How to Practice Mindfulness
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About the Show
On this episode, Chuck Gaidica is joined by Carol Hendershot, certified stress reduction instructor and co-founder of the Grand Rapids Center for Mindfulness. Together, they discuss the benefits of mindfulness and how to start a daily practice.
âMindfulness is simply paying attention to our present moment experience and doing that with curiosity and acceptance, as opposed to judgment and resistance. Weâre just meeting our experience as it is.â â Carol Hendershot
In this episode of A Healthier Michigan Podcast, we explore:
- What is mindfulness?
- Mindfulness used as a skill
- How does mindfulness impact the body?
- What is negativity bias?
- How to start a mindfulness practice
- What does the acronym S.T.O.P. stand for?
- Mindfulness apps you can use at home
Transcript
Chuck Gaidica: This is A Healthier Michigan Podcast, Episode 50. Coming up, we discuss how we can practice mindfulness. What is it? What isnât it?
Chuck Gaidica: Welcome to A Healthier Michigan Podcast. This is a podcast dedicated to navigating how we can all improve our health and well-being through small healthy habits we can implement right now. Iâm your host, Chuck Gaidica. Every other week weâll sit down with a certified health expert from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and weâll get into topics that cover nutrition, fitness, so much more.
Chuck Gaidica: And today of course, weâre going to deal with mindfulness. And this is a great idea. It may be the first time youâre hearing about it. I doubt it, but it could be. So as we discuss this, we wanted to make sure we had an expert, a co-founder at the Grand Rapids Center for Mindfulness, Carol Hendershot. Sheâs with us this morning. Sheâs also a mindfulness-based stress reduction certified and also teaches a class. Carol spent many years in the business world, has been into yoga and of course, sheâs teaching this idea of mindfulness. So weâre so glad sheâs here to help us navigate through this. Good morning. How are you, Carol?
Carol H.: Iâm doing well. How are you, Chuck?
Chuck Gaidica: Iâm doing great and I want to be in the moment with you, so Iâm going to focus before my watch tells me itâs time for me to breathe. But it is nice that technology can also help us. It isnât something that just distracts us, right, from being mindful.
Carol H.: Absolutely. There are a lot of apps out there now thatâll help us be more mindful.
Chuck Gaidica: And what is it? What is mindfulness? What does it mean?
Carol H.: Mindfulness is simply paying attention to our present moment experience and doing that with curiosity and acceptance as opposed to judgment and resistance. So weâre just meeting our experience as it is.
Chuck Gaidica: And when you talk about judgment and resistance, you donât just mean to other people or someone or somebodies who are influencing you. This resistance could be coming from your own mind, right?
Carol H.: Absolutely. Our minds are always talking to us and often it causes some real challenges because weâre resisting or judging our experience.
Chuck Gaidica: So letâs talk about some of the myths because for a lot of us, we hear this word mindfulness thrown around here and there. Tell us what it is and what it isnât. What are some of the myths?
Carol H.: Oh, some of the myths are that itâs a religious practice or that itâs a relaxation technique. Some people think itâs New Age or itâs emptying your mind.
Chuck Gaidica: And if itâs none of those things, then it leaves questions in my mind right now. If itâs not that, if I donât empty my mind to be in the moment, it seems like somehow it may still be related to a few of those things. If Iâm going to be in prayer or meditation, being mindful and in the moment with myself or my God may be an important thing. Right? So some of these could still be related.
Carol H.: Absolutely. Mindfulness can enhance our experience in so many ways. If we have a spiritual practice, it can deepen that. It keeps us more connected with ourselves and our higher power. Weâre working on quieting the mind, although emptying the mind is just not possible.
Chuck Gaidica: So are we born with this ability to be mindful and weâve just gotten off the track? I mean, is it something innately in all of us?
Carol H.: Yes. We are born with the ability to be mindful, but because we live in a distracted, fast-paced culture, this ability to focus and pay attention, it gets compromised and it gets kind of rusty.
