8 Benefits of Mindfulness

Hey there everybody, and welcome to Today's presentation on Eight Plus Benefits of Mindfulness. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. So let's start out by defining what mindfulness actually is. Mindfulness simply means observing and becoming aware of the present moment without attachment or judgment. It's not necessarily mean meditation. Now mindfulness is involved in meditation, but meditation is not always involved in mindfulness. Inner awareness or inner mindfulness is awareness of your thoughts, your needs, your feelings and your sensations. Outer awareness or outer mindfulness is awareness of your environment. That is your environment, you know, where you are right now, very specifically, very close to you, the room, the building, etc. And for some people, also the community and maybe even the country where they're at being mindful of what's going on around you. So mindfulness again is just a getting out of autopilot, getting out of monkey mind where you're thinking about 17 different things at once and becoming aware of the present moment. So what are the benefits of mindfulness? Oh my gosh. I was on pubmed this morning when I was putting together this presentation and there are so many wonderful articles that I will be covering in the upcoming days on the benefits of mindfulness. We're really making a lot of strides in our understanding of how mindfulness can actually help us rewire the brain and improve the body. Remember that things like stress being stressed changes the way your brain is wired, if you will. If you are frequently stressed, we actually see reductions in certain areas of the brain and increases in volume and other areas. And in the body when you're stressed, we see changes in the gut, microbiome. And remember, the gut is the factory where a lot of your neurotransmitters and hormones are actually produced. So if that factory is not healthy, then we've got a problem. So mindfulness can help us become aware of and address our feelings, thoughts and needs before they become a crisis. Think about how many times you've been on autopilot and you've ignored the fact that you were getting burned out, or you've ignored the fact that you were starting to get sick, sick, or you've ignored the fact, you know, you can see where I'm going with this and until it became a crisis, until you were burned out, until you were had strep throat, until you were, instead of being a little bit irritated, you were enraged. Mindfulness encourages us to become aware of those sensations and those thoughts and those feelings. Feelings, when they first start, become aware of our warning signs, if you will, of different things so we can respond to them before they become an issue. My grandmother always used to say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Mindfulness can help us adjust adjust our stress schema to reduce unnecessary HPA axis activation now by addressing our feelings, thoughts and needs when before they become a crisis. Okay, that's great. That's super helpful at reducing unnecessary HPA axis activation. But we also have schema or shortcuts in our brain that help us predict what may be getting ready to occur. A lot of times our schema are out of date or not 100% accurate for the current context. So it's important to recognize that and mindfulness can help us reprogram those schema. So instead of saying every time I have to get a shot, it's going to hurt, which means that every time I've got to go into the doctor to get a shot, I'm going to get stressed out, we can change that schema, hopefully with positive experiences to say, sometimes when I get a shot it hurts, for example, and so that therefore the event of getting a shot does not automatically trigger the HPA axis related fallout. When your HPA axis or your stress response system is regularly triggered, remember I said it alters the way the, the structure of the brain, it alters your gut microbiome. It also impacts your sleep. When you're stressed out, you don't sleep as well. When your HPA axis is regularly activated, it also contributes to suppressed immunity and increased inflammation and pain. None of those are things that we want. So mindfulness can actually help us physically feel better by helping us reduce our stress levels and addressing problems before they become mountains. Mindfulness also has been shown to improve people's sense of safety and personal empowerment. When you are going along throughout your day and it feels like these waves of emotion hit you from quote out of the blue or cravings hit you from out of the blue. It can feel very disquieting, it can feel very uncomfortable because you don't feel feel safe kind of in your own body. It's like, oh my gosh, all of a sudden I had this tsunami of anger. By becoming more mindful, people are aware, are able to become more aware of their early warning signs and take steps to address them, which gives them a greater sense of confidence and confidence. Another benefit of mindfulness is it improves the strength of the executive control network or your wise mind, your higher order think and it reduces the activation of the default mode network or autopilot and the default mode network amygdala connection. A lot of people when they're under stress, especially if they're, they've been under chronic stress or they have something like cptsd, their default mode network or their autopilot and their amygdala, which is their fear processing, processing area of their brain are really tightly connected and they talk all the time. So the executive control network has a hard time getting in on the conversation and saying, hey guys, let's step away from emotion based reasoning and focus on fact based reasoning. With mindfulness, people are intentionally overriding that default mode network and engaging the executive control network, switching from emotion based reaction to fact based thought based proaction, if you will. I guess mindfulness has also been shown to help people more easily change habits and behaviors. Well, think about it. A habit is something you typically do on autopilot. If you are more frequently intentionally engaging your executive control network, turning off autopilot, you're less likely to engage in mindless behaviors. Mindfulness has also been shown to improve relationships by recognizing the reciprocal impact of you on other people and other people on you. And this is part of emotional intelligence. And they've actually started to see that there is a very strong connection between people who are highly mindful and people who have high emotional intelligence. Because those people are aware of their feelings, thoughts and needs in the moment and they're aware of other people, they can empathize. Well, another study also indicated that people who are more mindful are more able to empathize. They are able to observe non judgmentally and without reaction what's going on in the situation and then respond from that point instead of getting defensive or reacting impulsively. So that is another benefit. And that study actually was done on physicians and other behavioral health clinicians. So I thought that was kind of cool. Number seven, Mindfulness helps us improve our communication through observing. When we're mindful, we're observing what's going on. We're not reacting, we're not in a flood of adrenaline. We're observing what's going on. We're stepping back and we're describing it like a fly on the wall or, or a scientist. And we're being non reactive. We are non judgmentally accepting the present moment as it is. It is what it is. And finally, mindfulness has been shown to help people prevent relapse. And this is not just addiction. This is relapse into any other behavior that you've changed. It's re preventing relapse into anxiety to depression. So there's a lot of benefits that we're finding and two strategies that have used mindfulness to help people prevent relapse or prevent recurrences of mental illnesses include mindfulness based relapse prevention and mindfulness oriented recovery enhancement or more. So we'll be talking more about those strategies in the upcoming days and weeks, but I think it's really important to recognize that mindfulness based interventions are being used more and more in mental health as well as physical health. There are many, many, many articles out there on the ways in which mindfulness is beneficial in helping people reduce pain and deal with cancer, but those kind of are things that we talked about here. Helping people reduce their stress and focus on the present moment can be extremely liberating for a lot of people that are struggling with issues like chronic depression, chronic pain, etc if the videos on this channel have been helpful for you, please support us in our mission to make high quality, practical content available to everybody. Donate@doc snipes.com donate join the channel@doc snipes.com join or purchase a thanks on any video you particularly like. Mindfulness means simply becoming non judgmentally aware of your feelings, thoughts and needs and the environment in the present moment. Looking around and Wednesday we're actually going to talk about contextual mindfulness and contextual Cognitive Behavioral therapy. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Mindfulness provides information that can help you use your energy to more purposefully work toward your rich and meaningful life and as you define, encourages you to stop, get off autopilot and say what is the best way to use my energy to work towards those things that are important and let go of those things that just aren't worth my energy? Upcoming Videos in this this week and in upcoming weeks will provide activities to help you become more mindful and discuss those current research studies.