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Niamh Delaney

Rumination Behaviors

By Meditation, Mental Fitness, Mental Health, mindfulness

Rumination encourages a hyper-vigilant response to negative feelings + psychological states. In contrast, meditation develops awareness about your thinking + psychological states, while also performing a protective role against these states.

Mindfulness strengthens your ability to:

  • Shift your attention (i.e., distracts you from rumination)
  • Allows you to be aware of your behaviors and thoughts
  • Engage with (but not encourage) your distressing thoughts in a non-judgmental way

If you feel stressed, anxious, or you’re engaging in rumination behaviors, take time out to practice breathing. For 3 to 5 minutes, sit somewhere quiet, try as best you can to only focus on your breathing while you reflect on your feelings and thoughts.

What would it be like to be your own best friend?

By Meditation, Mental Fitness, Mental Health, mindfulness

Many of us are looking for a real way of learning how we can deal with our stress and anxiety, how we can perhaps improve our relationships, and feel a greater sense of health and wellbeing.🍀

Mindfulness has been shown to lower stress + anxiety, improve resilience + increase wellbeing + can really help create the conditions to flourish in life.

So mindfulness is really about taking care of yourself.💖

As many of us are on autopilot for 50% of the time, that is distracted + unaware, we may fail to notice the good things in our lives or hear what our body is telling us.

And often make our lives harder than needs be, by poisoning ourselves with toxic self-criticism.

Have you ever noticed when a friend is in trouble how you’re gentle with them, support them, and tell them it’ll be ok. But if you were in the same situation you probably wouldn’t give yourself the same support or kindness, because we are so critical of ourselves.

One of the main attributes of mindfulness is learning to cultivate this capacity to be kinder to ourselves.

So what would it be like to be your own best friend, too treat yourself with the qualities you look for or admire in a good friend. 🤔What would it be like to…

  • To trust yourself
  • To be generous and kind to yourself
  • To listen to yourself
  • Not to judge yourself
  • Be loyal and patient with to yourself
  • And to accept yourself…just as you are..

One of the great things about mindfulness is, we learn to cultivate compassion – compassion for ourselves and others. Because only when we have self-compassion can we have compassion for others.

We develop the capacity to become more gentle and kind to ourselves.

And It’s these qualities that form the basis of the attitudinal foundations of mindfulness.

Are you as kind to yourself as you would be to your friend?💞

 

 

An Introduction to the Purpose of Mindfulness

By Meditation, mindfulness

What is Mindfulness?

It’s essentially being AWARE, fully present in the moment. So why is being fully present important? With 60,000 thoughts a day, most of us are completely unaware of the currency of our thinking. Stress and anxiety is often based on our negative assumptions about the past and/or future events. We catastrophise, we decide it’s going to be awful or at least very difficult.

Mindfulness helps us recognise this kind of future – orientated anxiety and see it as a mental habit rather than a reflection of the truth or reality. Events of themselves do not necessarily cause stress. However, if we take a mindful perspective, the stress will quickly dissipate.

What causes stress is the view we take of the event.

Mindfulness is living in the moment. Noticing what is happening and making choices in how we respond to our experience, rather than being driven by HABITUAL REACTIONS.

Learn how to use mindfulness to transform your everyday experiences by taking my FREE course. You can access that by visiting my website at https://themindfulpsychologist.eu/course/