Chuck Gaidica: Yeah, thatâs interesting. And I would assume if it does get rusty, whether itâs neuroscience or just your anecdotal evidence of practicing this more and more, you can get sharper at it. Right? I mean, we can get better at it.
Carol H.: Absolutely. Mindfulness is really a skill that we can deepen. And we think about mindfulness in two ways, mindfulness as a practice and mindfulness as a state of being. And what weâve really been talking about is mindfulness as a state of being. But mindfulness as a practice is carving out a certain amount of time that we can actually sit and practice the skills of being present. And when our mind wanders, we can bring it back. Itâs sort of like doing a bicep curl for the mind.
Chuck Gaidica: Oh, thatâs an interesting way to think about it. And while we say this isnât New Age, for some itâs a new idea, but give us some of the history of this. I mean, how far back, I guess we could go back thousands of years to discuss where it really began. But who is it that brought this to the forefront in the US, so we started to think about this now?
Carol H.: Well, it really started with a guy by the name of, Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. And Jon was the teacher of gross anatomy at the medical school there. And he was also a yoga practitioner and also a practitioner of meditation. And he felt that these practices would help people that were falling through the cracks of the medical system, in particular chronic pain sufferers. And so, he went around to the doctors and said, âHey, would you be willing to refer some of your patients that are struggling to my stress reduction clinic?â And some of them actually did, which was pretty surprising in 1979.
Carol H.: They started doing research right away and found that it was really helpful, especially for those chronic pain sufferers. They found that not only right after the class, the classes are eight weeks, were they experiencing decreases in their symptoms and improvements in their quality of life, but also they followed them for about four years and found those improvements were maintained.
Chuck Gaidica: Thatâs interesting. Is it the same research or related research that also pointed out that about half the time, we as human beings, are on autopilot? Weâre doing one thing while our mind is off doing something else. Did it come from the same study or a different one?
Carol H.: No. There have been tons of studies in the last 40 years on all different aspects of mindfulness, but that particular study came out of Harvard. And a group of scientists there got about 2000 people to download an app on their iPhones and agreed to be contacted randomly throughout the day and answer three questions, what are you doing, are you paying attention to what you are doing, and how happy are you?
Carol H.: And what they found from that research was that we are much happier when weâre paying attention, even if itâs to something as mundane as doing the dishes. And weâre actually not paying attention about 50% of the time.
Chuck Gaidica: Well, some of us would call that daydreaming, but I kind of get what youâre saying. And itâs interesting to me that when you can get lost in the moment. And I think thatâs connected to other things, when youâre serving other people, or youâre doing something thatâs greater than self, or you hear of these studies that show happiness when people are focused on something that helps them almost lose track of time in a good way. You donât realize that you worked all day doing something in the garden because you love gardening. You kind of snap out of it and you think, âOh my gosh, itâs three in the afternoon. Iâve been out here all day,â but you were loving every single minute of it.
Carol H.: Right. Thatâs a state called flow and theyâve studied that in sports and other activities. And it is really similar to mindfulness because youâre very absorbed in what youâre doing at the moment.
Chuck Gaidica: Why should we try to make things better? I guess, why should we try to practice mindfulness? What are the upsides of why we should even give this any thought?
Carol H.: Well, it has a lot of benefits, reduces rumination and overthinking, it alleviates stress, it enhances our self-awareness, increases focus and creativity. It can improve relationships, decreases our reactivity, improves memory and concentration. So there are a lot of aspects of mindfulness that are very helpful.
Chuck Gaidica: And is the idea that weâre being mindful for relationships, especially? Obviously, men and women often are studied and we think differently. As a broad brush, for instance, in relationships, Iâve read that women really want you to sit next to them and be with them in the moment. And a guy thinks, well, his mind goes to different places, right? And we hear of divorce increasing, even in people that are 60 plus, etc. When youâre looking at this in terms of relationships, isnât it important that youâre in the moment, youâre mindful of your partner, your spouse, so that we can navigate through this maze of the world thatâs coming at us from all different directions?
