Is mindfulness for me?

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mental health officer for the nzdf um and it's my pleasure today to kind of
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host and um and introduce scrolling leader cast and Grimm uh who's going to
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talk us through mindfulness and I'll let him introduce himself before we crack into the session today just another introduction so Sarah Ting
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there one of our integrated well-being staff and team will also be here she'll
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be keeping an eye on the chat so if you've got any questions or queries that you want to flick through to cast and push them through and uh and she'll keep
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an eye on that and if we don't address them during the session we'll make sure we get to them at the end of the session
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together now for those of you that uh want to find us this webinar super
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interesting and you want to share with your friends in whanau or your workmates are we going to record it as we just
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heard so uh we'll put it up on the defense Health wellbeing website and uh
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you'll be able to access it there so that link will go out a bit later on um so I'll start off with the karakia just to kind of settle into the session
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and then I'll hand over to carsten um
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it's like so cast and I'll I'll hand over to you
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awesome awesome
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I'm a psychologist in the health directorate and it's my real pleasure
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today to be kicking off Mental Health Awareness Week with a um with a focus on
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take notice this webinar is mindfulness for me uh the myths and the
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misunderstandings just give me a quick thumbs up if we can see this shared screen awesome technology is working
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it's always a good start so a little bit about me and how I come to be talking
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about mindfulness so I've had a bit of an on and off again relationship with
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mindfulness you could say since about 2007 I think a lot of people sort of share that when I first got interested
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in it and it actually took me quite a few years for me to find something that really worked for me
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so today I'm really Keen to share some of those lessons so if you're interested in this you don't have to necessarily go
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through the same types of struggles that I went through when I was looking to get started with this the other thing that's relevant is since
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um I've been a defense psychologist I've and I've been involved in introducing groups and running uh mindfulness
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programs for people since about 2016. and in that time I've heard quite a few
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different myths and misunderstandings and mischaracterizations about all mindfulness is and I think the problem
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with that is sometimes as mindfulness gains and popularity out in the world we
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can hear bits and pieces and perhaps get the wrong idea about what it is and so we stopped before we start or we end up
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thinking about perhaps mindfulness isn't for us so I'm here to clear up some of those misunderstandings and you can make
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up your own mind whether or not this is something that you'd like to explore so this is what we're going to look at
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today um what are we even talking about what is this thing called mindfulness I've got some easy ways to understand that
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we'll talk through some of the common myths I'll run you through some of my favorites along the way I've got a few
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examples or a couple of different ways to think about mindfulness hopefully that makes sense
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um I'll talk about some of the common traps and some of the common barriers to getting started with mindfulness and how
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to progress uh we'll talk about some of the tips for giving it a decent go some of the things
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you might like to try and then at the end we'll talk about headspace and how you can take advantage of this really
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great app that we have access to for free here in defense
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so what is mindfulness so I don't know about you but half the time I feel like
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my brain has got about 10 different browser tabs open and I'm busily scrolling from sort of tab to Tab and
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there's lots of things going on and my mind's sort of captured by my to-do list I'm not really sort of paying attention
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in the present moment and that's a pretty good definition of what mindfulness is not
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so we're starting off talking about the brain because it's actually quite a useful way to understand what
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mindfulness is and what it's not so your brain's got these three parts to the
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attention system okay and the first part is is the attention Spotlight so you can
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put your Spotlight of attention on where you want it to go right so that seems pretty obvious that's the first part of
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the brain's attention system the second part is your ability to
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notice stuff right so we can zoom out that Spotlight of attention to make the
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beam wider and defense we might call that situational awareness the ability
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to notice what's going on in our environment right and mindfulness training we might call that open
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monitoring or just being aware of our surroundings and the last part of the brain's
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attention system I'm pretty familiar with maybe you are too uh that's the Mind wandering part of the brain's
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attention system and you might be surprised to know that actually the evidence is pretty good
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that even when we're trying to pay attention to stuff we're probably wandering off about half the time about
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50 of the time we're not even really aware of where our attention is
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so that's all good but what's this got to do with mindfulness well really I
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like to think about mindfulness mindfulness is just your ability to know where your attention is at any
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particular time so try it right now so here we are right now just notice that
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you're looking at a screen right so just notice here right now you might be sitting down in the chair and you can
