If you’ve heard of mindfulness, you may have images of Buddist monks, hippies saying “ommm” and thinking “if a tree falls in the woods, and no-one is around to hear it; does it make a sound?”.

There’s often a stereotype of mindfulness about tranquility, emptying your mind and completely blocking everything out.

Mindfulness, meditation and other practices in a similar vein are all quite complex techniques/theories. For example, in order to consider yourself a “mindfulness practitioner” in my day job, you have to do an 8 week course on it and practise daily for 2 years.

What I will be explaining here is some distraction and mindfulness techniques that are informed by mindfulness/meditation practices. This is just a whistle stop tour of couple of my favourites, and it’s quite simplified.

Modern mindfulness is about paying attention to the here and now in a specific way. When we struggle with anxiety/stress/worry or low mood/depression, we can be drawn into the future or pulled into the past with our thinking.

Say for example I go for a walk and it’s raining a bit. As I’m walking along, I may start to think things such as “I knew I shouldn’t have come for a walk in this rain”, “why didn’t I wear my other shoes”, “would’ve been good to bring an umbrella” or “I probably could’ve done with a warmer coat”. I might also think about what’s going to happen later “urgh, I’m going to have to change my socks and trousers when I get in”, “have I got time for a shower before my lunch?” or “I’m going to look like a drowned rat when I get back”. These are simple examples of ruminating about the past – what we shoulda woulda coulda done, and worrying or thinking about the future. Pretty normal. Worry and rumination are part of life, we all do it. The trouble comes when it becomes excessive, or when it causes us distress.

If you’re struggling with anxiety and/or depression, the one thing I can highly recommend is some therapy. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is my favourite, but people find great sources of comfort and help in all sorts of talking and computerised therapies. You can speak to your GP about therapy, or you can google “IAPT” and your local town to find out about services in your area – lots of them are self-referral, but some you have to be referred by your GP. Therapy is a journey for most people, and finding the right kind of therapy, at the right time, for the right problem, with the right therapist can be a bit tricky. If you’ve tried before and didn’t like it, I’d urge you to try again.

So, these tips and tricks are not meant to be a cure or used in place of proper advice and/or therapy, but I hope that some of these strategies and techniques can help most people.

The title of this blog post might’ve given something away. A quick trick is to ask yourself “what’s happening right now?”. Grounding yourself in the moment can really help those worrisome and ruminative thoughts to fade away. Importantly, mindfulness is not about getting rid of our thoughts. It’s about having a different relationship with them. If I ask you, now, to not think about a yellow penguin… what do you do? Most people can’t help but think about a yellow penguin. If you’re really good at thought suppression and/or distraction you might be able to think about something else, but why are you doing that? So you don’t think about a yellow penguin… so you’re still thinking about a yellow penguin really.

I tend to use the words grounding, mindfulness and distraction interchangeably; as they’re all achieving a similar thing. Refocusing your attention. That’s it, nothing that fancy or hard. She laughs maniacally behind the keyboard. Mindfulness is HARD. It is a skill, and it is something that takes practise and patience to get “good at”. The irony being; if you beat yourself up about it and overthink it too much, you won’t be able to do it effectively. Now, try and remember this, try and accept that mindfulness is a journey and a difficult technique, but as long as you are recognising and re-focusing your attention – you’re doing it right. Our minds wander and produce 1000s of thoughts naturally, this is about having a different relationship with that flipping yellow penguin. It’s OK, it’s normal. We don’t need to fight it, we don’t need to get rid of it, we don’t need to stop it, we don’t need to judge it. Any thought, any memory, any worry, any image… notice it and re-focus your attention.

Alright, let’s get to the good bit and back to “what’s happening right now?”. Trick number one – engage your senses. SMELL. SIGHT. SOUND/HEARING. TOUCH. TASTE.

Slowly and carefully, look around and name 5 things you can SEE – in detail. Describe the colours, the shape, the size, the makeup of the different parts. If you can see a door: is it wooden, plastic, white, brown? What colour is the handle, what shape is the handle? Is it a smooth or a panelled door, does it have panelling or strips of metal anywhere? Have you got a drink nearby? What is it? What’s it in? What colour is it? How much is left? Does it have bubbles, are there ripples in the liquid?
Now reach out and TOUCH 4 things nearby. Think about the textures, the temperature, the feel. This can be the clothes you’re wearing, the chair you’re sitting on or a nearby water bottle or anything! See if you can really notice any differences within an object. Water bottles are great for this if the lid is a different texture or material to the bottle, for example, or you can squeeze it.
Then stop and LISTEN. What can you hear? Any traffic sounds, clocks ticking, taps dripping, people breathing, music playing? If possible, name 3.
Can you SMELL anything? If you can, try and name 2, even if it’s your deodorant and the smell of your clothes (fabric softener or detergent!). You could add in TASTE here too, reach out to your drink and smell it or take a sip of a drink, really focus on the temperature, the texture, the feel of it.
Finally, place your hands on your stomach and take 1 slow deep breath. Breathe in for 4, hold for 1 and breathe out for 4.

This exercise can be called the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 exercise for short. You can do it fast or slow. You can mix and match with the senses. You can name 6 things you can see and touch 8 things and listen to 2 things and smell 4 things – that’s OK. Use it however works for you, practice and play around with it.

Next one! Remember my grumpy, soggy walk? Let’s imagine for a moment that I’ve got a child with me on that walk.

She says “weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!! A puddle!!”, “oh my, look at that duck over there”, “oh wow, look at the shape of that cloud!”. She might be having fun and running around, but what’s also happening is she is in the moment. The next mindfulness strategy is looking at the world through the eyes of a child. Go for a walk and put your phone in your pocket. Really look at the colours and the shapes of the trees, the clouds, the grass. We can even build in the sensory stuff here. What can you smell, what can you hear, what colour is the ground?

We can do any activity mindfully, by using this sensory trick, even something as mundane as the washing up. When we do tasks that don’t require much thinking, sometimes that’s a cue for our brain to start wandering off and thinking about the next thing or the last thing. Again, we can use “what’s happening right now?”, really focusing our attention on the plate we’re picking up, noticing and describing what we’re doing with our hands. What does the water feel like? The temperature, the texture, is it greasy, squeaky? Are there bubbles? What do they look like? What does your washing up liquid smell like?

Give it a go! Mindfulness can really help reduce anxiety and reduce rumination. It’s a fantastic skill that can really make you appreciate the little things and be more present in the moment. You know those car/bus journeys you do so often that by the time you’re at the destination you can’t remember the trip? It’s often because your mind was elsewhere or because the journey is so mundane it doesn’t require much attention or thought and we just don’t remember it. So, not only can mindfulness help you to pay attention, it can also improve your memory!