Making Mindfulness A Habit

I’ve been getting more emails asking about mindfulness – more than I have about meditation. So I’ll write another post about it to see if I can bring a bit more clarity to the subject.

I think one of the problems is people are getting meditation and mindfulness mixed up as if they’re the same thing. They assume that if they meditate, then surely mindfulness will naturally follow. But that’s not actually how it works. Though meditation is an exercise in mindfulness, and mindfulness certainly supports meditation, nevertheless, for mindfulness to be effective, it needs to be practiced as a skill all of its own – in our daily life.

In effect, we need to make a mindfulness into a habit.

So this brings us to habits – the working programs in the mind’s hard drive. Any activity, learned skill or reaction, if repeated enough times, will become an instinctive habit. However they come, like a host of little robots, habits take care of almost everything we do. In fact, we need our habits to take care of the minutiae of our life. After all, how tedious would it be if we had to re-learn everything each time we did it?

In the beginning a habit begins as conscious thoughts and actions which we learn, either through repetition or intensity of experience.

With motor habits, like walking, talking and handling things, (which we take for granted), as we learn these things as children we feel clumsy and self-conscious at first. When learning to walk we keep falling over until we learn to balance, which takes conscious effort. With talking we need to learn vocabulary and how to shape the words, Then later, when learning to drive, we feel overwhelmed as we try to coordinate all the actions we have to remember to make.

In the forming of any habit, we have to first pay conscious attention. But once we’ve learnt the skill, it gets stronger and more instinctive, and falls back into the operating system of our unconscious to become automatic. We decide to walk and the habit does the walking for us. We start the car and the habit does the driving while we chat or daydream about other things.

We also learn emotional habits, usually as a result of our life experiences, traumatic or otherwise – beliefs about ourselves and the world, our fears, likes and dislikes, and our emotional triggers – they’re all habits. Then there’s the organs in our body, each of which operates according to their own genetically acquired habits, all triggering each other and living our life for us.

So, whether it’s habits of skill, ability, belief or emotions, one could say that everything we are is a habit of one kind or another – even our deepest and most basic personality traits and inclinations have been inherited as genetic habits from our ancestors. And we allow all these habits to take care of our life while we sit in the virtual reality in our head, daydreaming and worrying, or being happy or angry about something that isn’t immediately present. 

Now this wouldn’t be so much of a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that many of the habits we’ve acquired don’t serve us well. As much as most of our habits are functional, we’ve also acquired a lot of dysfunctional habits – like, for instance, habits of belief about ourselves that are limiting, and even destructive.

For example – let’s say a young boy has an abusive father who’s constantly belittling him and telling him he’s a failure. This creates a habit of fear in the boy, such that he is afraid of anything that challenges him – result being, the anxiety and self-consciousness that this habit creates, causes a self-perpetuating reality. The boy who has been made to feel like a failure, actually becomes a failure. As failure keeps happening, the boy feels cursed because he can’t seem to escape. The habit’s programmed reactions keep appearing as self-enacting responses from his unconscious mind – and no matter how much he tries, his conscious mind cannot change the way he is reacting.

So many of our dysfunctional habits are like this – of rage, depression, laziness, fear and many others. And they then become the cause of ensuant habits like binge eating, alcohol and drug addiction, violence and so on. And because the initial habits arise from the unconscious as instinctive reactions, it seems as if we have no conscious control over them, and no way of changing.

But with mindfulness, we can gain control. And with practice, we can change.

Now, what do I mean by practice?

Well, for sure, meditation is a mindful state – but as soon as we stop meditating and step into our daily life, the mindfulness that’s been generated quickly evaporates – unless we consciously practice it.

As I said in the beginning, we have to make a habit of mindfulness, and that requires us putting it into action in our daily life, as much as possible, such that mindfulness becomes instinctive. We need to practice being fully aware of what we’re doing as we’re doing it, over and above the instinctive drive of our habits.

Sounds tedious, but they say it only takes a month of daily practice to create a habit – after which it will recede into our unconscious and become automatic. Once that happens, we’re able to spot when one or other habit is pushing us to act, or react, in a way we don’t want – so we can override or moderate it.

For example, we might find ourself arguing with a friend. With mindfulness, we can feel anger arising – and we know that things will spin out of control if we allow the anger to express itself. But with mindfulness, we’re able to disengage before this happens.

Or, if we’re in a situation which causes us to be fearful, with mindfulness we can accept the surge of fight or flight hormones in our body, and ride the energy it gives us rather than lapsing into panic.

Or if we have a drug addiction, or any other addiction, with mindfulness we can feel the surge of the addiction when it arises, and deny permission for it to enact itself.

Every time we mindfully adjust the way we act, the effect is both behavioural and physical. By ‘physical’ I mean we actually change the physical structure of our brain. It’s called neuroplasticity, and research has shown that when we consciously change the way we act, the physical structure of our brain is slightly altered in kind, making those changes come more easily over time.

And all it takes is for us to be mindful of what we’re doing instead of leaving our life to be lived by our habits.

But as I said – this kind of mindfulness must be practiced.

I don’t have room to detail mindfulness practice in this post, so I recommend you read a post I wrote earlier that was specifically devoted to describing the practice and how to build a habit of mindfulness.

Here’s the link: https://meditationmakesense.com/2022/12/19/practicing-mindfulness-during-the-day/

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Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’  is available now. Just click on the links below:

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