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notice the sensations of the body and notice right now here you can listen to me talking right you can notice sounds
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so mindfulness is just your ability to strengthen this capacity but know where
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your attention is at any particular moment so hopefully that's useful when it comes
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to understanding what some of the misunderstandings or mischaracterizations of mindfulness are
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so here here are some of my favorites and we're just going to run through these and two so you often hear that
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mindfulness is about relaxation it's about calming the mind or it's about
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controlling the Mind mindfulness is actually meditation I need to sit down in the Lotus position
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in order to be mindful that's Buddhist so I don't believe in that staff so mindfulness is not for me and then at
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the end I've got a Bonus myth about um something I've heard quite commonly about one of us
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so let's start with the first one so mindfulness is all about relaxation so come on in a piece I don't have all day
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and I can well understand how people can get this idea about mindfulness because
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particularly when you start it's actually pretty useful to use a little
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bit of relaxation training to just get the mind to settle a bit so we can start to notice so let's just try that really
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quickly right now so just wherever you are just start to take a couple of slightly deeper breaths
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if you can feel the breath and the chest or the belly
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and just notice even by doing that you can start to feel calmer but that's not quite the same thing as
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being able to notice things right so mindfulness is your ability to notice
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relaxation is often involved in mindfulness training particularly at the
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start it's useful but it's not the same thing related to this as this idea that
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mindfulness is about calming the mind and I don't know about you but my mind
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doesn't feel particularly calm most of the time in actual fact I don't know if you notice but there's a lot going on in
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the world particularly in this day and age of social media and your to-do list and that kind of thing and I can often
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feel like my mind's quite busy with stuff but at the end of the day that doesn't really matter so much because
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mindfulness is about noticing the mind I actually think a better way to think
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about mindfulness is a little bit like reading so you know sometimes reading is
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relaxing as you do that deliberately right but oftentimes when we're reading that skill that we've developed is
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really important in terms of paying attention to stuff that's important in our lives right so mindfulness as we get
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better with it one of the skills that we hope to develop is the ability to notice what's going on in our mind and then not
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get so bothered by it like we say sometimes learning to unhook from a busy
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mind but actually really this is about noticing the mind not necessarily about calming or not
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okay the next one is that mindfulness is meditation and that's completely false
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okay there's lots of different ways to practice uh mindfulness that don't involve sitting down formerly to
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practice meditation there is a bit of overlap here though and I'll just explain what I mean and in the same way
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that you can train formally for like a sport or exercise right there's lots of different ways to train you might like
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to run or do cardio or you might like to lift weights meditation is a way of
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training your brain's attention system right and there's particular ways of trading your
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attention system to be more focused or have more situational awareness have more mindfulness right but there's lots
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of informal ways of practicing mindfulness as well that don't involve sitting down right so meditation can be
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very useful to train the skill mindfulness is something that we can do and formally we need we whenever we
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remember to do it you can practice mindfulness the next one is that mindfulness has
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bought us again it's not true lots of different traditions and religions
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emphasize training the Mind than for anyone who's seen the movie Gladiator might be familiar with a character
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called Marcus Aurelius who's a famous uh Roman Emperor and philosopher stoicisms
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become quite popular in the modern day and um that particular tradition also
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encourages training our attention systems quite hear from Impact Titus it's not what happens to you but how you
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react to it that matters which is quite in keeping with how we think about mindfulness in the modern day but you
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don't need to have a particular belief or anything you don't need to have a particular orientation wherever
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there are brains there's the brain's ability to pay attention you don't need to have a particular Faith or anything
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like that and the bonus myth that I just love all
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you need is mindfulness which is again completely false I love this cartoon today I'll live in the moment unless the
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moment it's harder I'm Pleasant in which case I'll eat a cookie uh hopefully the five ways to well-being that we're
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promoting here during Mental Health Awareness Week will sort of make that clear that actually there's lots of different ways to well-being mindfulness
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is just one part of it um but mindfulness is a very useful skill because it helps you to develop
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other skills so it's a little bit meta like that right it might help you to shine a bit of a spotlight on areas that
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aren't working for your particularly well and then you can develop some other strategies right and what's often said
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about mindfulness is that it's kind of one half of a coin like cool yeah we
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need to notice stuff but then we need to decide to act right or choose right and we need to learn how to choose
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skillfully right mindfulness on its own there's no enough
