Every minute of every hour of every day. You are making the world just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style. This quote from Rebecca Soni she's a writer, a historian, and an activist, starts our episode off today all about the benefits of slowing down, and living in the moment, minute by minute.
Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman podcast exploring the art and science of creativity. This is the podcast for women who want to elevate their creativity and start applying creative thinking in their everyday life. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Dr. Amy Backos. The modern creative woman is obsessed with helping you build your creativity through her conversations and creative insights. I'll share simple tricks and practices that can help you take the mystery out of the creative process and start each day feeling empowered, creative, and ready to take on whatever comes your way. Let's get started.
Welcome in and thank you for joining me on this audio creativity journey. I want to give you a quick update from Modern Creative Woman headquarters. I just finished the Vibrant Vision webinar today and if you have yet to join, the last one is the day after this episode drops, so do sign up modern Creative Woman slash webinar. The link is in the show notes. It was incredible. Every single woman who showed up put a comment in the chat that said yes. They had new insights about a dilemma that they were facing or a challenge, and on what they could do about it. This is such an incredible, powerful exercise that I'm teaching in the vibrant vision. It's part of what I do inside the membership to help women really focus on changing their relationship with their thoughts, so that they can use their creative thinking capacities to the fullest extent. So often what happens is we end up using distraction action, where we start to think about a change and we get a little anxious. We have uncomfortable feelings and so we shut it down real fast. Nope. Can't change, don't want to do that.
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Let's jump into today's topic and I think you're going to love it. It is the winding down of the topic meditation. If you'd like to go back and listen to a little bit more, kind of. The beginning of this series starts with episode 51 through 54, and we'll wind down on this topic today. And I say wind down, because it is a constantly important topic for us as women who are working to be creative in a different kind of way and explore the options through their mindset. Mindfulness meditation really gives us the chance to slow down, be in the moment and fully appreciate what's happening. If you imagine 20 years from now, you will look back and wish that you had your current health, your current body, your current opportunities, there is a way to not let that slip past you, and it's about staying in the present moment, allowing each moment to have your full attention. And that means whether you're washing dishes, driving your car, talking with someone, it means staying focused and present minded in a way that relieves anxiety. It gives us so much more pleasure it reduces boredom and irritation.
Making contact with the present moment is one of the most powerful ways that you can start to enjoy your life right now. Making contact in the moment with whatever's happening is how you kind of stretch out your experience of life. It gives you the chance to appreciate what's happening. It is increased by gratitude, and it also increases your gratitude. When you start to appreciate what's happening in this very second, you start to honor and respect time and your life in a different way. Certainly, mindfulness has been one of the most powerful tools that I've used personally. And then I've taught women that can allow us space, time, renewed energy, and a fully different perspective on what's happening in the moment. I want to talk about how meditation can impact your purpose. What I'm talking about is mindfulness meditation, that making contact with the present moment, where you're fully able to observe your consciousness rather than simply having your thoughts be the truth in the moment. If you call up an unhappy memory, you can start to feel uncomfortable and unhappy again. That's the power of your mind. Present moment awareness allows you to observe the process without judgment, without shame, without having to do something about it, just allowing it to be there. And that experience can completely change your life.
I've told this story earlier in the podcast, you might remember, and I want to bring it up again. The first time I became aware of how I could shift my mood, I was driving home from college and I was clenching the steering wheel and I my jaw was tight. I was biting my jaw really hard and irritated, just driving on the freeway. Nothing was happening and I was just wrapped up in my thoughts and all of a sudden I had the insight to notice what was happening, and I realized I was creating all of this tension when the only thing happening, the reality, the truth of the matter was I was driving. That was it. And in that moment, I relaxed my hands. I relaxed my jaw, I sighed, and I thought, wow, I actually have control over this emotional stuff, which seems so upsetting at the time. Oh, I can make myself feel better in the simplest way. It didn't require the therapy or self-talk. It didn't require anything. It didn't have to do anything different. I kept driving, but all I had to do was make contact with the present moment.