Carol H.: Absolutely. Presence is a big part of intimacy. If weâre constantly thinking about something else when weâre with our partner, then itâs likely that they wonât feel heard and wonât feel seen, and thatâs really important.
Chuck Gaidica: Youâve used the word, maybe more than once, negativity. And weâre not just talking about inputs from the world or crazy times on TV news that gets you excited, but negativity is something that can be self-imposed or takes you back to another day when you were a child and you just canât shake that. Help guide us through this idea of the negative thoughts in your mind and how we try to counterbalance those.
Carol H.: Yes. We actually have a thing called the negativity bias. Rick Hanson, an author on mindfulness calls this, âVelcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive experiences.â
Carol H.: And what we know about that is that it really comes through our evolution. When we were out on the Savannah or in caves, we really had to pay a lot of attention to the environment and any threats in our environment. And it was a lot better to think that there was a saber tooth tiger out there 10 times when there was only one once instead of missing the one that actually was out there. So our ancestors were really the ones who were nervous because the guys that werenât so nervous didnât live long enough to pass on their genes, so we come by this naturally. And it takes about five good things in a relationship, and particularly to counterbalance one bad thing.
Chuck Gaidica: Well, and thatâs interesting. Letâs talk about that again. Five good things to counterbalance one bad thing in a relationship. And so if, letâs say, youâve grown up and you had an abusive relationship with somebody when you were a child or there was dysfunction in, go figure, in a family, those kinds of things could be stuck in your mind, which could lead to ruminating and going over and over. Youâre playing the same record, Iâm not good enough, Iâm not thin enough, Iâm not something enough where youâve got these bad experiences. But when you talk about a good thing, that we need a good thing, what would those good things be? Are they just self-affirmation?
Carol H.: Well, theyâre really about paying attention to the good things in our lives, so that we can retrain our brains to have more balance. One of the parts of the brain that is enhanced through mindfulness practices is the hippocampus. And that is part of the brain thatâs responsible for translating short-term memory into long-term memory. And the more attention we pay to those good things, whether itâs a kind word from our spouse, or a beautiful sunset, or just a flower blooming, the more that begins to solidify in our long-term memory and it counterbalances that negativity bias.
Carol H.: So again, it really goes back to presence. Can we be present for the wonderful things that happen to us? And it really only takes about 20 to 30 seconds to shift that balance into the long-term memory.
Chuck Gaidica: You know, itâs interesting, I just had a recent experience and fortunate enough to be near a beach with my grandson and my daughter and my wife. And they said, âLetâs go shelling. Letâs just walk the beach.â Now, to be honest, as kind of a Type A guy, and Iâm a man and Iâve got all these biases, right, built into me, Iâm thinking in my mind, âWell, itâs a, itâll be a fun thing to do. My grandson is here, my daughter is here, my wife, itâll be a great thing to do and Iâm going to go along for the ride. Iâm driving anyway.â
Chuck Gaidica: I got there and Carol, can I tell you that I had not only fun, the day got, it was like hours, two hours just went and Iâm walking a beach trying to pick up shells and as Iâm doing it, Iâm thinking, âSomething is happening to me while Iâm doing this.â Iâm just completely focused on water coming in and out, the sand all looks the same, Iâm finding different shells, so there is all the physical part of this, but it was really just a joyful experience. I was experiencing joy from focusing on something that I could just kind of go away and get into it. It was wonderful.
Carol H.: Ah, thatâs beautiful. And thatâs the gift of mindfulness is when we can bring ourselves to an experience like that, we start to experience joy and contentment and all those wonderful emotions instead of just the negative ones.
Chuck Gaidica: Yeah. Well, letâs talk about this then in terms of practice. So I found a little way that, and I will go back and do it again, some day itâll be a great thing to do because now I have experienced that this actually works for me, but talk about ways that we can practice mindfulness. For people listening right now, how do we start?