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so a better way I think to think about mindfulness is actually like physical
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training and here's a slide from a course we used to deliver mindfulness-based attention training
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which has developed specifically for military audiences out of a neuroscience lab in the University of Miami and in
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the same way that we can train for uh getting fitter or stronger is kind of
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the same thing with mental training right there are particular progressions
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that we can do to get started and there are particular traps also
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um to be able to train the brain's attention system it's just like the body what you practice you get good at same
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thing with mindfulness or attention training so like I've already said there tends to
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be a common progression that most people sort of go through these series of phases when they start training their
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attention or training their mindfulness practice the first stage is the beginner right
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and the trap here is everybody knows us the status always the hardest part anyone who's tried a new fitness program
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started running starting lifting weights you know that if that was all there was to it you would hate it right because
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it's very tricky at the beginning if you if you thought oh I'm always going to feel this way it's really just not for
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me and it's the same thing with training mindfulness or beginning a meditation practice if you haven't done anything
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like that before you're going to sit down to notice your where your attention is going and it's going to be hopping
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all over the place you're going to start thinking about that argument here with your spouse and what's for lunch or
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what's on your to-do list right it takes a little while to move through that process get a few reps right on your
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practice before you start to notice benefits and there's pretty good evidence for this we know that actually it does take quite a few weeks three or
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four weeks before you start to really notice it in mindfulness practice is really underway now the task here is to
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just establish a habit and the the same science around habit formation here for
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well-being behaviors is exactly the same and it's relevant for the developing a mindfulness practice you want to start
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small you really want to have some kind of a reminder maybe you take a course maybe use an app and you want to maybe
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set a reminder to do it at the same time each day right and so you just want to get into a routine of doing a little bit
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of mindfulness whatever works for you at the same time every day so once we're underway with mindfulness
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it's starting to get the hang of it there's another trap here maybe you'll sort of
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have experience with this like I do you get you get the hang of it and you think oh I got this I don't need to practice anymore and it's just like Fitness right
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you start to feel a little bit better and then you know I'm sure we've all had experiences where we've kind of let that you know drop away and stop exercising
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right we don't get the benefit from it and it's the same thing with mindfulness right it's it's exactly the same set of
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principles you need to sort of keep it going and you need a sort of invest in it to keep getting the benefit from it
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and your task here is just to try and get a little bit more mindfulness in your day-to-day activities so you know
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when you think about exercising you know maybe you like going to gym for an hour every day but we all know you're doing
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it because of the benefits that you get for the other 23 hours in your day as well like it's a time outside the gym
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that ends up being really important and that's why you're doing your exercise kind of same thing with mindfulness what
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we're trying to do is through our formal practice our informal practice we're just trying to spread mindfulness so
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maybe actually instead of saying that thing that's going to derail our relationship with our boss or our spouse
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maybe we'll catch ourselves a little bit earlier right and maybe we'll get better and better at remembering to be mindful
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and the rest of our daily activities okay so let's do a little practice very
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very quickly it's called dropping anchor and what we're going to do is we're just going to direct our attention a little
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bit like we did earlier to the breath the body and sounds okay and the idea is that doesn't really matter what's going
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on in our mind or emotions if we've got a dropping anchor practice that can kind of Hold Us steady and stable while this
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stuff is going down so I just invite you to sort of sit you know comfortably in your chair it doesn't have to be too
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upright or anything just in a way that's comfortable you can close the eyes if you like but you don't have to close the
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eyes to do mindfulness it's perfectly fine to keep your eyes open and just like we did before let's just start off
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by taking a couple of slightly deeper breaths
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and I like to put your hands on the belly if that works for you
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right just notice wherever the breathing is most pronounced you might notice it in the nostrils or the chest
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and just notice the sensations in the body so you might like to wiggle the toes or stamp the feet you might like to
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rub the hands to roll the shoulders you've been sitting for a while so feel
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free to move around and cheer notice the weight of the body sitting in
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the chair just relax the shoulders and you might even notice actually you're holding a
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bit of tension in your face and the forehead so just let that drop away as well
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and now just notice sounds often quite a lot of different sounds
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so just pay attention to all the different sounds that you can hear
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just pay attention so even the most faint and distant sounds
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and if your mind wanders off that's totally fine that's what the Mind does just bring your attention back to the breath
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or the body water sounds
