- There are a lot effects of mindfulness and when we do our exercise together you'll you'll see,
but I just thought, just for to close out this section I thought let's let's name specifically
some things so this this I could have we could make an entirely different list but I just did
this. So one thing is increased body awareness. And research shows this. Almost everybody and you saw
when we were doing the breath a moment ago is asking you to really feel that belly, and then
even feel other places where you could feel subtle movement of breathing. So you were experiencing
increased body awareness probably in those moments that you were able to do that. If you do it on a
regular basis you you have a generalized sort of increased body awareness as a baseline, and
as a physician I firmly believe that is good for health. Different reasons for that. Relaxation is
not the goal of mindfulness practice. It is the one of the greatest side effects, and you don't have to
be relaxed to do mindfulness. In fact that's part of the the power of mindfulness. You can bring it
to your anxious state, your your chronic painful state, your anger, your your frustrate whatever
is troubling you and maybe isn't very relaxing. You can still bring mindfulness to that. You know
some patients the body can't relax. No there's a there's a surgical device implanted there or
whatever. And so mindfulness remember is awareness. And you can be aware of nice relaxed wonderful
things and you can be aware of tight difficult things as well. But generally speaking when you
look at the research on the autonomic nervous system, the more meditation that's done generally
the more parasympathetic tone you get and so so over time people feel more relaxed. You can feel
more relaxed right in a in a like maybe when we did the breathing you might. I saw a couple of
heads get very relaxed actually. So so you can get relaxed just with a single meditation session but
I'm talking more about overtime, because in any individual session you might not be relaxed and
that's not wrong, it's nothing, abnormal. This is probably the most significant thing - decreased
psychological distress, and I could have listed a dozen mechanisms of how that I just chose these
two, but this is what this practice was designed for. Its its stated purpose is to reduce suffering.
So there's many different ways that it does that. One is and I'm think now of like patients that
come to our mindfulness program. They some of them have really significant medical issues, surgical
issues, psychiatric issues. And so the thoughts, and remember they're happening out of our control
right there, so it's not like you really are choosing what you to think about. Your thoughts
come unbidden. If you have to - this is especially clear I think with anxiety disorders. If your mind,
if you have anxieties or in your mind is putting out an anxious thought every 20 seconds, you will
probably without if you're not being conscious you'll you'll default to chasing down every single
thought. Oh yeah did I leave the stove on, or oh I hope my son's gonna be okay this and that, or
every every thought, and then you follow it with another thought and you try to reach some kind
of resolution to relieve the anxiety. What if you could just notice that - Oh there's another
anxious thought. I don't have to I don't have - There's a great bumper sticker - Don't believe
everything you think. So so these thoughts come up and what if you at least during a meditation
period, if not if not in your day to day life, what if you just just know it, just named it. Oh there's
an anxious thought. You don't have to chase it down. You don't have to go figure it out and fix it. You
just noticed though there's an anxious thought. So that's my mind and my mind has that habit, anxious thought.
The other ways we have a lot of people with chronic pain for which this is really useful. In
fact most of the early research for mindfulness was on chronic pain. Uncoupling the pain from
all the cognitive and emotive associations that we have relieves usually about 50% of
the suffering right off the bat, even without diminishing the pain, with actual physical pain.