Carol H.: Well, the first suggestion I have is to start small because weâre actually forming new habits. Itâs really important that we do this every day and it can be just for three minutes. But, itâs that time weâre taking to stop, and be, and pay attention to our breath. So I always suggest that people try to find a dedicated time and place to practice. Find a comfortable posture. Of course, turn off all your devices. And then just turn your attention to your breath or other body sensations.
Carol H.: If your mind wanders, and it will, because thatâs what the mind does, the mind was made to think just like the heart was made to beat, thank your mind for doing its job. And then just gently return to your breath. Again, youâre doing those bicep curls for the mind every time youâd return to the present moment. And if you start to judge yourself, just notice the judgment as another experience and return to the breath.
Chuck Gaidica: So as we find that time to do this, we should not discount the fact you can still do this at your desk. You can still find a quiet place at work to step aside for three minutes and breathe. Right? I mean, there are ways to make this interact with your typical day.
Carol H.: Absolutely. And there are so many ways that we can weave this into our days. We can decide that weâre going to take a breath every time the phone rings rather than reaching to grab it right away and just center ourselves.
Carol H.: One of the things that I do is try to remember every time I go through a doorway just to be present instead of be off somewhere else. We can also do informal practices like paying full attention as weâre washing our hair or brushing our teeth. Again, thatâs all training for being more mindful.
Chuck Gaidica: And is this idea like I experienced with shelling, is it good that we get lost in something that helps take us away? Is that a good thing to seek out?
Carol H.: Absolutely.
Chuck Gaidica: Yeah.
Carol H.: Itâs really wonderful to be fully present with the people you love and with the things youâre doing. And again, thatâs sort of a flow state and theyâve found some real benefits from that state. And the more we get into it, the more likely we will be to get into it again.
Chuck Gaidica: Well, I have a quick story for you. So years ago, my wife, Susan and I were fortunate enough to see Christopher Cross in concert. And he sings that song Sailing, which is a very quiet song. Itâs a perfect song to play softly, and you hear it. And we know that he sings that song for the rest of the world, but itâs my song and Susanâs song. Itâs one of those songs as a couple, we say, âThatâs our song.â
Chuck Gaidica: So we get a chance to see him in concert, but we also got a chance to see him in a group with just an acoustic guitar where some, he would actually answer questions from the audience. So someone raised their hand and said, âYou know the song Sailing, how did you come up with the lyrics for that song? And he said, âWell, I have to admit something to you. Even though you will see sailboats on the big screen behind me tonight when I sing it, it has nothing to do with sailing a boat,â which was fascinating because it sounds like it would.
Chuck Gaidica: He said, âIt comes from the fact that I had a friend, a woman who was an artist and I would go to her studio and I would watch her paint. And as she was involved in the process of painting something, I looked her and I said, âHow do you do that? What do you, how do you come up with this?â She said, âMan, I just sail away. I just get into it and I sail away.â And then he said, âWell, I went home and I wrote a song.â
Chuck Gaidica: Itâs kind of cool to hear the background on that story. But, itâs what youâre talking about. Itâs finding those moments, that thing, that one greater thing that you just literally, you forgot that the two hours went away and youâve painted a masterpiece.
Carol H.: Absolutely. Youâre totally in the moment.
Chuck Gaidica: Yeah.
Carol H.: And you do your best work when you forget about what youâre doing. We do our best teaching when we just let it flow through us as opposed to trying to remember all the bullet points.
Chuck Gaidica: Yeah. I do want to double back on something because Iâve seen in a small circle of people who I know and love this negativity bias. And I love this analogy that these negative things can be like Velcro. Thatâs sometimes hard to peel off, right, on purpose. Thatâs the way Velcro was designed.
Carol H.: Right.
