Use Mindfulness to Help Beat Stress! 

Mindfulness is a way of achieving a ‘calm awareness’ by focusing our attention on the present moment. The principles have grown out of meditation, and learning them can help both in dealing with stress and in coping with binge eating problems. 

We often tend to spend our lives wrapped up in negative thoughts; thinking in extremes about what we should or should not do; what might or might not happen; and getting caught in a whirlwind of feelings and emotions.

It teaches us to focus our attention on the small details of our ‘here and now’ by noticing what is going on with a sense of non-judgemental interest.

So how does this help in dealing with stress?

It may be best to illustrate the point with a couple of examples:

‘Joe’ tends to feel stressed and irritable throughout much of his day, so he decides to try the technique to see if it helps. As he goes through his day he spends 5 or 10 minute periods noticing with interest small details of his usual activities, such as:

listening to the sound of the water as it fills his basin for his morning wash… or noticing the tingling sensation of the toothpaste on his tongue as he brushes his teeth…… the sound of his footsteps as he’s walking to the station…… the quality of the light coming through the trees that he sees from the window on the train……

While he is letting his concentration ‘rest’ on these points of interest, he also notices stressful thoughts coming into his mind.

However, rather than becoming involved in these intruding thoughts, he simply notices them in a Mindful way, and lets them go. He re-focuses his attention on what he is doing, or upon his surroundings. And with such a calm awareness occupying his mind, he is no longer so pre-occupied with worries or listening to his own inner critical voice.

At the end of his day, Joe realises that he feels less irritable and more relaxed than he usually does.

‘Sadie’ has been having difficulties in dealing with stress in her busy office environment and this sometimes builds to a point where she has an anxiety attack.

She has learned about ‘Mindfulness’ and has been practicing it during her day. While in her office, she notices her feelings of anxiety increasing and this time she pays Mindful attention to it instead of trying to ignore it and hoping it will go away.

She observes with interest the symptoms she is experiencing; the sense that her heart feels like it is starting to beat a little faster; that her breathing has quickened; and she notices the thoughts she has about fearing that she may faint.

She knows these are just the effects of her body’s natural responses to dealing with stress and that they will soon pass.

Instead of getting caught up in an increasing cycle of stress-worry-and more stress, she focuses her mind on her breathing: She notices how the air feels at it passes through her nostrils…… how she can feel her ribs stretch slightly as she breathes in deeply…… how her shoulders release her tension as she drops and relaxes them as she breathes out.

She continues to focus on her breathing in this way, while every time a worrying thought comes into her mind, she simply acknowledges it…… and lets it go.

She is then pleasantly reassured as she observes how her fear and feelings of anxiety are already starting to subside. This experience gives her added confidence that the next time she feels her anxiety building she will be able to cope with it using this Mindful approach.

And how can Mindfulness help with Binge Eating or other Eating Disorders?

In these cases, it is useful to think of ‘Mindful Eating’.

This is where we slow down the speed at which we eat (even if we are comfort eating), and concentrate our attention on our food in a Mindful way.

Much of our eating in our day-to-day lives has become ‘mindless’, where we are not actually thinking about our food at all…… instead we are watching the television, or picking at food in the kitchen while thinking about or doing something else.

Mindfulness in terms of eating could include:

• Noticing all the individual flavours of the food we are eating
• Appreciating the different aromas that we smell
• Noticing the colours and the shapes of the food
• Feeling the different textures of the different foods that we bite into
• Pausing between mouthfuls to concentrate on chewing our food
• Noticing how it feels as we swallow, and how it feels as the food passes down our throat and enters our stomach
• How our body feels as we get more full
• Making sure that we have finished swallowing one mouthful of food before putting the next one in our mouths
• Noticing how we are feeling emotionally while we eat, and what associations it might have for us
• Learning to genuinely enjoy our food!

This technique helps us to stop identifying ourselves so much with our problems – we are human individuals after all, not just a collection of symptoms - and symptoms come and go.

Like learning any new skill, this takes time and practice to develop.  

Dealing with stress effectively is a necessary part of breaking free from eating disorders like binge eating. And Mindfulness can become a useful part of our ‘tool kit’ of skills that enable us to do just that.