Svartalfheim To put it simply, mindfulness is a kind of conscious and uncritical mental state, and meditation is the most popular and fully studied practice method to help people train to get this state. The two are not the same, but they are often confused by ordinary lovers because of the highly bound promotion path.
I have been in contact with mindfulness meditation for almost five years. When I first started, I also made jokes. I thought that I had to order agarwood and sit cross-legged on the futon for 40 minutes to be called "serious practice". Later, I followed the supervision of clinical direction for half a year before I realized that the boundary between the two was actually much more blurred than the popular science in the market.
Up to now, there is no complete consensus on the definitions of the two in the academic and practical circles: scholars who study religious sociology insist that mindfulness itself is born out of Southern Buddhism's four-mindfulness meditation, and now the popular "religiousization" mindfulness meditation on the market-such as MBSR mindfulness decompression course invented by Jon Kabajin, is used by many enterprises as employee welfare-in essence, it takes away the commercial products of the core of mind training; Most of the practitioners who do clinical intervention are more pragmatic. As long as they can help visitors reduce anxiety and useless ruminant internal friction, both the traditional core and the simplified version have their practical value, and there is no need to distinguish between high and low.
| Common cognitive misunderstandings | reality |
|---|---|
| Mindfulness is meditation, and meditation is mindfulness. | Meditation is the mainstream way to train mindfulness, but there are mindfulness exercises such as walking mindfulness, eating mindfulness and washing mindfulness without deliberate meditation. The two are the relationship between "goal" and "mainstream training path" |
| Meditation must be done with your eyes closed cross-legged and sitting in a quiet place for more than half an hour. | One minute of breathing anchoring, three minutes of body scanning, and even the awareness of footsteps when you are tired of sitting for a long time are all meditation exercises, and there is no fixed form and duration requirement. |
| Mindfulness meditation is used to relax. If it is not easy after practice, it is a mistake. | The core of mindfulness is "awareness without judgment", not the pursuit of relaxation. Some people will have repressed negative emotions when practicing, which is a very normal reaction and there is no need to force themselves to "be calm" |
| Mindfulness meditation is metaphysics and has no scientific basis. | At present, more than 2,000 peer-reviewed clinical studies around the world have confirmed that regular mindfulness meditation training can improve anxiety and depression, reduce chronic pain sensitivity and enhance concentration. However, there are some metaphysical propaganda that has not been scientifically verified, so attention should be paid to screening. |
Let's talk about a real case that I have contacted. Last year, a girl who made Internet products came to me, and she had a serious sleep disorder. When she was lying in bed, her mind was full of scenes of needs assessment. After practicing with popular meditation classes on the Internet for half a month, she became more anxious. She always felt that she was "unable to sit still and always ran away, but she had no talent to practice well". I didn't ask her to follow the long course at that time, so I told her that she didn't have to pursue how long she was sitting. Just lie down for five complete breaths before going to bed. When inhaling, she knew that she was inhaling, and when exhaling, she knew that she was exhaling. When she ran away, she pulled back, and she didn't have to blame herself. After practicing like this for less than a week, she told me that at least lying in bed would not make me think more and more energetic, and she could fall asleep slowly. You see, at this time, she is actually in a state of mindfulness through very short meditation practice, and she doesn't need any complicated processes or high-end equipment at all.
To make a more popular analogy, mindfulness is like holding the steering wheel all the time when you are driving. No matter how busy the roadside is and how noisy the people in the back seat are, you know that you are driving now and will not be led astray by irrelevant information. Meditation is the process of holding the steering wheel and stepping on the brakes in the open space. When you practice it, you will naturally be stable when you are on the road.
At present, the propaganda of mindfulness meditation is very polarized, either it can cure all diseases or it is called the metaphysics of cutting leeks. Objectively speaking, the current clinical research has confirmed that eight weeks of regular mindfulness meditation training can reduce the recurrence rate of anxiety and depression by about 30%, and the effect of relieving chronic pain is equivalent to that of some mild analgesic drugs, but it is really not a "magic medicine". I have also seen visitors who have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. When they practice mindfulness blindly with short videos, they trigger emotional flashbacks, but they have more serious emotional problems. Therefore, if they have a diagnosed mental illness, it is better not to practice blindly by themselves, and it is safer to find a guide with a formal training background to practice with them.
Actually, there's really no need to make mindfulness meditation too mysterious, with energy and high frequency. To put it bluntly, it's just a tool to train the brain's concentration. It's no different from going to the gym to practice biceps brachii. After much practice, the brain's "concentration muscle" will be strong, and it's not easy to be carried away by messy past regrets and future anxiety, so you can spend more attention on what you are doing now.