Chuck Gaidica: But, the negativity bias of us trying to practice everyday finding wins, can that also include getting people around us who help? They donât even know theyâre being a coach, but just the notion that youâre creating your own little kitchen cabinet of people around you who are surrounding you with love or positive inputs because you do have a choice. You can either get a lot of other Debbie Downers who go down the same path with you, or you can find people that have positive ways of looking at life that maybe can influence you as well. Right?
Carol H.: Absolutely. The people you surround yourself with make a huge difference because you spend so much time and interaction with others and to have those positive influences can change your life.
Chuck Gaidica: Can you coach that? Do you work with people who you literally can coach them toward ways of stepping out of their, the negative past, the baggage, if you will, that sometimes many of us live with?
Carol H.: Yes. We teach an eight week class and some shorter classes as well. And itâs really just teaching people different ways to either practice mindfulness formally, so that it becomes a part of who they are or doing those informal practices that we talked about.
Chuck Gaidica: And some of those informal practices, I know youâve said things like you can make this pretty basic. You can start small, right, which is great for all of us, whether itâs a lifestyle change, as some would call it a diet, or whether itâs trying to be more mindful. You can be mindful while brushing your teeth or washing your hair or washing the dishes. What do you mean by that? What am I supposed to do to practice mindfulness while Iâm brushing my teeth?
Carol H.: Well, you put the toothpaste on the toothbrush and you smell it. You look at it and then you put it in your mouth and feel the movement of the toothbrush around your mouth and the taste of the toothpaste. So again, your mind will wander, but then you just bring it back to what youâre doing right now. And over time, you can actually probably stay present for at least half the time youâre brushing your teeth.
Chuck Gaidica: Thatâs intriguing. Back to my little story on shelling, when we got back and we were sharing our experiences with other family members about how great a day we had together as a family, somebody asked a question that I know I was lost in the moment looking at shells, but they said, âSo where you were, what color was the water? Was it blue? Was it Aqua? Was it more green?â
Chuck Gaidica: And I thought, thatâs a really interesting question that leads to mindfulness. To be honest, I wasnât really paying attention. To me, it was the last thing I thought about to pay attention to the color. The exact color, is it Caribbean blue? Is it green? And I thought, that person must really pay attention when they go places and theyâre in the moment paying attention to the color blue. That was intriguing to me.
Carol H.: Well, it is interesting because of the fact that we do pay attention to different things.
Chuck Gaidica: Yeah.
Carol H.: You were probably paying attention to the shells and your grandson and that person might have just been gazing at the water and really taking that part of it in. We have a limited capacity for attention and we have to pick and choose what we pay attention to.
Carol H.: Again, thatâs something that mindfulness strengthens is our ability to choose what we pay attention to. We can choose to pay attention to our partner when theyâre talking, or our kids when they come home from school and have a project that they want to show us, or we can be off in some other world with the problems at work.
Chuck Gaidica: Yeah. And I know there is an anacronym that you know as STOP, S-T-O-P. Tell us what that means and how we can put that into practice in our daily life.
Carol H.: STOP is, as you said, an acronym and the S stands for stop. Thatâs the easy one. The T, take a breath. The O is observe because we narrow our attention when weâre stressed. And so when we can open our attention, we open ourselves to creativity and new possibilities. And then once weâve done those three steps, we can just proceed. And sometimes the P stands for park because we realized that whatever weâre paying attention to just isnât in our power to do anything about. So stop, take a breath, open your awareness to whatâs around you and then proceed.
Chuck Gaidica: And then again, I know youâve talked about this in so many different ways, but just give us the upside, the benefits of why we should be practicing mindfulness even in the small ways throughout our day. What is it thatâs going to change in us and what is it thatâs going to help us become better human beings for ourselves and for those around us?
Carol H.: It slows us down and it gives us a chance to take a moment to decide how we want to respond. Often, weâre just reacting to our environment and we donât really realize what weâre doing. Something happens and we run away, or we react with anger and it just gives us a chance to slow down and make a choice.
