How to use mindfulness in CBT? - Chapter 16

This chapter will explain what mindfulness is and how to integrate it into CBT.

Mindfulness refers to maintaining attention on immediate experience while taking an orientation of openness, acceptance, and curiosity. It teaches to focus on what is happening right now, either externally or internally. It also teaches you to being willing to experience the now in a nonjudgmental way.

Mindfulness can help to get a different relationship with your thoughts. The goal would not be to eliminate the unhelpful thought or eliminate distressing internal stimuli, but to nonjudgmentally observe and accept your internal experiences - without evaluating them or trying to change them.

Different types of mindfulness exist. Here are three of them:

• Mindfulness of thoughts.
• Mindfulness of internal stimuli.
• Mindfulness for self-compassion.

There are formal mindfulness practices and informal mindfulness practices. In a formal mindfulness meditation, you set aside a period of time, go to a quiet place and focus your attention on a particular experience. You notice when your attention has wandered from the specified experience and nonjudgmentally bring it back to the experience.

Informal mindfulness practices refers to applying the principles of mindfulness to your day-to-day experiences.

It may be a good idea to practice mindfulness yourself for the following three reasons:

• It may reduce stress and enhance your sense of well-being.
• It can help you understand and describe it to clients.
• It might motivate clients to practice it when you have told them about your experiences.

It seems that integrating mindfulness into CBT treatment is much more effective for clients than teaching mindfulness as a standalone skill. You should encourage your clients to use either formal or informal mindfulness exercises when they find themselves stuck in an unhelpful thought process or caught up in an uncomfortable internal experience.

What is the AWARE technique?

The AWARE technique is a mindfulness technique developed to be used when clients worry excessively and / or experience a lot of anxiety. The steps are:

1. Accept the emotion. Accept the emotion as natural and normal. The sensations are a normal part of the emotion.
2. Watch it from a distance. Look at it without judgment. Be detached.
3. Act constructively with it. Act as if you do not feel the emotion. Whatever you can do without anxiety, you can do with it.
4. Repeat the steps. Continue to accept, watch and act constructively.
5. Expect the best. Most of the time, what you fear most does not happen. If you practice the steps often, you will gain confidence that anxiety always decreases. And your difficulties with anxiety will decrease once you stop fighting it or trying to avoid or control it.