You've heard Dr. Baime talk about the experience of anxiety. But now, we're going to hear him talk more about mindfulness and he's one of the great teachers of mindfulness-based stress reduction. So he's going to talk to us about how a sustained practice of mindfulness benefits not just how we deal with stress and anxiety, but how over time, it really can change the way in which we engage in the world. >> Mindfulness and attention are linked. Mindfulness is a particular way of paying attention. So, when you pay attention to what's happening right now, in your present moment, you're being mindful. So mindfulness is a behavior, it's something that you do. Mindfulness is also a trait. Some people, just for whatever reason, are more likely to be tuned into their present moment experience, [COUGH]. To take more information [COUGH] that's directly coming from their senses to think less about the future and the past and more about what's happening right now. We know actually that people who are like that are less anxious and are likely to have a more positive mood, that's really mindfulness as a trait. So it can be a state, something that you do right now, or that happens in the moment, or a trait, a propensity that happens in a person over time. And then there's this particular thing that is central to the way that we teach and practice mindfulness now. And that's mindfulness as a training activity or another way of saying that is mindfulness practice. When we practice mindfulness, we take this part of our mind that is aware, that is a portal through which we experience our life and we bring it to bear on something that's happening in the present moment. And we know that if you do that over and over again, if you bring your attention into the present moment and rest it on something, allow it to remain here. Over time, the neural systems that manage attention in your brain begin to change. And you're more likely to stay in the present moment, in a way that affects both what you notice of your experience, how much you pay attention, for instance, to other people. And also, the way in which you are less likely to be swept away by emotions, so it affects emotion regulation too. So mindfulness is a practice, like you practice the piano to do that better, a state, like something that happens in a moment and a trait, something that is a more long standing part of what you are but that can be cultivated through that practice. There are a lot of things that happen as a result of learning to practice mindfulness, really learning to practice it. People's mood is unquestionably brighter. In our own program, we've given more than 1,000 people, a 6 sub-scale measure of mood and well-being called the profile of mood state. And we typically find that the reported anxiety, the anxiety score, drops by almost 50%, depression and anger drop by about a third. Vigor increases by about 20%, and fatigue decreases by about the same amount. And something that this instrument measures as confusion, which is kind of just not having a sense of what you're doing or what's next, also decreases significantly. So those are just reported as mood states, but that's hardly the most important thing that happens. Really the most important thing that happens is that people start living their life more fully. The reward of practicing mindfulness, and the reason why people aren't just interested in it but become nuts about it. And you probably know somebody who is nuts about it and you want them to like shut up already about the mindfulness, I heard you the last time. It's that they start to feel differently about themselves and their lives in a way that's really profound. One of the most common comments that I hear from someone who've just finished our eight week program is that I came because I was getting angry or I was stressed beyond what I could handle or I wasn't sleeping. And what I found is that I was actually able to change my whole life. I've heard that hundreds of times, literally and that's a little big and a little vague, it's hard to get your hands around it really. But what happens is that when you're fully embodied, and awake and present in the life that you have, you notice its richness, you notice the people who you connect with and you connect with them better, you notice the sky more. You're more sustained by and satisfied with the experience that you have. And when you have a life that's satisfying and full of beauty and meaning and those are things that happen, the fact that you're stuck in traffic really isn't such a big deal anymore. So mindfulness is a really powerful tool for undoing anxiety. One aspect of it is just cognitive therapy in the sense that we teach people to recognize the distorted cognitions, the catastrophizing, exaggerations, black and white thinking, and so on that goes along with anxiety or panic. The other part of it though is learning to feel that emotion of panic or anxiety, to become comfortable with it, which is a funny to say because it's so aversive. But to be able to just notice it from a neutral point of view, to notice it as a sensation in the body and a kind of energy in the body that doesn't necessarily mean anything, to just view it from a little bit of distance. And then finally we teach people through this attentional training to actually take their attention, which has been fixated or hijacked by this worry about what's going to happen. We teach them to take that out of that focus and redirect it towards something that they have learned is stable, and comforting and safe, like the feeling of the breath in the body.
