Mindfulness is trendy, it’s about self-care they say, it’s good for your mental health, they say – but why?

Mindfulness is essentially learning how to exist more often in the present moment, to accept what is there. You can do this via meditation, walking in nature, watching a cat sleeping, just standing still and taking it all in – and myriad other ways – but, again, why?

It’s absolutely true that mindfulness is effective self-care, and it will indeed improve your mental health, and the reason it helps is because we are stepping into reality. Yep – that’s it, when we are in the present moment, we are experiencing life as it really, actually is in that moment.

We have 2 brains, our conscious (thinking) mind, which we use most of the time and can process about 7 items of data per second. We also have our unconscious (being) mind, our animal mind. This can process 11 million (yes) items of data per second. It is by far the most powerful part of our brain, and runs over 95% of our lives, keeping us breathing, keeping us safe, letting us feel a million things and fully experience the world around us.

We are all crazy people, because instead of utilising our powerful unconscious minds, we spend most of our time in our conscious mind. Don’t get me wrong, our conscious mind helped us become more sophisticated than any other species, and it’s great at solving problems and thinking, but that’s pretty much all it does. Feeling, imagining, experiencing, growing, all happens in the unconscious mind. We are addicted to the problem-solving conscious mind, so we walk around in a daze over 99% of the time, playing movies in our head about the past, or floating through fantasies about the future. We are very rarely present in reality. In the animal kingdom, we’d be disowned or killed by the pack, because we didn’t have our head in the game and others may be attacked whilst we daydream. We condemn drug-addicts and shun their weird behaviours, but we are ALL addicts, all behaving weirdly, according to the narrative in our head, instead of according to the actual situation on the ground.

So put simply, mindfulness is a return to sanity. For the few moments you are present, you are sane. This gives your unconscious mind precious time when the constant, questioning, curious toddler voice of the conscious mind is silent and the natural animal that we are can be quiet, re-balance, re-connect with what is.

I would highly recommend you try a regular dose of sanity, to step out of your wild mind for a few calm moments each day – it will change your whole perspective.