“Close your eyes and listen out for five different sounds you can hear.” It is a rainy Sunday afternoon in June and, as we walk back to the station after a pub lunch at Beachy Head, I am forcing my long-suffering friend Rebecca to try a mindfulness exercise. I can see from her face that Rebecca is not convinced. This does not deter me, and I make her try again—this time I ask her to notice five things that she can see. Rebecca is soaking wet (she forgot her raincoat). Rebecca is cold. We have a train to catch imminently. I have chosen the wrong moment to evangelise.
My transformation from mindfulness sceptic to zealous convert surprised me as much as anyone else. When I first encountered the concept at university, when a class was advertised in my college, I was the stereotypical first-year student: hedonistic and cynical and convinced of the glamour of an existence fuelled by coffee, red wine and cheese toasties. And what’s worse, anything remotely related to “wellbeing”, from eating vegetables to taking deep breaths, was a load of “mumbo jumbo crap” that only “arty southerners”—a breed of people I had recently been introduced to—would fall for.
Five years later, it is 2019 and I am sitting opposite an expert psychologist in OCD. She is instructing me to plant my feet firmly on the floor, to place my hands on my lap, and to focus on taking long, deep breaths. I am furious. I have been in the weeds for almost a decade, battling with a demon that has clawed great swathes of my life away from me, and all this so-called expert has to offer me is souped-up gasping? My anger clearly shows on my face. “Look,” she says, “I know this isn’t going to solve all your problems. But can we give it a go?”
Applied mindfulness doesn’t involve sitting in a silent room meditating
It didn’t solve all my problems. But mindfulness taught me that I didn’t need solutions to be okay. With OCD, the real issue is the excessive attention that we sufferers pay to our thoughts, the endless attempts that we make to untangle our problems. The psychologist introduced me to a scheme of therapy called Acceptance and Commitment (ACT for short), which uses applied mindfulness techniques to help patients to see their thoughts for what they are (according to ACT practitioners at least): random pieces of language rather than truths, commands or threats.
Applied mindfulness doesn’t involve sitting in a silent room meditating. Practising it can be as simple as taking a walk round the park and, as I tried to impress on my friend Rebecca, noticing five things you can see and hear. “Box-breathing”—an exercise used by the US Navy Seals for highly stressful situations, which I turn to in the face of any minor inconvenience—is as easy as breathing in for four counts, holding your breath for four counts, then breathing out for four counts, on repeat.
My hands-down favourite technique is “musical thoughts”, which comes courtesy of Russ Harris and his marvellous book The Happiness Trap. You take a thought that is bothering you—perhaps an everyday self-criticism like “I’m incompetent”—and sing it to yourself in your head. You don’t try to alter or change the thought, or to avoid it, you just play it to a tune. I find that anything by Stevie Wonder or Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons tends to work perfectly.
These methods all serve to unhook me from the spirals of rumination that my mind demands I engage in, by gently pulling me back into the world around me or reminding me to take my brain’s chatter a little less seriously.
I suspect that many of us are put off by mindfulness because it is too often offered up as a formal class or meditation that involves sitting in silence in one place. But that’s not the only way to do it. Practical mindfulness skills I can do on the move have liberated me from the prison of obsessive thoughts—how could I not be desperate to share them with the people I love? And now it’s time for me to get into the cold-water swimming that those “arty southerners” have been doing for years.
