This is a technique that can help you cope with unhelpful or intrusive thoughts and feelings that may have an excessive influence over your life.  These intrusive thoughts and feelings might prevent you from enjoying your leisure time, affect your performance at work or interfere with relationships.

Almost always there are issues from the past or concerns about the future wrapped up in our thinking about these issues. Our mind is wired to continually “work” on these things. The thoughts/feelings seem to go “round & round” in our brain.

Mindfulness uses the simple pleasures of the present moment to interrupt these thought patterns and try to help you bring things back into balance.

We can be mindful about almost anything - even doing the dishes. The simplest of all is our breathing and “Mindfulness of the Breath” can be a very useful technique to help cope with problems.

Mindfulness is like playing the guitar. In order to get better at it you have to practice! Nobody learnt to be Eric Clapton [that’s Ed Sheeran to the millennials] by buying a book of guitar lessons. If you can make mindfulness a part of your daily routine, it will be much more useful in the middle of a “crisis”. There is an App that can help you with this – “Smiling Mind” & it is free. Why not give it a try, you may find it easier & more helpful than you think! Spend 5 minutes of each day listening to/practicing a ‘talk’ from Smiling Mind – e.g. before you go to sleep or first thing in the morning – like cleaning your teeth.

There is a lot more to Mindfulness tor those who want to explore it, but this is one simple & effective way to start.