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and when you're ready you can open the eyes if they're closed and we'll just
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bring this little practice to an end so hopefully that made sense and I I'd
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love to sort of hear from people how they found that but hopefully you by now you're starting to get a bit of a sense
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of what mindfulness is and what it's not the important Point here and I've said
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this already is you really just need to figure out what works for you and there's lots of different ways you could
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try a course or an app I've got a photo here of someone from us mindful recruits we used to teach this on recruit course
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you can try a body-based practice like yoga has become really popular or you can be out of nature there's actually an
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approach to mindfulness from within to our Maori it's called got a photo here from some recruits out
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in nature we're now on a normal eye for stood underwater really there's no wrong door in terms of getting started with
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monkeys which leads us to headspace so headspace
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is a really great app um that I'll just talk through that's um it's got a lot of really good features
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and it's currently free for all uh defense uh regular force and civilians
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so one of the things I really like about headspace is that it's the most science-backed meditation app in the
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world and that was really important I I think we were looking at what app to introduced into defense because I know a
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lot of our people are very interested in what is the evidence so um so headspace takes their scientific
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evidence pretty seriously so that's the first thing the second thing is there's just so much content on the headspace
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app really for anything that you're kind of interested in obviously there's lots of guided meditations you know focused
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attention situation or awareness open monitoring type meditations um these great meditations for kids so
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if you've got tamariki in your life and you like to try a little bit of mindfulness with them
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um it could be a good compliment to what's being taught in schools these days like the poor spreads pause breathe
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smile program and schools has become pretty popular there's packs are mindful eating mindful exercise which I talk
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about and there's also these really great resources on sleep so there's sleep casts and sleep music in actual
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fact a few years ago when I got home from a deployment I had really bad jet lag and I used the headspace app to help
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get me through that and it also I highly recommend that um there's they've also thought of like
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how to get more mindfulness in your day so there's stuff to kick off your day so small small Snippets of mindfulness
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practice at the start of the day highly recommend starting with mindfulness first thing there's exercises to be more
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focused at work they've even got uh exercise programs on the headspace app so again body based practices and I've
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talked about the sleep stuff so they've really thought of everything um but also very very active at
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promoting lots of different events um so they're always uploading new sort of promotions keep things interesting I
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just pulled up this um your me time holiday calendar so if anyone experiences a little bit of holiday
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um stress crunching in a Christmas time I know it's a real thing for us here in defense we get very busy up until the
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final whistle so there's um some really great things for you to be able to get a little bit more grounded with all that
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sort of business going on towards the end of the year now to take advantage of headspace for
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free um there's a couple of very simple steps so first thing you need to do is Google the defense Health Hub putahi uh high
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water so this is on the N2 and it actually is a lot easier to sign up the headspace outside of dixis so um the
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defense Health hubc converter Google and then once you're there you want to search within our defense Health hub for
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headspace so just type into the search bar headspace again lots of different resources will pop up not what you're
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looking for is this getting started and FAQ guide and that'll just take you
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through step by step how to download the app and actually validate your service
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number email address so you get free access now I will just say it is a
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little tricky all right so you do need to follow step by step it does work but there's an email address there and the
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FAQ guide if you get stuck you can just email us for some support
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okay so uh that brings us to the end of this webinar uh is mindfulness for me
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myths and misunderstanding so hopefully that made sense in terms of mindfulness is just a fancy way of saying noticing
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right it's really just training your brain's attention system to be able to know where your attention is and to
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notice things um you need to find what works for you that's really important don't be swayed by people telling you that is one right
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way there's lots of different ways right so um so sort of explore what works for you
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you can try headspace for free I really recommend getting a grounding initially
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um in particular types of practice so you can sort of start to pick and choose and find I actually kind of like these
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practices maybe not so much those but give them a go create a routine and a habit that's really the best way to make
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sure that you're getting enough reps in terms of your practice and then see if it works if it works for you welcome to
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the world of mindfulness if it's not for you then crack on and try something else
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thanks very much sir over to you your order cast and that's awesome so
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um just Sarah has put for everyone's awareness here has put some more details on how to sign up for headspace in the
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chat so I should put the brochure in there as well as the link straight to the location on the Health Website