So let's talk about mindfulness meditation psychology. I started by looking up what the American Psychological Association has to say about mindfulness in the field of psychology, and they made kind of brief reference to what started off as a largely obscure Buddhist concept, quote unquote, from the APA that was founded about 2600 years ago into mainstream psychotherapy construct. So we want to be careful with this. We're not lifting Zen Buddhism mindfulness practice. We're using parts of it that fit in the field of psychology. It also fits in almost every religion. Meditative and contemplative practices can be found in every religion. So this is a mind practice that has been taught by thought leaders and religion, and now understood by research in psychology and in the 1950s and 60s is when Buddhism became really popular in the United States. And that comes in part from Suzuki Roshi, who moved to San Francisco, opened the San Francisco Zen Center. With the dream of teaching meditation to people in the East. Now in psychology, the concept of meditation really took off in the 1990s. And you're probably familiar with Jon Kabat-Zinn. He's given a lot of credit for this early research, and he was trained in several types of meditation, including Zen meditation. And he was the head of the Chronic Pain Clinic at the University of Massachusetts. And at that time, in the 90s, there was really no effective treatments for people who were experiencing chronic pain. And he started to apply Buddhist meditation techniques to help his patients cope with their pain, because it was something that had helped him, and he found astonishing results. He began using his training in research to understand what it was about meditation that could be helpful. And he began, of course, with randomized control studies. And he ultimately parsed out meditation from religion by including the core components that could be effectively, easily taught for clients who were experiencing chronic pain.
The science behind mindfulness meditation is really strong, it seems. Many researchers practice meditation and want to know more about it, and mindfulness meditation can be used to help self-control, objectivity, tolerating our emotions. It can help us be more flexible in our thinking. It can improve our concentration, improve mental clarity. It can increase our emotional intelligence. It enhances our ability to relate to others and relate to ourselves with kindness and acceptance and compassion. This is a powerful tool. Let me give you a clear definition. Mindfulness is a moment to moment awareness of your experience without judging it. Observing your mind while avoiding judgment of what your thoughts are or what's happening in your mind is the hallmark of mindfulness. It's a loving and accepting stance where you make contact and observe your consciousness.
One important factor. Mindfulness is a state, not a trait. In other words, a state is something that we can move in and out of. We can be mindful in this moment and not in the next. A trait is something like a personality, some quality of us that's long lasting, that shows up in situation after situation. It's kind of like the who we are, but fortunately mindfulness is something that we can just keep tapping into. It is unnecessary for us to be kind meditators in the moment or chill as a personality variable. All we have to do is learn how to step into that moment of mindfulness.
Where do we find mindfulness? Well, you can learn it in certainly meditation classes, psychology, religion, Tai chi yoga. These kinds of self-regulation practices like yoga and tai chi focus on training your attention and your awareness. And the whole goal is to bring our mental processes under greater voluntary control. It's similar to breathing. Our body will breathe on its own, or we can observe it and use that awareness and the breath in incredibly unique ways to soothe ourselves. So mindfulness meditation is about bringing thoughts under greater voluntary control. Your brain will think all by itself. It needs zero direction left unattended. Our mind naturally focuses on the negative, the fear, and of course, negative questions. However, when we bring our conscious awareness to our thoughts and we have greater voluntary control over them, we experience this state of mindfulness and we relax the tension, the stress shifts. It becomes not the focus. The awareness is the important part.
You might wonder how mindfulness works in the brain. I have a couple of areas that I think are really important for you to understand from the research, and then you can start to take these concepts and apply them into your life. So mindfulness works by promoting what research calls metacognitive awareness. That's essentially thinking about thinking when we engage in metacognitive awareness. We are more observant of our thoughts. They don't just fly by. Leave our mind with a feeling or they don't get stuck to us, leaving us with a negative feeling. We are able to observe them in a really powerful way. The second aspect that's important around mindfulness is that mindfulness decreases rumination, and it does that by helping us disengage from these repetitive cognitive activities. Have you ever ruminated about something you said or a negative thing that someone else said? Perhaps you had a suspicion about something and you just couldn't let it go in your mind? Your mind just kept returning to it even when you tried to let it go. That's rumination. Mindfulness interrupts that pattern in a reliable and efficient way. And the third way that mindfulness works is it enhances our ability to focus our attention. And when we have these enhanced attentional capacities, we have an improvement in our working memory. This is really important. This will improve your conversations with people and your work.
