Meta is a program about taking care of our minds through creative expression.
The elements: Mind
- It’s just as important to look after our mental health as it is our physical health.
- 1 in 4 high school students experience mental illness.
- It’s important to take active steps to look after ourselves!
- Mindfulness is one of the most effective ways of taking care of our minds.
- Mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment with openness and curiosity and without judgment. Basically, it’s about being AWARE.
- While in this awareness, keeping a check on our attitude is crucial. Observing our thoughts, as if we are a scientist making a new discovery, during the present moment, is a great way to keep our attitude in check.
- Mindfulness can be practiced two main ways: formally (meditation) and informally (bringing the same quality of attention to everyday life activities)
- META explores the practice of mindfulness informally, through creativity.
The elements: Emotions
- Humans have a natural tendency to want to get rid of difficult, uncomfortable emotions. If we are feeling anxious, we might try to distract ourselves and avoid the emotion (by doing stuff like endlessly scrolling through social media, or binge watching TV). This might work in the short-term, but it doesn’t address the problems beneath the surface, and doesn’t work in the long term.
- Unfortunately for us, we can’t push emotions away very effectively. Imagine that you are at the beach in the water, and you have a beach ball; what happens when you push that beach ball underwater? the beach ball pushes back, even stronger than before, and bursts out of the water. The same goes for emotions, when we push them down or try to get rid of them, they just come back, often stronger than before.
- The opposite of pushing emotions away is to embrace and welcome them. When we become mindfully aware of our emotions, by paying attention to them with curiosity and openness and without judgment, we find that they have less of an impact on us.
The elements: Thoughts
- Imagine your friend walks past and although you raise your hand to wave hi, they look at you and just walk by. If you had the thought, “I must have done something wrong,” or “they don’t like me,” or “I have no friends,” how would you feel?
- What if you thought, “Maybe they didn’t see me” or “Maybe they are having a bad day”? How would you feel?
- Here we have the same event, but a different interpretation (thought).
- Thoughts are not facts (they are simply mental events that pop up in the mind).
- We have 10’s of thousands of thoughts a day, and these thoughts determine how we feel.
- Much of what we think isn’t conscious – thoughts swirl around in our minds without noticing. If we stopped and noted down our mental chatter over a week, we’d find that much of it is negative. It’s a phenomenon called the negativity bias. We can have a brilliant day where 99 things go right and the 1 thing that went wrong is what we focus on.
- The negativity bias was hard-wired into the brain through evolution. It was adaptive and helpful (it ensured our survival) when we had to be on constant look out for threats and danger (e.g. predators).
- Mindfulness helps us develop a mind that sees real threats more clearly, acts more effectively in dealing with them, and is less rattled or distracted by exaggerated, manageable threats, or false alarms. We develop the power to observe our thoughts and work out whether they are helpful or not, and then to unhook from those that are unhelpful.
- We are also going to differentiate between our inner critic and our inner mentor.
- Another byproduct of the negativity bias is that we all tend to have a fairly harsh ‘inner critic’.
- Take a moment to consider how your own self-talk. When we start to pay attention to how we speak to ourselves (for example; when we make a mistake), we notice we speak far more harshly to ourselves than we ever would to someone we cared about.
- Self-compassion is the ability to give ourselves the same caring attention we’d give others. In this way, we can start to build an inner mentor to replace the inner critic. It involves understanding that us humans are all imperfect.
The elements: Attention
- Attention involves the intentional observation of our thoughts, feelings and sensory perceptions (what we can see, hear, smell, touch, taste) in the present moment.
- Simply noticing what’s showing up at any given moment.
- The act of noticing can be surprisingly challenging, because our wandering minds love to try to solve our problems of the past, or worry about the future.
- Practicing mindfulness helps train our brains to be able to hold our attention on one thing for longer.
- Attention is like a beam of light focusing on the object it is directed towards. It may be like a laser pointer focus, which is needed when trying to complete a challenging task; or it may be more like a floodlight (useful when taking in wider surroundings).
- The skills of bringing our wandering mind back to the task at hand again and again during creative activities develops the part of our brain that is responsible for focus and concentration.
Mind
Emotions
Thoughts
Attention
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