Rufus May Blog Thinking Aloud

I was listening to “On the ropes” yesterday driving to work. John Humpries was interviewing John Prescott. Its worth going to ‘listen again’ if you like passionate discussion and debate covering both the political and the personal. (Click here to listen to this episode, available for the next few days). It was like a well-balanced amatuer boxing match with both opponents throwing some big puches. I thought John Prescott made some interesting points about his character, his weaknesses and his strengths. He acknowleged his own problems with articulately expressing himself compared to more educated more priveleged peers. He also talked about how his working class background had meant he did not have the super confidence compared to better educated colleagues in government. He also talked a bit about his binge eating. However he made a distinction between these acknowleged limitations and challenges and his ability to to make good decisions as the deputy prome minister. I think this is an important distinction that employers and occupational health departments still need to understnad that one can have difficulties and still be competent. John Prescott also talked honestly about how he often hated the press. It certainly seems like they have had it in for him over the years. As I listened to Prescott talking openly about the achievements and struggles of his carreer in politics, it made me think about the huge pressure politicians must feel under; to respond to different demands and be aware of the many different perspectives on complicated social isssues. I wondered if politicians ever get taught useful skills like mindfulness.

I first learned about mindfulness when 5 years ago I was struggling to get my work life balance right. I found sometimes I was tired and irritable in the evenings and felt that I was thinking too much about work. I read a book called “Peace is every step” by Thich Nhat Hanh. It introduced me to mindfulness practices. Mindfulness focusses on increasing the amount of time we focus on ‘the here and now’ through our primary senses. The idea is that we spend alot of time thinking about the past or the future and alot of this thinking is repetitive and unneccesary. Because we are often ‘in our heads’ rehearsing conversations or going over past memories we can miss the good things about the ‘here and now’.

A simple mindfulness exercise is mindful breathing, where we concentrate on paying attention to our breathing. We can do this sitting in a relaxed but alert fashion and gradually count each breath; saying in our mind ‘breathing in one, breathing out one…breathing in, two breathing out two”, and so on till we get to five. We go back to one again if we lose count, we also go back to one again once we reach our fifth breath. When we improve our concentration we can try and count our breathing up to ten. I Have found such conscious breathing techniques very helpful for reducing the intensity of anxious thoughts. Mindful walking is another useful technique as we walk along the street we can focus on each step whether we are breathing in or out, so we might be saying ‘in, in, in , out, out, out’ and so on. This technique can again reduce the number of thoughts flowing through our mind as we bring our concentration on to our breathing. If we are indoors we can do a slower walking meditation where we walk very slowly moving one foot forward intime with each in-breath or out breath. All these exercises are very useful for people who feel they are thinking too much. Mindfulness’s roots are in Buddhism and Zen Buddhism has particularly focussed on this aspect of meditation. Mindfulness is being used increasingly to help people reduce stress in their lives and as part of therapeutic approaches. We often use mindfulness at the beginning or end of self help and Recovery groups. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Dialectical Behavioural Therapy are two brands of therapy that have placed mindfulness at the heart of their approaches. At the Assertive outreach team, we found when we did an exercise before a team meeting team members felt more relaxed and creative in the following team discussion. I know Chris Trepke at City Mental Health Team has also run quite a few mindfulness classes for colleagues over the last few years. When we are relaxed we are more likely to make wiser decisions, inventors for example often have described having their ‘Aha moments’ (when they make a breakthrough in their thinking) when they were relaxed and not thinking directly about the problem itself. Mindfulness has a number of refreshing attitudes that one can be encouraged through regular practice. These include; nonjudgment, acceptance, non-striving, ‘being’ as opposed to ‘doing’. These are well written about by Mindfulness teacher Jon Kabat Zinn in “Mindfulness Full Catastrophe Living”. By being mindful we can also learn to acknowlege and dialogue with strong thoughts and emotions. This can lead to us developing a deeper understanding of why we think and feel they way we do about certain issues.

I also think mindfulness skills offer a useful counter-balance to our often hectic lives that focus on achieving and doing and where our minds are constantly bombarded with messages and demands (e.g. adverts texts and emails to name but a few). According to mindfulness thinking we may well be more productive if we do less but we do it well. So hopefully as we begin to realise our busy lives and our overconsuming of resources is causing us problems, we will turn to a more simple lifestyle so we are not always ‘on the ropes’ and when we are, we may well be more able to ‘roll with the punches’.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.