Promoting Mental Health and Mindfulness by Matthew

Promoting Mental Health and Mindfulness by Matthew - December 2016 Scholarship Essay

The accomplishment that I am most proud of would be my admission to graduate school for counseling psychology. I chose to attend graduate school for counseling psychology because I wanted to learn about how psychology could learn how to help myself and others to live a happy and healthy life. I am very proud to say that I am on my way to completing graduate school and eventually becoming a marriage and family therapist. I would like to use my talents and education to promote healthy lifestyles in my clients as a future marriage and family therapist. A practical approach to a healthy lifestyle begins with an awareness of how daily stressors affect us.
As a graduate student studying counseling psychology, I wish to explore an approach that integrates the biological, psychological and social aspects of stress. By utilizing a mindfulness approach, a college student would become more aware of the factors that lead to stress. Decades of research have shown that mindfulness-based treatments are clinically efficacious in reducing stress, anxiety, and depression. Mindfulness would be an effective practice to incorporate in one’s daily life because it allows a person to be aware of their own health, their feelings and behavior in a nonjudgmental way. This approach integrates mental health and physical health by increasing awareness of what is occurring in one’s body and mind.
Utilizing an approach that integrates both the mind and body are crucial for stress reduction and stress management because the source of stress often has both a biological basis and psychological basis. Increased stress leads to increases in cortisol, weight gain, increased risk for heart disease, poor diets, and increases in lower psychological well-being. All these health factors are inter-related, the mind and body are connected and one affects the other. When we are experiencing stress, our body produces increased cortisol, which decreases metabolism. Therefore, we feel in our bodies more negative sensations such as headaches, shoulder aches, stomach aches, migraines, elevated heart rates and lower energy.
Mindfulness posits that much of our stress is derived from our relationship with our feelings, thoughts, and our environment. Mindfulness encourages us to become more aware of our feelings, sensations, and thoughts in a nonjudgmental way. Mindfulness uses techniques such as meditation and mindfulness-based yoga to increase awareness of our own body and to become more connected to our bodies. Mindfulness-based yoga helps to encourage gentle exercise in a nonjudgmental and open way. Often when exercises we lose motivation over time due to the high level of effort, delayed positive reinforcement, and lack of results such as no weight loss or no noticeable difference in body appearance. Mindfulness encourages one to be aware of our perceptions, our judgments and to become more accepting of what is. By doing this mindfulness encourages motivation for change and increases nonjudgmental awareness thereby enacting lasting change.
Mindfulness not only utilizes meditation and yoga, but also an overall lifestyle change. Mindfulness can be incorporated in everything we do. For example, I could eat meals mindfully by reducing distractions such as phones, television screens or other electronics. I could walk mindfully by being aware of my surrounding while walking, noticing the air on my face, and not using my smartphone while I walk. Essentially, any behavior that humans do can be done using mindfulness. Mindfulness is about being aware in the present moment with a nonjudgmental attitude. The nonjudgmental attitude is key because often we judge every experience that we have in one way or another. We judge ourselves when we forget to exercise one day, or when we eat a donut instead of an apple. Our self-judgments often get in the way by increasing our sense of guilt, shame, and eventually our stress levels. By allowing ourselves to be gentle on ourselves in a nonjudgmental way but still keep in mind our personal values, we can change our behavior.
Living a healthy life is a lifetime endeavor because the very definition of a happy life is that is a lifestyle choice, a fundamental way of being. Therefore, it is important that mindfulness is a fundamental way of being as well. Mindfulness is not a quick fix, it is a lifestyle change that changes one’s way of being, of one’s way of relating to the world. The science of behavior change can also be adapted to create lasting change by slowly removing contrived or unnatural rewards and replacing with more natural, intrinsic rewards such as feeling a sense of pride, feeling healthy and living in accordance with one’s values.