If you have never heard of mindfulness, now is a great time to learn more about it. It allows you to focus only on the present moment, letting your fears of the future and regrets of the past be put aside for the time being. It is so amazing for your mindset, helping to relieve stress and anxiety. It is also a wonderful way to start coping with your depression.
Why Mindfulness Works
How does mindfulness help? It can provide benefits for people suffering from depression in a variety of ways, but this begins with the cognitive symptoms of this mental illness.
When you practice mindfulness, you are really only focusing on what you think or feel exactly at this moment. You are in a constant state of being mindful, which can help to bring you back to reality. It helps to bring in positive thoughts and try to push out the negative (often irrational) ones.
With depression, it is often difficult to distinguish between exaggerated or realistic thoughts, which is what mindfulness is going to help you a lot with.
Taking the Power Away from Your Thoughts
Through mindfulness, you learn a lot of important lessons. But one of the biggest ones is that your thoughts don’t need to control you.
If you notice that when your depression is at its peak, you have a lot of negative thoughts about yourself, your abilities, and your worthiness in this world. Those thoughts manifest in very dangerous ways.
But with mindfulness, you are putting them aside for now and trying to find more positive, logical thoughts about the current moment. This can slowly but surely re-adjust your thoughts and let you see that they do not control you.
Practicing Mindfulness
Mindfulness is actually much simpler than it might seem. And it just takes a little practice. You can do it in the form of meditation, with simple breathing exercises, or while doing just about any activity.
Enjoy going for runs? Think about everything you think, see, and feel during the run, and you are being mindful.
You can practice mindfulness at work, school, at home, while walking your dogs, or while writing in your journal.
When eating a meal, pay close attention to the flavor, temperature, feel of it on your tongue, its smell, and how your body reacts to it. This is what you do when you are practicing mindfulness.