When we have increased working memory, it means that we can hold something in our mind and manipulate it. So if you look at the date today and you wonder what the date is in three more days, you can calculate that quickly in your mind. Mindfulness meditation allows you to calculate many things very effectively in your mind. So these three cognitive benefits essentially of mindfulness the metacognitive awareness, the reduction of rumination and our increased working memory.
All the these things contribute to effective emotion regulation. What emotion regulation means is you can manage how you feel without having to act on it, without having to take distraction action or engage in avoidance strategies. And it's really avoidance that keeps us from our dreams and our purpose. Avoidance is the enemy. It takes us out of the present moment, and it puts up a barrier between us and what we really want to do, what we really crave, what our soul wants, what our boundaries are. It's avoiding our feelings in the present moment that leads to suffering. What has all of this got to do with living your purpose?
I have some studies that I think you will find very interesting. In one study from chambers et al. They surveyed and did a whole bunch of research on 20 brand new meditators. They took them on a ten day mindfulness meditation retreat after this meditation ten days. This group had statistically significant higher mindfulness abilities and lower negative affect. They lowered their bad mood, and this was a statistically significant finding when compared to people that hadn't done any kind of meditation. They also reported fewer depression symptoms and less rumination. They had better working memory capacity, and this is important for work. They could sustain attention during a performance task in a more reliable, consistent way as compared to the control group who did not meditate. We need attention, and we need to let go of depression and rumination so that we can move forward with what's most important in our life.
I found a meta analysis. You know, I love a good meta analysis. This one reviewed 39 studies on mindfulness based stress reduction techniques and mindfulness based cognitive therapy, and the research found that mindfulness based therapy can change your overall mood and the cognitive processes that underlie a whole host of clinical problems. Essentially, it was reducing a wide variety of mental health issues. And this is a study from Hofmann. They found that the reduction of depression was possible from mindfulness meditation. And when we have a low mood, it keeps us from thinking we will succeed. It stops us from having hope or from getting help. And when we can use meditation and therapy, our creativity to reduce our depression, we can also use medication. There's a whole variety of ways that we can address a mood disorder. Lowering depression allows us the opportunity to pursue goals and make our contribution. The positive mood allows us to take action.
I found another study where participants were randomly assigned to an eight week mindfulness training group, compared to a group that had no mindfulness, and they looked at depression and anxiety and even psychopathology. And here's a very clever way that they understood what was happening for people. They did a neuropsychological assessment that the neuro part was a functional MRI, and what they did was asked people to watch these sad films while they were having a functional MRI. And a functional MRI is a little bit closer to a movie than a still picture, right? It shows where the blood is flowing. It shows what's happening inside the brain as it's happening. So the people who had that mindfulness training had significantly less anxiety and depression. They also had less somatic distress. That's where there's body aches or upset stomach. After the meditation when they were compared with the control group. You're going to find this so interesting. What happened during the movie time. So that fMRI, while they were watching sad movies, showed that the mindfulness group actually had less neural reactivity when they were exposed to these sad films than the control group. In other words, it was not so disturbingly distracting. They were able to feel the emotion without adding on top of it a whole bunch of other things. Another part of that fMRI was that these reactions from the meditation group were distinctly different from before and after their training. So this meditation training changed how their brain processed emotions. What a relief. When we are struggling with intense emotions, it can really derail the day. Using mindfulness meditation is a simple, easy, practical tool that we can use any time. So in this study, the mindfulness meditation was found to really shift our ability to use our emotion regulation strategies.
And furthermore, we could experience emotions a little more selectively. In other words, we didn't get flooded with a whole bunch of emotions. We are able to sit and experience the emotion at hand without recruiting lots of other emotions. What a relief. If we're sad, we don't need to recruit all our other sad memories. When you think about your career, your business, you have to show up and be present. Even if you're having an uncomfortable day, even if something went wrong on the way to work, or you're struggling with some big issues at home or in your personal life.
The mindfulness meditation practice helped people disengage from those upsetting images, suggesting that we can do the same thing where we were able to let go of rumination, disengage from the upsetting experience, and the meditation allows people to focus better on cognitive tasks. And this really matters for us because we have to manage our emotions to be able to live our purpose.
Mindfulness also predicts better relationships, and in fact, your ability to be mindful can predict your relationship satisfaction simply by practicing mindfulness, you can be happier in your relationships. They don't have to change their behavior. And you don't even have to change your behavior. You just start getting in the moment and it makes it a little bit easier. It increases our skill in communicating with our partner. Meditation helps us use more positive coping strategies when we have relationship is stress.
