Mindful acceptance
Mindfulness is everywhere in 2024. There is mindfulness training in schools and workplaces. Apps abound promoting mindfulness meditation. Academic research on mindfulness has increased exponentially in the last 20 years.
The hype isn’t unwarranted. Meta-analyses (a study evaluating the results of lots of other studies) have found that mindfulness based interventions decrease distress and anxiety in university students, reduce stress and burnout in the workplace, and increases resilience and cognitive function among school students.
Mindfulness typically involves elements of being fully aware of your thoughts and feelings without trying to change them. It involves accepting the present moment for what it is. It can be done as either a formal meditation, accompanying movement such as yoga, through journalling, or simply through bringing awareness to daily activities such as eating or walking.
While studies have almost universally found benefits to mindfulness training, there are a handful of studies that have uncovered unintended negative consequences. I think it’s worth highlighting these studies for reasons that I’ll explain shortly.
Firstly, a 2019 study found that, following a short breathing exercise to induce mindfulness, participants had attenuated moral reactions to a guilty conscience – which meant they were less likely to change negative eating patterns and less likely to intend to make reparations after hurting a friend. Another study found that, for some people, mindfulness reduces pro-social behaviour. Finally, a 2022 study found that mindfulness reduces guilt, which in turn reduces the likelihood of engaging in reparative behaviours after causing harm to others.
There is a common methodology in each of these three studies that I believe is important to shine a spotlight on: they all induced mindfulness using a brief breathing exercise (using prompts such as “bring attention to your breath… feel your torso expand as you breathe in and fall as you breathe out”). Firstly, this means that the more intensive and intentional forms of mindfulness interventions may not have the same negative side effects (with the research showing that, in general, mindfulness interventions support prosocial behaviour). However, this brief form of mindfulness is also the type that we’re most likely to engage in during our day-to-day parenting. We often hear advice from parenting experts to take a few mindful breaths before we engage with our kids during challenging moments, and we’re much more likely to take a mindful moment rather than performing some Tai-Chi before jumping in to address challenging behaviour.
The issue is that these attempts at micro-mindfulness may encourage acceptance of feelings and thoughts, but at the expense of also accepting behaviour or the situation for what it is without attempts to change it. And that is something that mindfulness is not meant to be.
For example, I often hear a familiar narrative in parenting groups. A parent is struggling with their toddler or preschooler’s behaviour. They’re trying desperately to regulate their own emotions and calmly accept their child’s, but their child’s behaviour is driving them crazy. They reach out for advice, saying that they’re trying to avoid punishment, but they’re not sure how to navigate challenging behaviour without it. The issue is that they’re accepting feelings non-judgementally (good!), but also accepting unacceptable behaviour (not good!). They haven’t yet learnt to mindfully accept their child’s feelings without trying to change those feelings, while also holding firm limits on what behaviour will be tolerated.
Limits doesn’t mean punishing inappropriate behaviour or attempting to control our child’s behaviour. It does mean that we modify our own behaviour or the environment to limit our child’s negative behaviour – such as moving a child who is angrily throwing thing to their bedroom where there are less breakables, or calmly turning off the TV once they start whinging for one more episode after going past their screen time limit. Accepting our child’s feelings doesn’t mean being permissive of their behaviour.
By the same token, accepting our own feelings doesn’t mean becoming complacent about the way we are acting. If we’re taking some time to calm down after a rupture with our kids, we shouldn’t reduce our negative feelings such as guilt without also taking action to minimise the cause of the guilt. It’s ok to mindfully work your way to realising that you’re a flawed human (just like everyone else in the whole wide world), that you made a mistake, that that doesn’t make you a bad person, and that you don’t need to let guilt consume you. It’s not ok to decide that, because you’re not feeling so guilty anymore, that you’re not going to make amends for your role in the rupture.
Acceptance is not about saying that everything is fine. It’s about accepting where we are. After all, we can’t get anywhere else without knowing our starting point.
So take that mindful breath. Accept the moment as is. Then work to make it better.
I'd love to hear your thoughts! Have you got a mindfulness practice? I like pairing mindfulness with movement, especially yoga.
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