Carol H.: There is a beautiful quote by, Viktor Frankl and itâs, âThere is a space between stimulus and response. And in that space lies our power to choose our response. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom.â And that really speaks to what weâre cultivating in mindfulness. Itâs that space to choose.
Chuck Gaidica: Yeah, it is something. I also remember back when my late father was having high blood pressure issues and we knew that practicing mindfulness for him could be, could be, impactful. So we sat down and encouraged him to take those moments to breathe, do some deep breathing, and think of a place he wanted in his mind to sail away, whatever it was, it would work.
Chuck Gaidica: And what was fascinating was while he had one of those portable cuffs on his arm, weâre not at the doctorâs office, weâre in the dining room, to literally watch his blood pressure come down, to watch the number right before my very eyes see the impact of a very brief, but impactful few minutes where he practiced mindfulness. It was just the proof of the pudding.
Carol H.: Yeah, itâs really powerful. Iâve had students in my class who come in with high blood pressure and by the end of the class, the end of the eight weeks, theyâve actually decreased their blood pressure to near normal or normal.
Chuck Gaidica: Thatâs great. And youâre not opposed to technology, right? So as I mentioned early on in our dialogue here today, me having a watch that tells me itâs time to breathe multiple times a day, thatâs, that is my app. Itâs reminding me to do something that maybe I forgot to do and Iâm actually happy itâs doing it.
Carol H.: There are a lot of really great apps out there. One is the Insight Timer. Iâve actually been using that for almost 10 years now and it keeps track of your meditation time. It shows you all the other people in the world that are meditating. It has all kinds of guided meditations. They even have some classes on there that you can do.
Carol H.: Another one is the Calm app. And those apps, as you said, will tell you to breathe and slow down and give you opportunities to practice formally with someone guiding you.
Chuck Gaidica: Well, Iâm so glad that we connected today because youâve also, youâve taught me a lot, but youâve taught me this idea that there is balance to this whole idea that somehow even if my mind wanders off while Iâm trying to practice mindfulness, I can forgive myself and just bring it back. I donât have to judge myself. Even if I drift off, itâs okay, I can bring it back home and itâs okay.
Chuck Gaidica: And I think so many of us think, well, once that happens and Iâve now gone off to the next bright shiny object, well itâs all over. I canât really fix it. Well, no, maybe if you practice it, like you said, and youâre lifting weights like itâs your biceps, practice makes perfect, youâll get better at it.
Carol H.: You definitely do get better at it. And a lot of people think when they try mindfulness because they do have really busy minds that they canât do it. And that would be like going to the gym one time and looking at your bicep and saying, âHey, nothingâs improved. I canât do this weight lifting thing.â
Chuck Gaidica: Yeah.
Carol H.: So you just have to do it for a while and it makes a huge difference. For me, it was my struggle with anxiety and depression and itâs made a huge difference in my life.
Chuck Gaidica: Well thatâs good to hear because thatâs, actually that was an issue with my dad, and that was something that was an offshoot of the mindfulness that we tried to practice with him. And Iâm glad to hear that youâre well and youâre doing well. But thanks for all that you gave us today. Carol Hendershot, itâs been so wonderful connecting with you.
Carol H.: Thank you, Chuck. I really appreciate your time as well.
Chuck Gaidica: Carol Hendershot certified mindfulness-based stress reduction instructor and co-founder of the Grand Rapids Center for Mindfulness, an expert in this field, for sure.
Chuck Gaidica: We want to thank you for listening to A Healthier Michigan Podcast. Itâs brought to you by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.
Chuck Gaidica: If you would like to know more about the show, you can check us out at ahealthiermichigan.org/podcast. You can leave reviews there or a rating on Apple Podcast or Stitcher. And you can get this episode. You can forward them to people you know and love. You can get the previous episodes as well. On your smartphone or tablet, be sure to subscribe to us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Iâm Chuck Gaidica. Enjoy the rest of your day.
