Mindfulness is about emptying the mind

FALSE “Mindfulness is the opposite of ‘emptying the mind’; it is fully immersing the mind in precisely what you are doing,” says neuroscientist TJ Power. “If you were eating a banana mindfully, 100% of your awareness would be focused on the taste and experience.”

“We all have the ability to focus our attention but we’re not very good at doing it consciously because of the distractions of modern life,” says mindfulness teacher Amy Polly, AKA the Mindfulness Rebel. “Rather than ridding yourself of thoughts, accept them and learn to change them if you need to.”

By its nature, the brain can’t be switched off, says Dr Afrosa Ahmed, a GP and author of Mindful Healing: “Your liver detoxifies, your lungs help with breathing, your heart helps circulation, and the purpose of the mind is to think and feel. You don’t want to empty the mind; you want to befriend it.”

Mindfulness is the same as meditation

FALSE “They are friends but not the same,” says Ahmed. “Meditation is the formal practice of mindfulness, so you’re practising at a specific time and place. Mindfulness can be done anywhere – on the bus, brushing your teeth, doing the dishes.” Both practices help you gain more control over where you put your attention. One study found improvements to memory, emotional regulation and mood after subjects did 13 minutes of mindful meditation (or formal mindfulness) every day for eight weeks. Polly recommends little and often to begin: “Three minutes a day is better than 30 minutes a week to start building the habit.”

Mindfulness alters brain function

TRUE “You can create new synapses within a few hours and days,” says Nicole Vignola, a neuroscientist and author of Rewire: Your Neurotoolkit for Everyday Life. “By practising mindfulness, you can sift out what you don’t need. You do this by naming the feeling in a non-emotional way – if you feel angry when driving, you almost robotically acknowledge simply what is happening, such as noticing: ‘that woman didn’t put her indicator on’. If you focus on having a bad day, you’ll find evidence in your environment to prove you’re correct.”

Power, who is the author of The Dose Effect, adds: “Time spent in mindful states can change how we process challenging emotions from what we typically do, which is distract ourselves with alcohol, social media or sugar.”

Mindfulness is easy

FALSE “It’s not easy, but it is simple,” says Ahmed. “We’re introducing a total mental reframing and that doesn’t happen overnight. You can’t just ‘try a bit of mindfulness’ any more than you’d ‘try a bit of economics’. Mindfulness takes practice and telling your brain to suddenly think differently is going to get some fightback.”

Polly adds: “Creating new thought patterns is like treading a new path through an overgrown forest. It’s difficult at first and tempting to take the easy route, but with consistency the brain will find a new route. It takes on average 66 days to form a habit and mindfulness is no different.”

You can’t multitask while being mindful

TRUE Mindfulness is about doing one thing mindfully, says Polly. “So, eating your lunch or driving the car is the task – but you’re doing it mindfully. Multitasking, though? No, that’s just task-switching.”

We tend to run on automatic in our everyday lives, says Vignola. “You don’t walk into a room and think about how you’re going to put on a light or pour your coffee; you just do it while thinking about other things. Mindfulness requires you to undo some of those automatic patterns so that you are in control of what you’re doing instead of leaving it up to your subconscious.”

Mindfulness can lower your blood pressure

TRUE “Learning to regulate our breathing and calm our nervous system are two essential skills for lowering blood pressure,” says Power. This is backed by a study that found adults with elevated blood pressure who followed an eight-week mindfulness programme significantly lowered it after six months. Incidentally, when blood pressure falls during relaxation, nitric oxide is produced, which helps relax and widen blood vessels, keeping blood pressure under control.

Polly credits conscious breathing with supporting this process: “An elongated out-breath activates our parasympathetic nervous system – rest and digest mode – that regulates blood pressure and heart rate, and lowers stress. Breathing in for four seconds, holding for four and breathing out for five or six can trick your body into a calmer state.”

Mindfulness makes you happy

FALSE “One of the things we have lost in the western world from the ancient practice of mindfulness is compassion, taking care of ourselves,’” says Polly. “I encourage people to ask ‘What can I control? What can I change?’ So you mindfully move your energy into something more helpful than ruminating. Nobody is happy all the time, but curiosity and awareness of your thoughts and feelings can empower you to be kind to yourself and ask for help when you need it.”

It is impossible when you have a busy mind

FALSE Research has shown that the average brain has up to 70,000 thoughts a day, so it’s natural for the mind to be busy. “I have ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder],” says Polly, “and sometimes I have too much energy to sit focusing on my breathing, so I put on my rollerskates or go paddleboarding instead.”

If you’re afraid of sitting with your thoughts, Vignola recommends tuning in to internal bodily sensations, such as heart rate, breathing, temperature, hunger or fullness: “This way, your brain is still active, but not with all the worries that tend to govern your thoughts. Mindfulness ensures you don’t attach yourself to your thoughts, so when your mind is taken back to that text you sent in 2016 that makes you cringe, you don’t act on it or start ruminating on it. You just let it pass.”

Most of our day is spent using the brain’s central executive system for problem solving, decision making and focusing on tasks, and you switch off your default-mode network – the idling state when wandering thoughts kick in. “The problem is, that state becomes active when you go to bed because it hasn’t had a chance to be on all day,” Vignola says, “so you lie there catastrophising or overthinking. We need to spend more time each day in default-mode thinking.”

Mindfulness enhances athletic performance

TRUE Mindfulness-based interventions have been found to increase performance in precision sports because they reduce anxiety and improve relaxation and motor control. “Focusing on the present moment rather than the outcome helps remove anxious thoughts around athletic performance,” says Vignola. Mindfulness can help athletes avoid injury, aid pain management and reduce inflammation – it has been found to reduce the perception of pain by 50% by interrupting neural pain signals.

Mindfulness improves sleep

TRUE Evidence suggests that mindfulness may work in a similar way to exercise and CBT for improving sleep quality, by changing the way a person moves through sleep cycles and decreasing sleep-disrupting thoughts.

“There have been articles claiming that mindfulness isn’t good for sleep because it brings your attention to the fact that you can’t sleep,” says Polly. “But mindfulness teaches you acceptance: to say, ‘OK, I’m feeling like I’d like to go to sleep but I can’t right now’, instead of putting your energy into fighting it.”