Centering Thought: Today, I accept myself for who I am. I will pay attention to my thoughts and be fully present in my own life, using mindfulness to see that feelings come and go.
The concept of mindfulness has been popularly linked with everything from spiritual practices to pop culture to big business. And it has its place in each of these. Surprisingly, it can also find a fitting place in our mood recovery.
When we learn to accept our many moods and even to accept our greater mental health issues, be they diagnosed or as-yet-unnamed, we are actually practicing a form of mindfulness. Mindfulness is really about being present in the moment. Catastrophic thinking and rumination are then the opposite of mindful thinking: They are the times when our thoughts spin out of control into negative worry and obsession. This can happen overtly (such as during panic attacks or obsession-compulsion) or subtly as it often does during low-level depression.
Paying attention to our thoughts — the actual statements we make in our minds as we move about our days — can expose our insidious negativity and our expectations for more of the same. Perhaps we feel sad on crisp fall days. If we use the first rumblings of sadness to begin practicing mindful thinking, truly observing our thoughts, we could come to realize something enlightening, such as that the smell of fall leaves in the air reminds us of the time of year when we experienced our first depression. And we may discover this through a thought chain that goes something like, “Oh, great, it’s fall again. Time for me to be sad. I’m always sad in the fall. The leaves smell like sadness — like the time of year when everyone snuggles up together with their families in their new fall sweaters while I have no one. I’ve never had anyone. I haven’t had anyone since my brother died ten years ago. I remember leaving his funeral — it was this time of year — and watching all the people with their happy families playing in the fall leaves.”
More likely, our thoughts will be non-linear, winding and weaving in and out of many topics. But if we observe them without judgment, we just might learn something. And we can come to accept each moment we experience as just another passing moment, rather than a tied-together sequence of doom and gloom.
Many of us have practiced mindfulness to get through panic attacks by describing our thoughts and symptoms, so that they lose some of their potential danger. We have used mindfulness to help alleviate the depths of our seasonal depression, such as in the sample thoughts above. We have even used mindfulness to calm our bodies during hypomania and other extreme moods by paying attention to what symptoms our bodies feel without assigning meaning to them.
Acceptance and mindfulness go hand in hand, for when we accept ourselves as we are, we are able to process our moods more fully.