I’d say the majority of us start off our days with an alarm ringing us awake. As we wipe the sleep out of our eyes and drink our morning coffee or tea, the cobwebs begin to break away and the doors of the mind open to start looking forward and planning/worrying about the day.

The reality is, the planning and worrying sometimes doesn’t wait and they dart in the moment we open our eyes. So, I’m going to suggest a simple and easy idea that could have a major impact not only how you start your day, but how the rest of the day unfolds.

Take a moment to consider what’s really important to you in this life.

For this APA Mental Health Blog Party, I’m going to get right down to it. If there’s one major lesson I’ve learned it’s that we can’t always control what happens to us, but true freedom lies in cultivating the awareness to choose how we want to respond.

Mindfulness is key to mental health.

In my work I see people who have suffered from addiction, anxiety, depression, and multiple forms of trauma. The fact is, they didn’t choose to struggle with this pain and stress, it just happened to them.

An unknown person once said:

“A diamond is just a piece of charcoal that handled stress exceptionally well.”

But how do we get to the place where we can handle this stress exceptionally well? That’s the trick. It doesn’t just happen overnight and it’s often a lifetime practice and one that thrives with patience.

As this New Year dawns on us, how about we don’t set rigid New Year’s resolutions, but instead see this year as a practice. There is some implied rule within resolutions that we’ll actually stick to them and when we don’t, we set ourselves up for the same old habitual mind traps that have kept us stuck in the past.

“I’ve failed once again,” arises, leading to a sense of sluggishness and the next thought, “What’s the point?”

There’s another way.

It’s important to set goals for ourselves and create plans to reach those goals; this is the underpinning of cultivating hope. Hope is our greatest antidepressant.

There are a few steps we can take to make a resilient New Year:

In the past post Feeling Disconnected from Life: 9 Steps to Reconnect Today I quoted Abraham Joshua Heschel saying:

“Life is routine and routine is resistance to wonder.”

The purpose of this was to bring awareness to the fact that our brains are inclined toward automaticity and the thing we do in life and the ways we are tend to become habit. What was once interesting or what we used to put heartfelt attention into tends to become rote.

Six months before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a group of students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967 in a talk titled “What is Your Life’s Blueprint.”  In this talk he said:

“And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.

Over the course of our lives we’ve been labeled or labeled ourselves as a glass half full or empty kind of person. But what if the glass was already broken? That’s the lesson that Ajahn Chah gives to a group of students including Psychiatrist Mark Epstein, author of Thoughts Without A Thinker.

Ajahn Chah was a highly respected Buddhist Teacher, maybe well known to some as Jack Kornfield’s teacher. What was he talking about when he said the glass is already broken and how does that relate to our lives?

It can be as blatant as a sledge hammer hitting us in the face or as subtle as supreme ninja. The art of blaming is rampant and goes on to help absolutely nobody.

Pema Chodron writes:

“We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don’t like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground.”

And why not protect our hearts when there have been so many experiences showing us that it so easily bleeds?

There are a lot of books and writings we all get our hands on that speak to changing our lives or transforming ourselves in some way or another.

We all suffer in life. Whether it’s deep emotional pain, physical pain, or just wanting to avoid an upcoming work project, the mind is constantly on the lookout for how to fix this suffering.

However, what we are often times offered is a romantic version for how to alleviate the suffering. We read the book or watch the programs that tell us simple steps on how to change our lives. These in themselves can be helpful, but not if we don’t do the work.

The truth is, real transformation and change takes a kind of discipline and can be hard work.

There is a tradition on the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog. Every Monday, I cite a quote or a poem that is related to mindfulness and psychotherapy in some way and then explore it a bit and how it is relevant to our lives. For me, quotes and poetry can often sink me into a state of greater understanding. So for today, here is a quote by Don Miguel Ruiz

“You see everything is about belief, whatever we believe rules our existence, rules our life.”

Of course, whatever we believe colors the lenses of how we see the world and our very next interaction. If we believe we can’t give that speech, lose that weight or live without our Blackberries or IPhones every minute it’s going to be a heck of a lot harder if not impossible to do so. The same goes for getting through anxiety, depression, or addiction.

We start to integrate fundamental beliefs in this world from the time we’re in the womb. We’re already beginning to sense the environment around us, taking in and processing information.

As life progresses we start to integrate this information as truths.

A recent opinion piece on CNN came out about a book by Dr. Louann Brizendine, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF, that caught my attention and so I had to read further (a sign of good marketing). The book is The Male Brain, a follow up to her past book, The Female Brain, and it basically states that the classic stereotypical male attributes (e.g. automatically looking at women’s breasts, lacking empathy, oversexed) can now be explained from a neuroscientific perspective. In other words, neuroscience can now explain John Gray’s famous book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.

I thought, “Wow, this is astounding,” but something didn’t feel 100% kosher here. I dug deeper. In a New York Times book review, Emily Bazelon more or less says that Brizendine’s book is a highly lopsided account of the facts for the purpose of high power marketing. She says:

There is no question about it, the interest in Mindfulness-Based Interventions to work with people experiencing a variety of “disorders” and also in healthy individuals is growing at a rapid pace. There has been research with psychological issues such as stress, anxiety, depression, bipolar, addiction, eating disorders, ADHD, OCD, Parenting and others. There has also been plenty of research with medical diagnoses such as Chronic Pain, HIV/AIDS, Cancer, Sleep disorders, heart disease, epilepsy and others.

The most well-known of these are Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Dialectal Behavior Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and a growing interest in Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP) for addictive relapse.

In her book  The Art and Science of Mindfulness: Integrating Mindfulness into Psychology and the Helping Professions, Shauna Shapiro shows a variety of research with mindfulness-based interventions and says,

As it stands, there is solid evidence that mindfulness-based treatments can be successfully applied to the treatment of symptoms of anxiety and depression, whether MBSR, MBCT or ACT is applied. Mixed-modality intensive treatments like DBT that incorporate mindfulness training are also useful for treating more complex personality disorders, which often include substance abuse and self-harming behaviors. 

Yet, it’s amazing that there has been this much positive research in only 30 years, most of it coming in the last 10 years. This is an exciting time in the field of mindfulness as a modality for medical and psychological distress.

The research is clearly pointing out that mindfulness as an approach has been and can continue to be translated into the mainstream and is indeed helpful as an intervention.

In a previous interview with Shauna, I asked her what she felt was the most exciting research out there in connection with mindfulness and she said:

Neuroplasticity. I believe this single word gives people hope; hope that change is possible. For example, we used to think that we all had a “happiness set point” much like with weight, and that no matter what our circumstances, we would always end up back at baseline. Good scientific evidence substantiates this theory, for example, people who win the lotto or those who are in a …

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