Practicing Mindfulness in a World of What-Ifs

According to author and mindfulness guru Eckhart Tolle, “fear is almost always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.”* “Mindfulness” always sounds great on paper, but it’s never quite as easy to put into practice. Pick an object in the room and focus on it; pay attention to everything about it. I, for example, am looking at a pen. It has a black tip and is half-full of ink. Someone (not me) has chewed on the cap. Now, when you get up, notice how your feet feel when you walk, how your footsteps sound. Focus in on the sensory aspects of your daily life. Believe it or not, this is mindfulness: being aware of the physical sensations of life, and learning not to fixate on the psychological conditions. I, for one, have been an anxiety sufferer and am constantly reading and learning about how to alleviate that constant feeling that something (I don’t know what), but something will go wrong. The more I work with young people, the more I understand that this is not purely an adult emotion.

“What if I don’t do well?” If I had a dime for every time a student has said this during a tutoring session…well, you know the saying. The problem with “what if” statements is that, as Tolle explained, they don’t represent a real, concrete occurrence. Students often fear what ifs. They are inundated with talk of scores, colleges, acceptances and negative consequences if they don’t perform well. It makes sense that many of them feel overwhelmed. To make matters worse, we live in a “suck it up” society, which leaves little room for understanding of conditions like anxiety or panic. I can remember hearing a lot of “black and white” statements growing up: if you don’t bring your grades up, you won’t get into a good college. I’d venture to guess that a lot of kids out there have heard some version of that one. What a stress-inducing sentiment! Since when is learning do or die? The same way I wouldn’t like to be told that I’m going to be fired if I don’t do an absolutely amazing job at work today, I don’t think adolescents should be exposed to this kind of negative thinking either.

This concept of “living in the moment” is certainly not new. Surely Mr. Tolle has borrowed some of his ideas from Buddhist and other teachings, but he does put a modern spin on this age-old way of experiencing the world. We live in the future. What will my scores be? Where will I go to college? What will my roommate be like? What am I going to major in? What kind of career will I have? Will I make a lot of money? We truly live our lives in the future tense, or are at least conditioned to do so. For the adolescent, this constant fixation on the future can bring with it some problems. Note that I chose the word “fixation;” certainly, considering the future and being prepared is not a bad thing, but obsessing about it and missing what’s happening right now can be an anxiety trigger. Anxiety, particularly when it begins at a young age, can lead to other, more serious issues, many of which can be life-long interrupters of the beauty of the moment.

It is important for students and parents to keep a few “cognitive distortions”** in mind and practicing avoiding them. First, it is very easy to “filter” thoughts, magnifying negative details and filtering out positive ones. I often realize during tutoring sessions that we tend to focus only on the two or three questions the student missed. It is important to remind him or her that despite those few, there were also several correct answers. Why not highlight those as well? Also, when we think in “black and white” terms, we convince ourselves that there is no middle ground, that things are either all good or all bad. In reality, some things are just somewhere in the middle and that’s ok. An issue for me at times has been “catastrophizing,” which, just as it sounds, describes a tendency to exaggerate the importance of not-so-important events. It’s easy for students to do this, as things like practice tests or shaky work in a tutoring session can lead to thoughts of disaster on a real test, even though that real test has not yet happened.

Being mindful is a beautiful idea and every time I read about it, I get re-inspired to focus on the moment, on the little things, and not fixate on potential problems that may arise in the future. It’s harder to live, but every moment is another moment to try. This is a great concept that we can pass on to our students and children, reminding them that academics and, indeed, life are not actually do-or-die, though they often appear that way in our minds. Eckhart Tolle would remind us that these feelings are literally only in our minds.

*from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, by Eckhart Tolle. Namaste Publishing, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2004.

**http://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-cognitive-distortions/

Written by Phil Lane