A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook

Before reading this blog post, take 10 seconds to take a few deep breaths, be aware of your body here and create a moment of being present. Now, read over this poem twice before moving on.

Here is a poem by 13^th century Sufi Poet, Rumi,:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the door sill
Where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

Right now is an opportunity (which is really available to us at any moment) to recognize that we may be starting this moment off from a place of auto-pilot, falling into the same old habitual styles of thinking and behaving that we’re really wanting to change. This might mean engaging in habits that don’t serve your health and well-being (e.g., drinking/eating too much, isolating, too much TV, too much digital interaction) or with habitual ways of thinking (e.g., negative self talk).

Rumi reminds us that “the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.” This reminds us that right from the morning time, we can break out of our habitual tendencies and become present. We don’t need to fall back into the “same old, same old.”

What is it that you really want? Re-mind yourself of it and “don’t go back to sleep.”

However, he notes how that moment of awareness and choice is very subtle, we touch the ability to change, going “back and forth across the doorsill.”

He reminds us that the doorsill is there,  it’s “round and open,” deep down we can feel it and may have even tasted it.

Sometimes it takes a reminder like this, to put us into a space of awareness where we can see the doorsill, see the hope, to make a change. This momentary awareness of clarity and choice is The Now Effect in action. When we have the experience of making the change, this allows us to trust ourselves that we can indeed do it.

This burns into our short term memory and as we intentionally practice and repeat this it starts to become automatic. We’ll still cross back and forth across the doorsill from time to time, but over time, with practice, we’ll be more awake and cross over less and less.

Give yourself the gift of crossing the doorsill and not “going back to sleep.”

Please share your thoughts, stories, and questions below. Your interaction here provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

In a recent study out of the Journal of Communication, researchers showed how media multitasking not only makes for poorer cognitive performance, but perhaps points to why, despite increasing our stress and making us less effective at home and work, we still do it.

The study found that there is an emotional boost when we engage in media multitasking. One thing we know about emotions is that they often guide our subconscious decision making. You might wonder why you say, “Okay, today I won’t text and drive,” or “I’m really going to focus on this project today,” only to find yourself falling back into the media multitasking trap; repeatedly checking twitter, Facebook and your text messages. Your conscious mind is not in the driver’s seat.

In a past blog post explaining why habits are so hard to break, Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, explains the dopamine kick that comes our way in the face of addictive substances. This dopamine drives our behavior toward whatever the gratifying substance is. In other words, there is a physiological and emotional gratification that we receive as we move toward the substance.

There are a few things we can do to raise our abilities to effectively integrate and manage this media in our lives, and I highlight these in The Now Effect:

1. Acceptance – Accept the reality that your brain is often making decisions for you on a subconscious level and you’re not often consciously in control. You can use the serenity prayer; it certainly applies. “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”
2. Control your environment – Now that you understand that your subconscious mind makes most of the decisions, you can do certain things to influence it. Turn the phone off or maybe the ringer. The addictive behavior is so strong that you may not even be able to do that. Put up some signs in your work place or home that reminds you to be present to what you’re doing. Surround yourself with materials on mindfulness.
3. Forgive and invite – Every time you notice yourself unintentionally multitasking with unimportant and non-urgent tasks, no need to be harsh on yourself, which only gets you further from a focused attention.  Just forgive yourself for the time gone by, recognize that you’re present, and in this “choice point,” make the decision to refocus.

Integrate these 3 steps into your life and you’ll be on your way to breaking the bad habits and more effectively harnessing the power of the technology that’s available today.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

Why are bad habits so hard to break? What does the bumper sticker “Just Say No!” actually work against us? Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, may have the answer.

If you have 10 minutes or so, watch the 60 Minutes video below to understand why habits are so hard to break and what is being done about it:

Volkow also was part of a 25-minute documentary on HBO around a range of issues related to addiction.

In the 60 Minutes video Volkow tells us that if it were so easy to just say no then we wouldn’t have drug addiction or obesity. There’s something going on in the brains of addicts where they literally lose the ability for self control.

Because of this Volkow calls the phrase “Just Say No!” “magical thinking.”

The fact is, drugs affect learning, memory and self control. It’s a chronic disease that physically changes the brain; these changes are long lasting and persist over time even after the person stops taking the drugs.

To get more specific, dopamine is one of the main chemicals regulating the pleasure center of the brain. At the most basic level it regulates motivation; it sends signals to receptors in the brain saying, “This feels good!”

Whether you’re a heroin addict and you see an association to heroin, you’re a caffeine addict and you see a cup of coffee, or if you’re hungry and you see some good-looking food, your brain rushes with dopamine, which is now caught on brain scanning machines.

So what about the problem with obesity in our society? Volkow says that images also affect the rise of dopamine in our brains. So if we pass a McDonalds and see the arches, our brain associates that with a tasty hamburger (for some) and shoots up dopamine. That good feeling will unconsciously drive the motivation to go in and get a Big Mac. It’s a conditioned response.

The big news that Volkow has found is that most addicts share a reduction in levels of dopamine receptors. This isn’t just for the hard drugs; this includes people who regularly smoke marijuana and cigarettes. The brain isn’t wired to handle these highs and a shut-off valve kicks in and reduces the number of receptors available. So the ability of the drugs to stimulate pleasure continues to decrease. That is why eventually addicts no longer use to get high, but just to feel normal.

