Here’s the good news: for most people, and for the vast majority of the time, the immediate situation they find themselves in is usually pretty good. Whether they are brushing their teeth, or sitting at their desk, or walking to the shops, or chatting with neighbours, or making a meal—right then in that moment, nothing terrible is occurring.
Here’s the bad news: most of us fail to properly experience the benefits and pleasures of these moments. We may drift along absently, our minds preoccupied, dwelling on past events or on future ones—worrying about paying the bills, or meeting deadlines, or whether we made a fool of ourselves in that meeting, or what our colleagues really think of us, or whether we’ll make it on time for that appointment.
For our mental well-being, physical health, and even the extent to which we feel fulfilled, this can become a big problem if left unaddressed. To understand why we humans struggle so much in this area, we must first look towards the wild grasslands of Africa, where zebras can be observed, for the most part, grazing peacefully. From a physiological perspective, they are healthy and contented, right up until the moment that they are attacked—perhaps by a young lion trying to hone its hunting skills.
At this point of crisis, the zebra’s fight-or-flight responses kick in, and it’s body is flooded with cortisol, adrenalin and other hormones, putting its systems into overdrive. It’s physiology is put into a state of emergency triage, taking blood away from any organ that doesn’t aid it’s immediate survival. Pain receptors are dampened so injuries can be ignored. This is not healthy if sustained for the long-term, but for short bursts during life-threatening situations, it is a necessity.
Fortunately for zebras, as with most of the animal kingdom, this heightened state doesn’t last long. After we watch the zebra elude the lion and get away, it trots off to safety and is soon happily eating grass once more, as if nothing has happened. The danger has passed, its cortisol and adrenalin levels return quickly to normal, and all is well.
Indeed, Robert Sapolsky—a professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford University—used zebra blood samples in his acclaimed study to confirm that the levels of cortisol spike only when the danger is occurring.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for humans, When our levels spike, they can stay elevated for long periods. And it isn’t just a life-threatening event that triggers a response, but any mentally or emotionally stressful situation. But why is this the case?
One of the main differences between humans and zebras is our frontal lobes—the part of the brain involved in planning. It give us a higher vantage-point for viewing the passage of time. We can join moments together and see how they fit into patterns of days, or weeks or years. Thus, we are capable on dwelling on past stressful events, or being anxious about possible future ones. As a result, our cortisol levels will continue to be elevated even when we find ourselves in non-threatening situations, because internally we are reliving or pre-living worst-case scenarios.
This might be okay if our flight-or-flight responses were only fired off in cases of lion attacks. But in reality, our physiology cannot distinguish between physical danger and social discomfort. So our fight-or-flight response is triggered in all manner of situations of perceive threats, not just to our physical safety but to our egos too—in situations that are socially uncomfortable, or are mentally or emotionally difficult.
The complex demands of modern living, therefore, prevent us from enjoying what could otherwise be positive experiences. Instead, we allow social pressures, financial woes, and intrusive thoughts to elevate our blood pressure, adrenalin, anxiety and stress levels for prolonged periods each day; which in turn begin to affect our long term health and general well-being. In short, we are great at making ourselves feel miserable.
But you already knew this, and you want to do something about it. This is why you are, at this moment, reading this mindfulness course. And that’s great, because awareness of a problem is the first step to overcoming it. Mindfulness will help us to attain a more level outlook. We can aspire to be more like a zebra when it comes to being emotionally present and in the moment, seeing the here-and-now for what it is. I heartily agree with using our frontal lobe when it gives us rational foresight, such as the kind that encouraged you to pick up this course and make a positive change to your life. What we’re going to be working on are those other aspects that prevent you from enjoying the present moment because you keep dwelling on other things.
As this course progresses we are going to learn how to be mindful in different situations. But before we cover these techniques in detail, it’s worth noting that there are several lifestyle habits that can drastically change whether you will be prone to stress and tension during a typical day. So right off the bat, if you want to prevent unwanted stress, and give your mindfulness skills a better chance of success, you can try some of these suggestions. These are the kinds of suggestions you’ve no doubt heard before, and know deep down, to be healthy and sensible to adopt. However, since you are serious about tackling your stress, perhaps this is the ideal time to put some of them into practice.
