How Mindfulness Really Works: The Two Powers

Do you know the two powers of mindfulness?

You are having one of those days.

Late. Traffic jam. Boss yells. Forgot your lunch. Somewhere around two, right before you snap, you realize it might be a good time for those breathing exercises. So, you breath. You close your door, set the timer on your phone, and you just breath.

You’re on your seventh set of box breathing and still nothing. You don’t feel better. In fact, you are now even more aware that you feel like crap. You think, This mindfulness thing is bullshit.

You are partially right. The way mindfulness has been sold is part fairy tale. Do exercises and like the Buddha under the tree all suffering will dissolve into harmonic bliss. When you feel stress or anxiety or anger, do your exercises — slowing down, listening, counting — and you will experience relief.

Mindfulness exercises can produce relief. Over time, they almost always create a new sense of well-being. Mindfulness, both the ancient wisdom practice and the modern intervention, are not the problem. Mindfulness has been set up to fail you.

The most interesting brain research of the last few decades focuses not only on what happens when we feel bad — reactions like fear and anger; it also explores the mechanisms that make us feel better. Starting in the early 2000’s we could literally see what not only happened in our brain when we were afraid, but also what allowed us to manage strong emotions (they call it extinction learning, or removing the fear, in the literature).

What has followed is an understanding of what interventions or intentional practice do to the brain. We know that our brain, under stress, has two loops. The amygdala — your alarm center that wants to keep you safe — and the hippocampus — part of your memory center — get stuck when we are stressed. Together they spin and fill the mind with crazy thoughts and feelings, anything to get us out of the situation we are in. When you want to run away on a first date, even before it starts: that’s the short loop. Afraid of a presentation, interview, or competition and feel sick, even panicked: that’s the short loop on full tilt.

Research has also shown, however, that when we are stressed, we can also get on the long loop. When we add the frontal lobes — your thinking center — into the equation, we have the capacity to turn down stress and its partner reactions like fear and sadness.

The problem for too many people with mindfulness is that it doesn’t instantly make us feel better. Awareness is not cessation. A 2018 study that captured people on the long loop after eight weeks of mindfulness training didn’t turn the alarm down when they looked at gruesome pictures. They weren’t on the short loop, but they weren’t going to like what they were experiencing either.

I wish mindfulness were a magic tonic. Actually the first power is that it allows you, in just seconds, to choose what you want to focus on next. Breathing, counting, noticing what you are feeling: these are skills. It is the door to what you want to experience. The door is locked without mindfulness. If you don’t know how to step back, you can’t ultimately turn the alarm down.

Which introduces us to the second power of mindfulness. Once the pathways between the different regions of your brain are open, you can be mindful on purpose. Aware, you can turn your focus back to the same kind of mindfulness or a different form and in enough time, the alarm turns down. You could just suppress your experience of the bad day, but mindfulness is more effective. Even better, mindfulness literally shrinks the size of your alarm. A smaller alarm with open pathways means that what used to trigger a stress reaction and make you miserable, over time, will have a smaller impact on your life.

But both powers still need to be exercised. You can’t expect the interventions to be helpful if they are simply an idea. Practicing a form of mindfulness before you feel stress or strong emotion is what allows you to use it when you notice yourself starting to lose control or feel bad. The commitment to a longer form you will use to wait out or transform the stress or strong emotion needs to happen before you begin to melt down. Knowing why mindfulness really works, I hope, will inspire you to practice more.

Mindfulness as a discipline is not the problem; it is the veracity of various claims to its benefits. It hurts to realize our life is out of order. It is painful to have to sit with the days we hurt. And, when you learn to be mindful for just a few moments as you feel off or are suffering, you can choose to practice a longer session of mindfulness next. You can then experience its true value: a life where we can notice pain and no longer feel helpless.