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um I'd also say there's a one trap people have fallen into is there's you've got to go through the corporate memberships
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um pathway on the headspace web page if you try and sign up just as a member like as a public as a general public
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member it won't it all gets it'll create it won't work so um so just go through that corporate memberships pathway we
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had that until March next year and we're not yet we're we're still waiting to see where we'll we'll sign up again but um
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but the more users we have making the most of it the more likely that'll be so awesome team uh so thanks so much cousin
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I had a couple of questions from myself I wonder if you'd be willing to answer those so
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and the first as you mentioned how uh mindfulness can help you kind of get better at or be better at or other parts
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of kind of well-being other aspects of wellbeing so I'm just curious like can you can you describe a couple of the
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kind of top ways how ways that happens yeah absolutely so
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um mindfulness is this great way of developing your sense of perspective actually and so one of the things I've started I sort of started to notice and
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myself actually was that you know as sometimes a little bit overly perfectionist you know a little bit
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anxious and it's it kind of just made me aware of some stuff that perhaps I wasn't noticing in myself and so when I
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saw that I'm like oh okay cool I need to actually be a little bit better at some of these other things like maybe I need
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to be a little bit more diligent with my exercise you know or maybe I need to like just be a little bit more aware of
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how much sort of coffee I'm smashing back so mindfulness was initially like that was the sort of the spotlight of
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noticing stuff but then I'm like oh Coop I actually didn't do something about it and I I've heard from lots and lots of
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people that that's how it sort of operates in their life too is actually I didn't realize kind of how frustrated I was sounding when I was talking to my
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kids actually I didn't notice how I was sort of fluttering from tasks and tasks in my day-to-day activities and so once
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you know you become aware of that you can start figuring out some other skills to help with it yeah
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good and um I was wondering uh there's quite a lot of packs uh in the in the
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headspace you know for a whole range of things and like you I'd definitely encourage people to have a look through there's even stuff there for you know
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mums who are going through pregnancy is so there's some quite sort of specific packs there and we happen to know that
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our particular one is seems to be quite well utilized by a defense a defense mum so um so that's awesome so you know be
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be aware for everyone there's quite a specific text I was wondering uh do you
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have any recommendations around like a good pack to start with for people yeah so I think getting a good kind of
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grounding in the basics can be quite useful it's the same thing it's like getting it started in the gym you know
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if like if you went and saw a PDI you know they wouldn't load you up with heaps away initially just like hey just
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get some good movement patterns and let's get the body moving you know let's figure out where you're a bit stiff and
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niggly and then we can start to build on that um I know headspace has got some good
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introductory picks and and it'll just stick you through the basics and say hey this is focused attention look how hard
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it is to pay attention oh hey here's some open monitoring so hey you know like what's situational awareness like
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and it gives you a good foundation it's like okay I'm starting to sort of clock how this works for me and my brain and
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my body and then from there you can start sort of driving your own ship a little bit actually I want a bit more
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Focus to teach actually you know what I really want there's a little bit more patience because on my phone and makes
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you a bit frustrated and you can start saying cool I want to develop these types of skills so initially like any
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kind of focused attention introductory kind of pet it's a really good place to
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start high recommend you start out with other basics awesome yeah thanks for the most perfect since Kirsten
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um I'm wondering one more question and what if anyone else has any questions please don't hesitate to put them in the
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chat but um uh a common question that I've encountered would talk to people about mindfulness is how much do I have
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to do because I'm busy and so how much will actually make a difference I'm curious what's your perspective on that
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question yeah that's a great question um and I'm I'm the kind of guy that really wants to know same sort of thing
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what's the minimum effective dose you know like how much or how little this is actually pretty good evidence about this
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too so I mentioned that Neuroscience Lab at the University of Miami so we've partnered with them in the past and and
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the short answer is like if you're diligent like if you train mindfulness sort of formally using meditation
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practices about sort of five times a week over about sort of four weeks for
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about sort of 12-ish 10 to 12 minutes a day you will start to see benefits right
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and and the good news is for those who really like the science like this has been tested with Marines you know before
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they deploy in the theaters this has been tested with military aviators that kind of thing so you know like I said
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before wherever there's a brain retention system this will work so really you want to just find you know
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the pack or the course or the part of the app that works for you and you just want to build it into your routine you
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just want to keep sort of cracking on for a good couple of weeks three to four weeks 10 to 12 minutes a day I reckon
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you'll start to see some changes awesome that's great thanks custom have we got
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any questions from any of our attendees just check them in the Q a if you wish if you do
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for something recording thank you