Becoming Mindful to Enhance Emotional Regulation and Purposeful Living

Hey there everybody, and welcome back to this series, Whole Person Counseling: 26 Essential Skills for 2026. I'm your host, Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes. Today we're talking about enhancing mindfulness and self-regulation to improve treatment compliance. Why do some people stay stuck in reactive loops even after they've gained insight? They have that aha moment, they recognize what they're doing, why they're doing it, but they keep doing it anyway. What's going on? Insight is intellectual, but behavior change requires real-time awareness. Not just downregulation, but real-time awareness. When people are on autopilot, they're just reacting to the past. Mindfulness helps people reconnect with the present so they can move from reflexive survival to proactive, empowered choice. Mindfulness is a major step to reconnecting the person with themselves and helping them start to feel safe and empowered in their own skin. A lot of people we've worked with have attachment trauma, have trauma histories, and they may not have felt like there were people there to protect them or felt like they were able to protect themselves or make good choices. By increasing mindfulness, people are going to start becoming more aware of their thoughts, wants, and needs, the environment around them, and what can and cannot be controlled in the moment. There are tons of different things that people can do for practicing mindfulness. And we've already talked about morning and evening mindfulness. You can vary those, how people do them, to fit the particular person you're working with. So in the morning, I encourage them to either look at their rich and meaningful life mural and decide, based on what they have to get done today, which things are most important to use their energy for to nurture their rich and meaningful life. Other people may choose to start out the morning and think, okay, this is what I've got on my agenda today, and plan in their mind, mentally rehearse how they're going to walk through the day and how they're going to manage what comes up, what they've got to get done, and plan for any obstacles or challenges that may appear. For example, if they know they've got a meeting at 12 o'clock with multiple people, but one of them almost always gets under their skin. Okay, you know it's coming up, you know that person's going to be there, you know there's a good chance that they're going to say something that gets under your skin. So what is the best way to handle it, to effectively use your energy to help you move toward your rich and meaningful life? Be going in there prepared to defend against this person's comments provides a sense of safety and empowerment. And it doesn't mean the person's necessarily going to have some sort of verbal response. They may think to themselves, well, that's your opinion, I don't share it, and, and move on. So the person can plan that way they don't get caught in an unexpected situation or at least not as many, which can be much more stressful. In the evening, the evening mindfulness is almost always the same— looking back over the day, evaluating how you used your energy, evaluating any lessons you can learn from the day, and identifying again what is— for that person, what are their thoughts, wants, and needs in the moment. Journaling is another way of engaging in mindfulness. Not everybody likes to think and pontificate about things. Not everybody likes to journal. So journaling is a form of mindfulness where people can write down what's going on with them, how the day went, and then they can learn from it. The nice thing about journaling is they can go back 30 days later or a week later and review their entries and learn again, learn from them and see their progress, which can be really awesome. Open awareness is another form of mindfulness that can be practiced where we just literally try to clear our mind but become aware of everything around us. I used to do this with my students when I taught at the University of Florida. We would go out onto the quad for 10 minutes, and I would encourage them to just pay attention to everything that's going on out there. And then we would come back in, I'd give them 5 minutes to write down everything that they could remember that they saw. And it was fascinating at how different people's lists were. But open awareness is just taking it all in without judgment, not getting stuck on any one thing but being attentive. And that can be very grounding in itself because it turns the attent— your attention away from problems and things that are going on to just being present. Open awareness can be extraordinarily difficult for people with ADHD. As with all interventions, there is no one thing that's going to work for everyone. So if that one doesn't work for the person you're working with, that's fine. Don't force it because that will just increase a sense of powerlessness. Choose something they can do. And I didn't mention earlier— I went past it— mealtime mindfulness. This is really helpful in treatment, in recovery, in life, in my opinion. Each time you sit down to a meal, whether it's one meal— you only eat one meal a day or you eat three meals a day— but every time you sit down to a meal Before you start eating, take a moment to take stock of how am I feeling, what am I needing, what is my next step. It encourages people to reground themselves, re-anchor themselves a couple of times a day. It's even better if they're like me and they drink coffee constantly. If every time they get a cup of coffee, they take 30 seconds to reground. How am I feeling? What am I needing? What's the best course of action? That can be incredibly powerful to help people stay grounded and become aware of, for example, when their blood sugar is starting to drop, or if they're starting to get really tired, or if they're starting to feel really frustrated about something that they're working on. Taking that moment and acknowledging it, turning off that autopilot, can go a long way to reducing unnecessary distress. The first few videos we talked about laid the groundwork. We talked about defining a rich and meaningful life, downregulating, enhancing emotional intelligence, and mindfulness. Now we're going to segue into tools that will help the body support the healing of the brain. Remember, we're talking about whole person healing here, and we're talking about particular tools that people can use. So the first thing we're going to talk about, which is the next video coming up, is circadian rhythm stabilization to help stabilize hormonal and biological rhythms.