Mindfulness, “the life-changing bestseller”, is a book by Mark Williams and Danny Penman that offers an eight week course on mindfulness. If you have not come across mindfulness before, it is an attempt to take the clinically-useful bits of meditation and put them into a framework that improves people’s mental health.
I’ve now done it all, and it hasn’t changed my life.
The book comes with a CD that includes guided meditations. It’s 2016, so I don’t have a CD player, or an optical drive on my computer. In the past four years of not having one, this has been the first time it’s really been a problem as I couldn’t find all of the audio tracks online. In the end I had to resort to using my PS3.
It gets quite time consuming as you go on. In week five for example, you are doing three meditations per day: 8 minutes, 8 minutes and 10 minutes. This is more than half an hour once you had set up and cool down times. That is quite a lot. The default reaction of some is to say “just half an hour a day to improve your mental health? Surely that is worth it?” They’re probably right, but half an hour is still a long time. I could use the same time to go for a run every day, and look after my physical health, something which I don’t find time to do.
Nevertheless, I did want to give this an honest go, so I did make the time. Did it provide some benefit? I’m not sure. I don’t feel any different. However, given that I am not measuring my anxiety on a daily basis, and that you would expect to see fluctuations anyway, I find it very difficult to objectively say whether I have seen an improvement. However, it does not feel like I have. Perhaps I need some high-anxiety situations to come along to truly find out.
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Tags: danny penman, mark williams, meditation, mental health, mindfulness
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2016 at 10:29 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.