Caffeine
Caffeine is the world’s most actively consumed mind-altering drug. As stimulants go, it can indeed boost alertness, and improve cognitive and physical performance. However, it can also disrupt sleep patterns, cause jitters and create excess nervous energy. It certainly isn’t designed to help you relax! And when people allow themselves to go on past the point of exhaustion, they learn to ignore their body’s natural signals to rest and repair, which can damage long-term health.
Additionally, many people find that caffeine affects their anxiety, increasing with acuteness the more caffeine they intake. So if you want to reduce your chances for stress, one thing you can try is to lower your intake of coffee, tea, energy drinks and other sources or caffeine.
I wouldn’t advise going cold turkey, since people can sometimes suffer crashing headaches and other symptoms if they cut out caffeine too quickly. Just reduce your dosage a little at a time. I myself am a tea drinker, and enjoy a real cup of tea first thing in the morning, and after my evening meal—with the rest of my cups of tea being decaffeinated.
Caffeine doesn’t negatively effect everyone, so maybe you are one of the lucky ones. But there’s no doubt that it keeps you awake, and drinking caffeine any later than four hours before bed can impair your ability to get a good night’s sleep—which is crucial to reducing stress. So, perhaps you can try having a cup of camomile tea before bed, rather than that last cup of coffee.
Also, it’s worth noting that if you happen to be living a lifestyle that is so demanding it can’t be properly performed without psychoactive stimulants, then that might be a sign that you need to make some changes. Whether you’re in a job where you are behind the wheel of a vehicle for longer than is safe, or whether you are being asked to work longer and longer hours without a drop in performance, it’s always good to stop and question every now and then whether the demands placed upon you are unreasonable and unhealthy.
Physical exercise
It has been recently discovered through peer-reviewed research that individual humans tend to burn up roughly the same calories each day, regardless of whether they exercise or not. So, for example, your particular body might be hard-wired to burn 2000 calories per day, regardless of what you do with your time. And it will do so (roughly), whether you walk up a mountain or sit at your desk. If you eat more than this predetermined number of calories per day, you will gradually gain weight, of course. Vice versa if you eat too few. But no matter what you eat, you will still burn roughly that hard-wired amount.
So how does this relate to tension, stress or anxiety? Well, if you’ve spent a day hiking up a hillside, your body will have used most of its calorie budget on that high-intensity exercise. And you will feel pleasingly tired and relaxed at the end of the day.
Conversely, if you have spent the day sitting at a desk, then your body will need to find other ways to burn off those daily calories, and it has been shown that it does that though nervous energy (and inflammation too). Your body can literally make you feel stressed or anxious in order to burn off calories.
Have you ever sat at a desk and found your legs jiggling, or your hands constantly fidgeting with whatever objects are lying around? Or have you ever felt extremely restless or unable to keep still? When we have extra calories to burn off, our bodies make us twitch, wriggle, pace the room, feel agitated and antsy. Inside our brains, there is increased activity too, resulting in feelings of tension and irritability and busy, anxious or neurotic thought patterns.
So to counter this, try and get at least a little exercise every day. The more the better (within reason!). We all know it’s good for us, but crucially, it helps combat stress and tension before it arises. Not only does exercise help to burn though our daily calories, but it triggers dopamine and endorphin bursts in the brain, making us feel good, positive and relaxed afterward.
A good night’s sleep
Sleep is another thing we all know we need, but so often fight against in order to cram more activity into our day. Sometimes our workload is such that our free time gets pushed later and later into the evening. By the time we’ve reached the point where we can kick back and relax it’s getting towards the time we need to go to bed. But we’re damned if were going to miss out on our free time, after all that work we put in, and so we stay up later than we should.
The problem is, this catches up with us over the long-run. We may kid ourselves that we are one of those people who don’t need much sleep, but the science says otherwise. Humans need around eight hours sleep each night if they are to properly repair damage, fight infection, process toxin build-up, and integrate the day’s memories and experiences into their psychological make-up. That’s just the facts. Any less than that, and we are burning health’s candle at both ends.
Chronic lack of sleep, by just an hour or two each night is as bad for our health as a moderate smoking habit. But beyond the long-term physical health risks (including cancer), lack of sleep leads to elevated stress levels and irritability. It impairs our ability to cope with difficult situations. We don’t retain the skills we have learnt the previous day.
