The Mindful 3 Step
“How will mindfulness help me feel better?”
I hear this question frequently and it’s one of my favorite questions to answer.
Mindfulness is being aware of whatever is happening. It’s that simple. That doesn’t mean being absorbed in the activity. It means being aware of what is happening in and around you. It’s not being lost in thought, it’s being aware that your mind is thinking and of what it is thinking. Mindfulness practice develops presence, which is a felt awareness of what is happening and how your mind and body are responding. It’s the opposite of being distracted or disconnected.
Mindful awareness can open up the possibility of choice in pivotal moments. It’s those choices that can help us feel better. Let’s use the example of the endless internal dialogue that most of us discover when we start observing our thinking minds. Instead of your inner dialogue running your life, you can build awareness of the activity and content of your inner dialogue. Over time, you can also strengthen your agency of how you respond to your inner dialogue. This is a concrete example of how applying mindfulness can help you feel better, by identifying and avoiding further mental suffering.
We have very little control over what thoughts arise in our minds, but we can choose how we respond to those thoughts. Do we keep perpetuating them? Do we choose to observe them with some distance and wisdom? Do we choose to bring our attention to something else on purpose, to stop feeding the thoughts? These are some options from a Mindful Menu.
To help practice mindfulness, I’ve created a sequence that I call:
1.Notice what is happening: the thought, sensation, or external stimuli. It’s that moment of becoming aware. It’s connection to what is happening.
2. Name what is observed: use a brief label of what is noticed. E.g. loud sound, thinking about x, pain, seeing x, feeling x, etc.
3. Choose: how to respond in that moment. Often the choice is to keep being aware of the next thing that is noticed, to be passive and allow experience to unfold. But this is also the moment when we can use our agency to chose something different. Perhaps we can choose an option that decreases mental suffering or supports our health.
To illustrate this, let’s take an example many of us can relate to. It’s late at night, you’re tired and almost ready to go to bed, and scrolling on your phone. The thought arises, “oh, I need a new _____, I want to start looking for the best _______.”
Without mindfulness, we get sucked into online shopping and fatigue and bedtime gets ignored.
With the Mindful 3 Step, we 1. realize that 2. we are wanting to shop and 3. choose if this is the best time for that, or assess if we really need ______ after all?
I hope that makes sense. Try it right now! Are you 1. aware that you’re 2. reading and thinking and 3. do you want to continue doing that?
Over time with practice, mindfulness happens without the three steps, which is more fluid. But it’s still useful to wake up to the third step…what am I choosing to allow to happen? Do I want to unblend from this process and change the course of what happens next?
There’s two frequent uses of the Mindful 3 Step that I often suggest to my clients.
The first use is when strong feelings are arising and those feelings are overwhelming or distracting from what a person needs to do to function; for example, waves of grief or sadness arising when at work. I suggest that the person 1. notices the 2. strong emotion and 3. chooses to make an appointment to tend to it later, after the workday. So the person is meeting and acknowledging the strong emotion without allowing it to take over in that moment. Or the emotion may take over for a short time, but then the person turns away from the emotion and finds stability so they can resume functioning. This is a process that we refine and practice together in therapy.
This is quite different from suppression, which consciously or unconsciously ignores a strong emotion and doesn’t revisit it on purpose. Exercising the choice of when we will turn towards strong emotions strengthens our emotional resilience and our capacity to feel in control in times of difficulty.
The second frequent use of the Mindful 3 Step is what Internal Family Systems calls “unblending.” (IFS is a popular model of therapy that also uses mindfulness.) For example, a person 1. notices a 2. inner critic criticizing her and 3. chooses to observe the critic’s dialogue or felt sensations with some internal space. The blended awareness would unconsciously keep believing the critic’s dialogue, the unblended awareness observes and chooses how to respond.
Unblending is a significant use of mindfulness that can decrease our suffering. We can observe our mind’s mischiefs, the patterns that perpetuate pain, without fully believing or acting on them. In fact, we have to observe and understand them to figure out how to unhook from these painful patterns.
Unblending is another process that I utilize frequently as a therapist and in my personal life. In fact, it was experiencing the freeing potential of this unblending process in my Buddhist meditation practice that inspired me to become a psychotherapist! I wanted to share these teachings with people outside of any Buddhist context. Many other meditators had the same interest and helped to create the wave of Mindfulness-based interventions which has had significant impact on Western societies in the past twenty-five years.
If you’re interested in exploring how mindfulness can help you feel better through therapy, please reach out to discuss this with me in a free twenty minute video consultation. It’s my pleasure and passion to do this work and I would love to share it with you.