodrama, but also rage, love, joy, compassion, fear, anger, sorrow, and desolation.

Something I recognised in reading that old work, apart from how turbulent and troubled I must have been back then, was a sense of how mindful I must have also been to capture so carefully the thoughts and feelings swirling inside my head. Even writing now, I’m reminded of the presence I need to bring to be able to do this, and the value that brings into my life.

Many of the years between then and now were lacking that presence, as raising a family and building a career allowed ‘busy’ to become a way of life. Years later, I am again more often mindful than not. The saying that “nature abhors a vacuum” comes to mind, because it’s akin to how the mind functions when we are not fully in control of our attention. The mind wanders, filling the void, often without any conscious awareness that Elvis to some extent has left the building!

A wandering mind isn’t necessarily a bad thing but…

I want to state that a wandering mind is not necessarily a bad thing. There are strong theories supporting subconscious parallel processing during this state – problem solving in a more innovative way than we are necessarily able to do when discovering the solution has our full attention. Where I think we usually miss a trick, is that we often have no awareness of where our mind goes and when it goes there, leaving somewhat to chance the possibility that we may uncover some new and exciting direction or solution.

The human mind is built to tell stories, to make sense from chaos, and it does this at the expense sometimes of truth or value. When we don’t watch what our mind is doing, we allow our pre-existing biases and our personal history to define the narrative. We should instead understand our prejudice, be informed by the past, and be conscious of what is real and what is made up.

“We don’t beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well.” - Randy Pausch

Mindlessness is an easy state to slip into. It’s very easy to become overwhelmed by an eventful life; to be so caught up in completing tasks ‘x’ and ‘y’ that you could not, if stopped mid-activity, honestly claim to have curated your current thoughts and feelings. In some cases, you may not even be able to articulate what they were. We crave habit, and we make every activity both efficient and soulless in our quest to satisfy this desire.

The idea of ‘flow’ may come to mind – that state where we are operating at maximum efficiency while being disconnected in a conscious way from the here and now. This is slightly different from what I’m describing. During flow we are not wandering, but rather so full and in tune with the task at hand that our mind doesn’t have resources left to wander.

Avoid being out of tune

All I’m really encouraging you to avoid are those situations where you want to be engaged, learning, absorbing, interpreting, but you have forgotten to approach them mindfully. As a result you repeatedly tune in and out, or worse still, just remain out of tune.

There are ways to become more mindful; to remain present while still living an active and full life. I can’t recommend enough the recently published Peak Mind by Amishi Jha. If you want to discover more about your attention systems and how to strengthen and better utilise them, then I’d suggest you get a copy – it may change how you think about how you think.

In lieu of you making time for that, or if you’d simply like some starting points to help gain more of an understanding of how mindless or mindful you tend to be right now, then I have a couple of exercises to recommend.

Labelling your thoughts

One way to become more familiar with noticing where your attention goes is to practice watching and labelling your thoughts. This simple meditation requires as little as a few minutes, but becomes more powerful as you spend longer watching and labelling:

1.       Sit somewhere quiet, with good posture and free from external distractions

2.       Gently close your eyes and let your breathing be normal and relaxed

3.       Relax your body while retaining a healthy posture

4.       Focus on your breath, not controlling, just observing

5.       When ready let go of your focus and let your mind drift

6.       As you notice things arise in your mind, try to label them:

a.       Thinking – e.g., a worry, a to-do list item, an idea

b.       Feeling – e.g., frustration, boredom, happiness, peace

c.       Sensing – e.g., an itch, a noise, a smell

7.       Try to just apply the label and not get drawn into thought or emotion. Just label and let go as quickly as possible

8.       If you find yourself getting lost in an overactive mind, bring your focus back to your breath for  few seconds, and then let go again

Making people new again

The people we love, work, and play with are often the people that most easily slip into the background. We see them and hear them but forget our observations just a few heartbeats later. Can you remember how you felt about someone special the first few times you met them; the excitement and curiosity; the freshness of the experience? That’s a sign of mindful presence, a presence that fades as your brain builds patterns and habits to make dealing with that person more efficient. It’s not a bad thing, as we can’t afford to remain constantly obsessed – it would lead to a terribly unproductive life. But that newness of people, and the value that comes from experiencing someone in a mindful way can be rebooted on a regular basis:

1.       The next time you walk into a room where someone you know quite well will be, make a conscious choice to notice something new about them

2.       It can be the smallest of things, a facial expression, the way a word sounds when they speak, a gesture or a look

3.       Focus until you find just one new thing that is unfamiliar

4.       Then think about what that means to you; what they mean to you knowing this new thing about them

“If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.” – Epictetus

The holiday season is upon us. It can be a time of great stress and busyness, but you always have the power to choose. You have a choice to be mindful in everything you do, from each gift you wrap and card you write, to every face and movement you notice as if for the first time. Make some minutes more mindful, or some people, or some tasks. The more you practice, the easier it becomes. Engage with the life you have right here and now, rather than what has been or may yet be.

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About the Author:

KYLE RICHARDSON

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