A piano teacher I know told me recently that she can directly correlate sleep to learning. Of the adult students she teaches, those that habitually sleep less, learn less. And this is borne out from current research. A piece of music that would typically take one or two months to learn, instead can take more than a year. The hours of practising that the pupils were putting in were junk, because their sleep-deprived brains were being robbed of the crucial time during the night when memories and new skills are laid down in our neural networks.
In short, when we deprive ourselves of sleep, we have given ourselves an extra handicap before we even get out of bed. We are reducing our chances of handling what the coming day throws at us before we’ve even finished breakfast. And thus it affects our happiness.
The problem, however, isn’t lack of knowledge on the subject. We all know what we have to do. Rather, the problem lies in the fact that modern living leaves us thinking that there are never enough hours in the day. Where do we fit in this extra sleep? What’s going to give?
If stress, burnout or anxiety are real problems in your life—if you are feeling unfulfilled, unhappy or are searching for greater meaning—then it’s clear that certain changes need to be made. Consider where you can make changes that will allow you to consistently get closer to the required amount of sleep that a human body needs. This will immediately, without any other mindfulness practice, begin to lower your stress levels.
Unfortunately, I can’t help you decide where to make alterations to your routine. That’s something that will need some dedicated thought and willpower to enact. A general rule of thumb is to pair down. It’s very easy to take on too much—to say yes to more commitments of your time, when you ought to politely decline. I find it very hard to say no to extra engagements, in favour of a simpler week. But I’ve learnt that it’s better for my long-term health.
In life, I hate to disappoint people—it causes me great distress (something I picked up from my dad)—so I’ve been guilty of putting my own health on a back-burner in order to please the people around me. However, it’s important to realise that it’s okay to prioritise our health. Very often, that disappointment we are trying to spare people isn’t as drastic as we imagine. Most requests made upon us aren’t life-changing or urgent. Sometimes they are just invitations. Declining them might cause mild inconvenience at most. As my wife has reminded me over the years, it’s alright for people to be disappointed sometimes. We all get over it. And hopefully, if they know the reasons, they will be understanding.
For example, I was invited to play in an orchestral concert recently, and after much angst, I declined. I knew my friends would be disappointed, but the coming month was already busy, and I had learned from experience that taking on the extra commitment of rehearsals would lead to me being very stressed.
By all means, be helpful, and kind, and generous with your time, especially to your closest loved ones. Give them your full attention whenever you can. But simply be mindful of those, perhaps less-important commitments, that lead to you oversubscribing your time. Find out where your boundaries lie, and try to stick to them, knowing that you would probably be understanding if others did the same.
Healthy eating
It’s so easy to do, to fall into the trap of convenience food, but when we load up on ultra-processed foods, we are paying for it, not in terms of dollars or pounds, but in terms of health and mental well-being.
My household, like many others, have to balance a budget, and feeding a family often means having to make compromises. So it’s pretty difficult in modern society to cut out all processed foods or ingredients, but you can still go a long way towards eating healthily.
Preparing meals from raw or fresh ingredients, or dried grains, pulses, flours or pastas, gives you a huge pallet from which you can create an unending array of interesting meals. Not only are raw ingredients often cheaper than a ready-made microwave meal, but they are filled with more nutrients, and you get to control how much salt and sugar you include in your cooking.
Consuming a better diet means that your energy and concentration lasts longer. You are fitter and healthier too, which means that you are less likely to succumb to bugs and colds. And the array of artificial preservatives, colours, sweeteners and other additives that you are avoiding means that your mental health will also improve.
Many of these artificially-produced ingredients aren’t even classed as food—xanathm gum, for example is a bi-product of bacterial scum-growth, similar to the sort you might find growing in the corner of your shower. Some kinds of fatty bulking agent have been made from a bi-product of coal (search for ‘coal-butter’)! It’s no wonder that eating all these things can cause our bodies to react in all kinds of unpredictable and unhealthy ways—contributing to increased levels of migraines, stress, anxiety, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, hormone imbalances and more.