On top of that, drugs have been shown to damage the prefrontal cortex, this is the area that resides in the front of the brain, our executive function that allows us to exert free will. When this is damaged it makes it more difficult to regulate emotions and self control.

It makes sense why more and more addiction centers are integrating mindfulness into their curriculum. Mindfulness practice has been shown to activate the prefrontal cortex and even grow the hippocampus, the area involved with learning and memory. It’s also been shown to grow areas of the brain associated with empathy, which might come in handy when addicts start to experience a sense of failure and shame when not being able to “Just Say No!”

Another reason mindfulness is helpful in terms of recovery is that it yields The Now Effect, that “aha” moment of clarity where we enter into a choice point, a moment where we access possibilities and opportunities we didn’t know were there before. This is crucial when it comes to our addictive behaviors to take a step back, “think through the drink” and recognize the various options that lie before us.

We can learn to step into the pause, notice the sensation of the urge that’s there and as the late Alan Marlatt, PhD says, “Surf the Urge” as it peaks, crests and falls back down like a wave in the ocean.

Just because our brains have been altered by addiction, doesn’t mean we’re destined to fall into the same habits. With the right skills, community and support we can learn how to break out of routine and into a life worth living.

And at the end of the day, if we got addicted to mindfulness, would that be so bad?

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

We’re all experiencing the intersection of social media into the landscape of our culture and daily lives. That is why bringing mindfulness to how we interact in this medium is more important than ever.

It’s my pleasure to bring to you Howard Rheingold, an author who has been talking about our interaction with the online world and how it has changed our reality for years. Howard is author of many books, the most recent being Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.

Today in our debut video. Howard answers questions on the landscape of social media today, why mindfulness can help and what the future looks like.

In the video you will find:

• A Brief History of Social Media: Social Media didn’t start with Facebook, in the 80′s there were interactive bulletin boards. Today, the interaction is enormous; we’re approaching 3 billion internet accounts and 5 billion mobile users. More than ever, there’s a collision between technology and our attention, but social media does not compel our attention. We have a choice to be aware of it and use it wisely, and mindfulness can support this.
• Understand the 5 Essential Literacies: Attention, Participation, Collaboration, Crap detecting, Network know how.
• This is a participatory medium where we are actively creating our culture. The only way we can improve quality of life online is to help people separate good information from bad information.
• Quick Tips for being more mindful of social media. Build a personal learning network. Look for people who know what they’re talking about and follow them via blogs, twitter, or listorious. Pay attention to those people; stop following the others. When it comes to the ones who provide value, feed them: ask questions and even give them your own tips.

Howard says that in the future we will need to consider: is this social media machine going to use us or are we going to use it?

The answer is up to us.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

In the spirit of Psychcentral’s Slow Eating Challenge  and the “Now on Your Diet” chapter in The Now Effect I offer The Slow Down Diet.

There’s a funny cartoon out there of some cows in a pasture eating grass. One cow’s head is lifted up with a sense of horror on his face and the caption reads “Hey wait a minute! This is grass! We’ve been eating grass!”

If I asked you, have you ever been sitting at a meal with someone or even by yourself and been halfway through the meal without having tasted the food? In my experience, the odds are likely that you’ll be nodding your head up and down. Our heads are simply often somewhere else, worrying about where we need to be, watching television, or engrossed in conversation.

This unawareness is the seed for making poor food choices, not to mention missing out on enjoying the food. This unawareness can also drive people to overeat as a way to cope with unacknowledged feelings and emotions. You may be in search of a “quick fix” that consists of caffeinated beverages and highly refined foods that burn very quickly and spike up the metabolism.  

Many people have learned to comfort and sedate themselves with food.  Sadly our “super-size” culture not only supports these tactics but also capitalizes on it.

Since preparing and eating food is such an essential component of our lives, why not bring mindful awareness to this?

I had a client who suffered from stomach pains, always complaining of a sensitive stomach. I told him that Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, has a system where he suggests chewing the food 30 times before swallowing (you don’t to count after you practice a few times). When he tried this he began noticing that his stomach didn’t hurt quite as much anymore because his food was broken down so much prior to hitting his stomach.

I had another client that suffered from a food addiction and would often be found going to the bakery daily, buying a cake, and eating it that night. We practiced mindful eating with a raisin in session to experience the concept of slightly slowing down with the eating and beginning to bring all the senses to the food.

She took time seeing it, touching it, smelling it, hearing it and tasting it. She considered all the hard work it took by many people (including her own for having the resources to pay for a session to do this) to get this simple raisin in front of her today. In time, along with other work we did, she was able to slow down her eating and begin to eat in smaller portions with a greater sense of appreciation for her food.

Another client I did this practice with said, “I’ve been downing raisins my whole life in handfuls, one after the other. And it wasn’t until now that I realized, I don’t even like raisins.”

We both had a good laugh.

Go ahead and try this out for yourself. Whether you’re eating a snack or a meal, try to slightly slow down your eating, bring your senses to the food as if you were noticing this food for the very first time. Consider all the work that it took by so many to get it there today (including you). Whatever you do, don’t take my word for it, try it out for yourself!

Please share your comments and questions below, your interaction provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com