Hi Robert:
Great post as usual.
As a researcher who has explored mindfulness in the treatment of pain (back 20+ years ago when there were maybe 50 good studies, as opposed to over 5000 now) I applaud your new found practice of mindfulness.
Both for understanding the research AND for practice, a few tips:
Regarding research:
Most mindfulness research is STILL rather sloppy and has little in the way of determining if people really ARE mindful when they’re practicing. Kind of like doing a study of diet when you have no idea what people are eating!
Regarding practice:
a few clarifications might help people understand what mindfulness is.
Let’s substitute the words “awareness” and “attention” for mindfulness and see if it clears things up.
Scientists have identified two very different networks of neurons associated with two very different mind states:
the Default mode network comes into play when we’re not focusing on anything in particular. Without a specific focus (like ending up with Google as your default browser if you don’t consciously choose otherwise) the brain defaults to mind wandering. This is related to our evolutionary heritage when we needed to be constantly scanning the environment to look for food, or mates, or to avoid danger. Our complex verbal mind, with its construction of a “little me” to watch over things, ends up constantly creating little videos in our head to test out possible future scenarios – successes, failures, pleasures, dangers, etc.
When we’re focused, the “task positive” network comes into play, what you can simply think of as “control mode.” In this mode, we end up spending a great deal of time struggling to deal with mind wandering, OR the temptation to shift into another mode I refer to as “zoning out.”
Zoning out mode: This is what you do at the end of the day when the battle between mind wandering and control mode has gotten too much. You may do innocent things to escape, like bingewatching junk Netflix while binge eating junk food. Or you may end up with a little more problematic things like binge drinking or drug use (or worse).
All three of these tend to involve some kind of control – in default mode our thoughts are controlled by our desires and fears; in control mode we are trying to control our behavior AND our thoughts; in zone out mode our behavior and mind are controlled by external things.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these modes. The problem is we’re helplessly pushed and pulled between them and seem to have no choice.
With awareness of different modes of attention, we can learn to shift from one to the other as needed. But we h ave to shift into neutral gear first. Neutral gear is, leaving zoning out in order to get in the zone. This is experiential mode. It is the natural mode of human beings, the one we live in most of the time as infants and little children, before the “little me” starts developing between 1 ½ to 3 years old.
So awareness and attention training (of which mindfulness as usually taught is really a rather small subset) enables us to shift into a deeply calm, peaceful yet powerfully alert state, what you might call experiential mode – a present centered state of awareness in which we are open to see things anew, without the old videos running in our minds, letting go of the old models we have built, leaving us in a state of wonder, awe and curiosity. We can then CHOOSE to let our mind wander if we wish (one of the bases of creativity), or we may shift into a gentler, kinder control mode, remaining connected to our experience, thus enabling us to gently focus without having to be tensely in control.
That’s just a start, but you can see there’s much more to mindfulness than you might have thought. And you’re right – no mystical mumbo jumbo; this is just how our brains and bodies work at optimal functioning. And we can learn from day one to begin shifting to being closer to functioning in this optimal state.
Pretty wonderful, no?