We can all do ourselves a massive favour by embarking upon a gentle journey of better eating. Introducing more raw or organic ingredients into our cooking—or even just learning how to cook—can have a drastic effect on our overall health and well-being. It doesn’t have to be overnight. Just a little at a time. After all, we wouldn’t expect our cars to run smoothly if we filled them with the wrong kind of fuel, so why would we expect our bodies to?
It is always surprising how often I have been prepared to look after replaceable objects with more care than I look after my own irreplaceable body. But that’s one of the unspoken consequences of living in a society that puts pressure on us to prioritise our personal productivity and consumption over our health and mental well-being.
Laughter
It might seem so obvious as to negate mentioning, but laughter is a crucial component of being happy and less stressed. To begin with, if we can laugh then we are probably not in the midst of a stressful situation. However, the benefits are more nuanced than this. Finding situations or activities that make us laugh each day is great for our overall health. The act of laughing releases feel-good, stress-relieving hormones, which lifts our mood and counteracts our stress hormones for much longer than the duration of our amusement.
Finding someone to laugh with increases our social bonds and makes us feel more connected. It also places our physical systems under stress—however, it’s a good kind of stress. During laughter, the convulsing, spasms and tensing of our muscles produces exertion on our systems akin to a moderate workout. Whilst not enough to build muscle, it is nonetheless enough to raise our heartbeat and kick-start the immune system into gear, keeping you fitter and healthier. It also allows your body to heal and recover quicker and stronger, including the damage produced by daily fight-or-flight responses.
There have been patches in my life where the weekly grind has squeezed out space for levity and silliness. At some point, I became aware that I hadn’t had a hearty laugh for days. It was no coincidence that my stress threshold had become more sensitive during this time. Challenges that I had previously been able to manage now seemed frustrating and angst-ridden.
Working laughter into your day is more important than it initially seems, and crucial to integrate into our lives. There’s a biological reason why we are hard-wired to find things funny.
Nature
Similar to laughing, we are hard-wired to find nature pleasurable or calming. Not everyone likes going for walks in the countryside, or sitting in a wildflower meadow. It might not be their thing. I’ve heard people tell me that it’s boring. They might not like the idea of the outdoor elements, or getting their shoes muddy, or they may be unaccustomed to walking on uneven surfaces, or not having the kind of overt stimulation that screens and indoor entertainment has to offer. But it’s all a matter of acclimatising. In many cases, they simply haven’t reached the point where they are able to unwind sufficiently to notice or appreciate all the amazing things that nature has to offer. Nature has a pace of its own. It forces you to slow down.
Once people discover how to overcome these artificial obstacles—by wearing appropriate clothes, for example—then suddenly, the world of nature can dramatically effect our sense of calm. Our physiology has evolved to cope with and find comfort in nature. Our stress levels measurably reduce in response to the colour green, to the sound of birds or running water, to the stimulation of wind on our skin or sun on our backs. Even to the sight of a wide open space, such as a horizon. Our brains become absorbed in smells and sights. Processing the complex organic forms found in nature means there is less brain-energy left to spend on anxiety. So even though it may initially seem to be less stimulating than the dazzling media we habitually consume, if you become sensitive to a wider, immersive natural environment, it is more deeply and neurologically satisfying.
Even the microbial content of the air, that is wafted up from the surrounding biome, has a measurable and significant effect on our brain chemistry, inducing feelings of calm and blissfulness. We are engineered to find nature stimulating and restorative.
I, for one, have found I cannot do without my excursions into nature. Whatever the season, I simply have to escape into the wild and experience the wonders of the natural world. My worries and anxieties melt away. I am confronted with forces or landscapes or ecosystems far greater than me, and it puts into perspective all the problems I face back in the world of people. Suddenly the artificial affairs of human society—unfolding inside tiny, box-like rooms, or on flashing screens—seem so small and paltry in comparison to a mighty storm-cloud, or a crashing sea, or the quiet, eternal stillness of a mountainside.
So if you don’t already, give nature a go. Immerse yourself in an environment that is infinity wider and more complex than our human-engineered one. Let different ideas blossom within the stillness. Feel how refreshed and restored you are afterward.
Screen-time
When I look back to documentary footage or films made in the 1940s and 1950s, one of the things that leaps out at me is the ubiquitous presence of the cigarette. Everyone seems to be smoking. Young, old, female, male, rich or poor. There isn’t one corner of society where it isn’t either fashionable or acceptable to be seen puffing out clouds of smoke.
