‘Be Here Now’ to Reduce Anxiety
The present moment is the only moment that you actually have available to you.
You spend the actual moments when you are alive anticipating future moments and remembering past moments so you never get to enjoy and thrive in the moments when everything is okay.
How often are you actually in your shower?
I suspect your body is in the shower regularly.
But you … how often are you in there, with your body, in the shower?
Taking a shower is a rich sensory experience. You have the luxury of calibrating the water to the exact right temperature. You have good smelling body wash and shampoo. The water makes a lovely rainfall sound. You can, if you’re paying attention, feel the water running down your body, feel your fingers massaging shampoo into your scalp …
But, you’re not paying attention are you? No.
You can make the choice to allow your mind to wander in the shower. There’s no judgment in this observation. (In fact, many people have epiphanies and brilliant ideas occur to them in the shower!)
Your mind wanders in the shower … so what? Doesn’t everybody’s?
Fair point. Let’s explore how often mind wandering occurs, and whether it matters.
A cleverly designed study – A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind – investigated how frequently people’s minds wandered and how mind wandering related to happiness.
Participants received random alerts on their phones asking them:
How are you feeling right now?
What are you doing right now? and
Are you thinking about what you’re doing?
The results indicated that participants said their minds were wandering 46.9% of the times they responded.
Results also indicated that participants were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not, regardless of whether they were doing something they least enjoyed.
What people were thinking about was a better indicator of their happiness than what they were doing.
Therefore, the researchers concluded that mind wandering was a cause — rather than a consequence — of unhappiness. They state: “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
So, how does this all this shower talk and mind wandering relate to anxiety?
How often does your mind wander to pleasant things? When your mind wanders are you reminiscing about your happiest moments, that beach vacation you took last year?
No. You’re not.
You’re list-making, running through all the things you have to do today and convincing yourself there’s no way you’ll get them done. Or, you’re going over a conversation you had with someone earlier, wondering if you were too forward or if they think you’re stupid. Or, you’re imagining, in great detail, the worst possible outcome of something that will likely not even happen.
Am I right?
These thoughts are negative. And anxiety-makers. As we now know, your thoughts are an important determinant of your happiness. If you’re thinking negative, anxiety-creating things, you’ll likely feel anxious.
And, all of these thoughts take you away from now.
The present moment is the only moment that you actually have available to you. That is, you can do nothing about all of your prior moments, and your future moments are not guaranteed.
When you allow your thoughts to wander to negative destinations, to take you away from now, you rob yourself of your life. And you rob yourself of happiness. It is impossible to live fully when you’re not present in the day-to-day moments of your life.
You spend the actual moments when you are alive anticipating future moments and remembering past moments so you never get to enjoy and thrive in the moments when everything is okay (or likely way better than okay!).
This is a big deal, folks.
Practicing mindfulness and engaging in present moment awareness is a hugely important tool for anxiety reduction and management.
It allows you to train your mind to not take yourself to negative prior or anticipated future moments, but to instead reside right here and now where, much more often than not, everything is fine.
And, most importantly, learning and practicing these skills allows you to live your life in the fullest, most engaged way possible. These tools allow you to thrive rather than simply survive, tolerate, exist in your own life.
These skills take work and regular practice to build. And, you will definitely not be good at it to start (hint: fortunately, that’s not the point). But, with commitment, learning how to ‘Be Here Now,’ is life changing magic. Truly.
What now?
Tools to get you started!
Curious as to how often your own mind wanders? Download the app from the study referenced above – Track Your Happiness
Want to start learning more about mindfulness and practicing present moment awareness?
I will be offering much more content on this topic.
And, in the meantime, you can get started with one of two apps I love:
Through Headspace you can get a free 10-day trial of guided mindfulness practices, and
Insight Timer has an awesome free library of guided mindfulness practices – and much more! – as well
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This blog post is offered for educational purposes only and should not be confused as therapy or psychological care.