Benefits of mindfulness

One of the strongest and most useful benefits of mindfulness is the ability it gives us to exert emotional self control and regulation. As we learned earlier in the lesson How Stress Affects Us, our brains respond to perceived stressors in a way that short-circuits our higher reasoning capacity. As a result, we act upon emotions or instincts and our behaviors may be hasty, rash, or unwise.

A key benefit of mindfulness practices and a greater ability to maintain mindful awareness is the ability to regain regulation and break ourselves out of the brain's stress response. In simple terms, we can learn to 'hack' our brains. When we can control our thoughts and focus our attention, we can control our reactions to things that happen in our lives. We learn to respond with logic and reason.

Consider:

Think of a time somebody met you in anger. Maybe it was a spouse or a family member. Maybe it was another customer at the grocery store. Maybe it was a client at work. How did you react? What happened then?

What is our reaction?

Our first reaction might be to respond in the same way. When someone is angry at us, our instinct is to reply in anger...so we yell back. Or we might feel afraid. Then we respond by apologizing. We might even avoid talking to the person. In these cases, we are responding to an emotional reaction with another emotional reaction. This might make the situation worse.

How can we react instead?

But...if we are calm and respond with thoughtfulness, we might be able to reason with them. By not reacting with emotion, we can avoid anger. Perhaps we can even have a useful conversation.

Mindful self-control gives us the power to respond with reason rather than emotion. Just imagine if every argument was solved this way. We would have a much more civil society!

Please Note:

It is never okay for someone to threaten, abuse, or hurt you. There are some people who cannot be reasoned with. Never put yourself in harm's way for the sake of practicing mindful response versus reaction.

Additional benefits of mindfulness

There have been many scientific studies on the benefits of mindfulness. Doctors and health professionals have found that when we can control our emotional states, our lives are more satisfying.

Additional mindfulness benefits are:

We may have confidence in ourselves and our abilities. This is because we learn to be patient with ourselves and others. We understand that growth and learning take time.
We may experience optimism and hope. This is because we recognize challenges as obstacles that can be overcome. We do not see things as hopeless barriers.
We have a better ability to mentally focus. This is because we are more aware of ourselves and the world around us.
We have greater productivity and time management. This can lead to a sense of accomplishment and contentment. This is because we can learn to not pay as much attention to thought patterns that distract us or cause us stress.
We have a greater sense of personal choice or freedom. This comes with understanding that when we choose how to respond to a situation, we gain freedom of choice.
We have a greater sense of compassion toward ourselves. This is because we can recognize negative or self-destructive emotions and thought patterns and learn to overcome them.
We have increased compassion toward others. This is because we gain the emotional intelligence to know when others are reacting a certain way due to strong emotions and stress responses. We see when people are acting without reason.

Mindfulness and resilience

Together, this adds up to becoming more able to cope with struggles or challenges in our daily lives. We call this resilience. Resilience is the ability to 'bounce back' from trouble.

But even when we are resilient, we will still struggle. We will still have bad days. We will sometimes lose our temper. We will still feel sad or unhappy. We will still get lonely. However, the more resilient we become, the less these will affect us. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being slightly irritated and 10 being extremely angry, maybe a situation only rates a 4 or 5 instead of a 9 or a 10. If we used to be upset for hours after an unpleasant situation, maybe now we are able to 'get over it' much sooner.

This leads us to one of the greatest benefits of mindfulness: stress reduction. When we are more confident in ourselves, or are less angry or less sad, we are less anxious and stressed.