A note from Tine: Welcome to another edition of Tim Talks! For those who are new to Beautyholics Anonymous, Tim Talks is a new series on the blog where my husband, Tim, will be sharing his knowledge to help raise mental health awareness. Tim is a psychiatrist who works in metro Melbourne. His area of interest is child, adolescent and youth psychiatry.
To be honest, I’ve never even heard of the term “mindfulness” until about a year ago. I haven’t really heard of people talking about it and then suddenly, every other article in magazines are going on and on about mindfulness. It’s something I’m still learning and if you’re new to it too, I hope that Tim’s explanation on mindfulness will help you understand the concept better. Do approach it with an open mind. I used to think that mindfulness was hokum. It’s not.
In the previous Tim Talks post, I briefly raised mindfulness as a skill that can be useful as we try to deal with stressors in our lives. Before we start looking at mindfulness, I’d like to challenge you readers to recall what you were doing or experiencing in the first five minutes from when you got out of bed this morning. Chances are that most of us would have gone through the motions and would have very limited awareness of what we did in that period of time. Most people refer to this as the ‘auto-pilot’ mode, which I feel can similarly be reflected as a lack of mindfulness.
I hope that this blog post will help give a clearer perspective of mindfulness, its usefulness and applicability.