These days, of course, we know full well the serious health risks associated with smoking. After decades of use, the consequences of long-term habits became too terrible to ignore. And so, we are no longer a nation addicted to tobacco. Instead, if future generations look back on today’s society, I wonder whether screens may be our equivalent.
Whether walking down the street, or sitting on the bus, or waiting in a queue, people’s eyes are glued to their phones. At the office, people can spend hours a day at a computer screen. When they get home, they might switch on the TV or tablet and watch hours more.
The long-term effects of too much screen-time are still not properly understood. We are a guinea-pig generation, just like the smokers of the 40s and 50s. But even now, we know that looking at screens is changing young people’s brain structure. We know that trawling through hours of social media is causing people anxiety, burnout and other mental health issues. We know that problems with posture, tendinitis, eye-strain, headaches and a host of other muscular problems derive from the overuse of screens and computers.
More than this, we know that screens can be addictive. Our ape brains cannot help but be distracted by colourful moving images, and are drawn to screens wherever they are in a room. The dopamine hits from clicking on links and buttons tap into our foraging instincts. Seeing constant streams of beautiful, successful people can leave us with feelings of inadequacy. The pressures and dramas of social groups can be amplified online, leaving us feeling unable to turn off our phones for fear of missing out or being isolated. Seeing curated photos of other people’s apparently-perfect lives can prompt us to compare ourselves to an impossible standard. The Wild West of discussion forums or threads opens us up to a kind of toxicity and dark humour that can eat away at the soul. And finally, doom-scrolling bad news that’s unfolding in terrible ways across the planet can leave us with feelings of utter despair.
Why do this to ourselves? These devices, whether through conscious effort or by some form of incremental evolution, have been deviously designed to tap into our deepest triggers, reward-receptors and psychological weaknesses. We cannot help but be addicted, to whatever extent our personalities allow.
If we could only see how many hours of our lives we have each wasted, staring at pixels, perhaps we might be shocked into removing these tempting devices from our reach. There are, of course, legitimate reasons for using screens—and the educational benefits of the internet are immense—but our mental well-being would certainly improve if we traded some of those hours and hours each week for more time doing activities in real-life—activities that we love.
So give it a go if you can make it work. I myself experienced a week recently without any phone or internet connection. And it was bliss. I hadn’t realised just how much a burden on my soul I had been carrying around with me—the world’s news, murders, rapes, injustices, environmental collapse, the inane arguments of anonymous people, or outraged people, or ignorant people, or toxic memes, or constant stream of alerts and pings that each required my attention. And I had thought that my own screen time was already quite modest.
Honestly, if you try cutting out screens, you will be absolutely amazed at how it can improve your stress, anxiety and general well-being. It’s like unplugging from the Matrix and finding out that there’s a real world out there to enjoy.
Hobbies
Finally, talking of enjoying time in the real world, we all need a hobby. Some pursuit that is completely different from our day-job, something that is fun, engaging, rewarding and perhaps even frivolous. Whether that’s some kind of crafting, or making music, or baking, gardening, hiking, sport, writing, model trains, growing vegetables—you name it. We all can benefit from some pure fun.
There have been times in my life when I have been both self-employed and hard-up. During these periods, I have felt hard-pressed to spend any time not working and working and working. But failing to ring-fence a little time here and there for something completely unrelated can be the difference between simply existing and actually living.
The times where I haven’t allowed myself to unwind have been some of the most stressful of my life. More than that, my productivity became less and less effective the more I became stuck in a rut of constant grind. Stress levels that are kept at an elevated level, day after day, end up causing chronic problems, both mentally and physically. In some cases, these can even lead to some kind of breakdown.
It is impossible to place too high a value upon some fulfilling, fun, self-actualisation—whether that results in something useful and productive (such as home-made cookies), or whether it is superfluous and transient (like a game of snooker). Both are just as valuable, since their real value isn’t in what you are producing, but rather how you feel during and after, and how your soul has been nourished.
Download this course as an e-book or PDF
Download the online course as an e-book or PDF, then read at your leisure on your preferred device:
Leave a Reply to Mindfulness Made Easy: An Online Course – WithMeaning.netCancel reply