Mindfulness to Help with Depression

If you have never heard of mindfulness, now is a great time to learn more about it. 
Mindfulness allows you to focus only on the present moment, letting your fears of the 
future and regrets of the past be put aside for the time being. It is so amazing for your 
mindset, helping to relieve stress and anxiety. It is also a wonderful way to start coping 
with your depression.

Why Mindfulness Works

How does mindfulness help? It can provide benefits for people suffering from 
depression in a variety of ways, but this begins with the cognitive symptoms of this 
mental illness. When you practice mindfulness, you are really only focusing on what you 
think or feel exactly at this moment. You are in a constant state of being mindful, which 
can help to bring you back to reality. It helps to bring in positive thoughts and try to push 
out the negative (often irrational) ones.

With depression, it is often difficult to distinguish between exaggerated or realistic 
thoughts, which is what mindfulness is going to help you a lot with.

Taking the Power Away from Your Thoughts

Through mindfulness, you learn a lot of important lessons, but one of the biggest ones 
is that your thoughts don’t need to control you. If you notice that when your depression 
is at its peak, you have a lot of negative thoughts about yourself, your abilities, and your 
worthiness in this world, those thoughts manifest in very dangerous ways. But with 
mindfulness, you are putting them aside for now and trying to find more positive, logical 
thoughts about the current moment. This can slowly but surely re-adjust your thoughts 
and let you see that they do not control you.

Practicing Mindfulness 

Mindfulness is actually much simpler than it might seem, and just takes a little practice. 
You can do it in the form of meditation, with simple breathing exercises, or while doing 
just about any activity. Enjoy going for runs? Think about everything you think, see, and 
feel during the run, and you are being mindful. This can be done at work, school, at 
home, while walking your dogs, or while writing in your journal. When eating a meal, pay 
close attention to the flavor, temperature, feel of it on your tongue, its smell, and how 
your body reacts to it. This is what you do when you are practicing mindfulness.