One study found that mindfulness protects against the emotionally stressful effects of relationship conflict. Another study found that the ability to express ourselves in various social situations is enhanced through mindfulness. So you can join Toastmasters to learn to speak better and add a meditation practice and you'll be golden. Several studies have pointed to this idea of relationship satisfaction being higher for people who meditate. Now, relationships are necessary for your purpose and your dreams and your happiness. Relationships are not just essential for survival. They're part of business and community and family and our friendships. And managing the stress in relationships makes us more fun to be around, and it makes us have more fun.
You're working, memory is enhanced, and in fact, one study with military personnel found that meditation not only gave them better feelings, more positive emotions, and less emotions when under severe stress. The military personnel who meditated actually had improvements in their working memory, even during some of the most stressful points of their service. If this is not enough to convince you to meditate today, I give you a few more studies.
Meditation enhances our self insight, our sense of morality, our intuition. It helps us moderate our fears. If you, like everybody else, experiences fear. Meditation can help. Numerous studies have pointed out the health benefits that come from meditation. Mindfulness meditation in particular, increases your immune functioning. It improves our sense of well-being. It reduces our distress, it increases our information processing speed, and it decreases the effort necessary to deal with thoughts that are unrelated to what we're doing. If you're working on a project at work and then you have thoughts pop into your head that are unrelated and aren't going to help you with that project. If you're a meditator, you can move those along a lot faster. Meditation increases empathy, self-compassion among health care professionals, among therapists and therapists trainees, and it lets us be more attentive to the therapy process. Does it help clients when therapists meditate?
There's a lot of studies on this, and there's a challenging bit to this in meditation. In meditation, I'm going to tell you what the paradox is in a minute. But there's some really powerful studies that show for therapists who meditate, their clients have better outcomes. Nine weeks of treatment working with a therapist who meditates. Some of these studies found significant reductions in overall symptoms that were greater overall than clients working with therapists who did not meditate.
Here's where it gets a little tricky, and I want you to be aware of the meditation paradox. As you think about this last study that I just told you about. And as you think about your own personal experience meditating, the paradox is the more mindful we become, the more we become aware of how unmindful we are or our lack of mindfulness. And we may end up feeling less mindful as we're actually becoming more mindful. So the more mindful we get, the more aware we become of not being mindful. That's the paradox, but it's totally okay. And in fact, it's natural. The more we learn, the more aware of what we don't know. Let's talk practical application about how can you use this mindfulness meditation? How can this become a part of your routine? Well, I've already talked quite a bit about what you can do in terms of the loving kindness meditation. It's really powerful. You can go back to the previous episode, have a listen to that, but you can start to use mindfulness in all kinds of places. I encourage you to start with art, drawing, doodling. You can get a great big piece of paper. Move your arms, big circles, lines up and down. Being in the present moment while you move your body has this added layer, this somatic experience that really encourages your present moment awareness. Turn on some music. Really get in the moment.
Next time you get in your car or hop on your bike, can you put your hand on the steering wheel or the handlebars? Just notice. Picture yourself right there. Here I am. Now next time you hug someone, you can just really savor that hug. You can put in checkpoints anytime you need. A mindfulness moment where I used to work at a little bridge over a little river, and every time I walked over that little bridge, I use that as a mindfulness trigger. So I set up those trigger spots. I have them around the house where I just pause and take a deep breath. Probably nobody knows that I'm doing that. There's nothing externally observable about it. I want to encourage you to practice in these moments where you have silence, or you have all your favorite art supplies, your favorite music, and the more you practice there. The easier it will be to apply it out in the world when life is happening.
I'd like to close by sharing a quote from the author, Anita Christen. You don't have to move mountains. Simply fall in love with life. Be a tornado of happiness, gratitude and acceptance. You will change the world just by being a warm, kind hearted human being. Have a wonderful rest of your week.
Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free and it comes out once a month. And I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine. Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level and want you to know you have options inside the membership, and if you're interested in a private consultation, please feel free to book a call with me. Even if you just have some questions, go ahead and book a call. My contact is in the show notes and you can always message me on Instagram. Do come find me in the Modern Creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at Dr. Amy Backos.
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