We are always surrounded by a lot of information, both externally to us in our world, and internally to us in our minds and our bodies and when our attention is constrained or rigid a lot of this goes unnoticed. The inability to be present reduces the amount of information available to use - we are distracted or preoccupied that impairs the quality and the view of the current moment.
Try This
Try this. Look around the room for 30 seconds and look for everything that is the colour blue. Try to remember every blue item that you see and then bring your attention back to this video.
Now see if you can close your eyes and recall every item that you saw that was round.
How did you? Did you have some difficulty in recalling all the round items that you saw?
If I had asked you to name some of the blue things then you probably would have done okay. And although you most likely saw lots of round shapes your attention was dominated by the rule to look for blue things, so your mind only saw part of what your eyes saw.
So what can we learn from this - our judgemental, problem solving minds constantly pull our attention away from full awareness of the present moment.
In my last video I talked about this idea of getting some distance from your thoughts so they don’t control your behaviour. We called this let it go, or if you like to geek out on the technical terms its called cognitive defusion.
What we are going to look at today is the idea of ‘staying here’ as in staying in the moment and being present. In ACT terms this is simply known as being present, or sometimes its referred to as attention to the present moment or contacting the present moment, they all mean the same thing.
And what we mean by this is to be able to notice your right here right now experience and to be able to have some control over your focus as required. This includes the experience of the external world so what we are engaged in, and also the inner world what is happening to us in our bodies and in our minds.
And the reason we would want to do this is probably pretty obvious, we want to engage fully in whatever we are doing so we get more satisfaction and fulfillment out of that thing.
If I am playing a game with my children I dont want to be thinking about work the next day, I dont want to be thinking about something that happened yesterday or last week, although my mind might want to go there, I want to be focusing and engaged in that moment with my children. If I am not fully present then it can feel like there isn’t a real sense of real connection in that moment and just going through the motions. a bit like life is on autopilot.
If I am trying to sit down for a couple of hours to do some university work. I want to try and remain focused and engaged on that work.
And more generally speaking everyone has different values, every one has different things that they find meaningful and important. But what we all have in common is that if you are acting on your values but not fully engaged in what you are doing then you are missing out.
Notice I also said doing things that are important. Not just fun or meaningful, but things we have to do day to day. There are times when you might be doing something pleasurable which you might want to savor, or enjoy, or appreciate such as listening to music, or going for a walk and watching the sunset. But there may be times when there is nothing pleasureable at all about what you are doing. When I sit down to update my spreadsheets of the work I have done this month, there is nothing pleasurable about that. I would much rather be spending time with my family, or watching TV, or exercising. There are plenty of things that we do which are challenging, or stressful that we still want to be able to focus on.
A really good example of this when thinking about therapy is if you are doing some form of exposure work. So you are either trying this by yourself or working with a therapist and they are asking you to step into a challenging or anxiety provoking situation. So for example you are experiencing some kind of social anxiety and you are purposely going into a shop to try and work on that anxiety. Well thats a situation where you want to try and stay present for the purpose of that exercise and for that exercise to be the most effective. Its not pleasant, its not something to be savored but it is important.
And this might seem really obvious that the present moment sits between the future and the past. And physically we are only ever in the present moment. The present moment is constantly happening and changing. Its now, its now, its now….
But our minds are really clever. They can try and forecast the future as a way to help prepare ourselves or to problem solve. Or they can recall things that happened in the past, again as a way to try and learn from them. But remember our minds do that from the present, they do it from the right now.
The problem with this is that when our minds do this it can elicit emotions, thoughts and feelings of the past and the future, right now in the present. So even though something has happened in the past, or it may happen in the future (or it may not) it has an impact on us now in the present moment.
And quite broadly speaking what I tend to see in my practice is that when people’s minds go to the future it causes some anxiety feelings, lots of what if questions, what if that happens, what if this happens, how will i cope, i wont be able to cope.
And when peoples minds go to the past it can cause problems when they may feel guilt about something they have done, maybe they regret something or perhaps they replay some kind of experience in their heads over and over to try and figure something out or work out why something happened. Did I actually say that to that person? Why did i say that to that person? What must they have thought about me when i did that? Why did that thing happen to me? What could I have done to prevent that?
Generally speaking this can lead to depressive type feelings. And Im just speaking very broadly here I know there are times when the past will make you feel anxious and the future may make you feel depressed. And there is a massive link between someone feeling depressed, someone feeling anxious and someone feeling both that its actually very hard to tease the two apart into two distinct components.
Time for a geek out moment I think. In ACT we work with what are known as processes. So if you look at some of the earlier forms of CBT then you may notice that there are lots of different manualised approaches and models to various disorders.
For example we have:
Heimbergs model of social anxiety
Clarks model of social anxiety
Clarks model of panic disorder
Barlows model of panic disorder
Borkovecs model of generalised anxiety disorder
Dugas model of generalised anxiety disorder
Zinbarg, craske and barlows model of generalised anxiety disorder.
Becks cognitive therapy for depression
Jacobsons behavioural activation for depression.
So if thats the way you work with specific models for specific problems. Then what happens when someone is experiencing two problems. What happens if someone has social anxiety and depression. Do you use a social anxiety model or do you use a depression model?
ACT gets around this by being what is called transdiagnostic. It can be applied to pretty much anything. It targets processes, so instead of looking at the content of your thoughts, it looks at the process of thinking and targets that. Thats why we do things like try and get some distance from your thoughts, as if you learn that skill it doesnt matter if you are applying it to an anxious thought, or a depressed type thought, or a scared thought, its the same technique. And then the therapist doesnt have to remember about 9000 models.
And one of those processes is what we are discussing in this video - being in the present moment. As you can see, it doesnt matter what problem you are experiencing, if you get better at staying present then that is most likely going to improve the quality of your life.
End of geek out.
So in the present moment we try to not get caught up in the past, or try to get caught up in the future, and we try to experience the present moment for what it is, whether that's something enjoyable like a hobby, whether its spending time with someone important and really being engaged with that, or whether its attending to something that needs to be done.
So how do we build this skill?
There are loads of ways to do this, and I’ll make a dedicated playlist to specific exercises. But ill give you some general principles right now.
The first thing is to notice that you are not in the present. So try to determine where you are on a time line that runs from the past to the future, with the present in the middle. Are you getting lost in things that have happened in the past or are getting caught up in the future?
The second thing is to remember that this is normal. Minds are designed to problem solve. They are designed to try and learn from our actions in the past and they are designed to try and use that information to problem solve in the future. Where the problem usually comes is when that is excessive and starts controlling your life, but it is a very natural response.
And thirdly when you notice you aren’t in the present, and need to be, gently try to bring your self back. Either through a formal present moment awareness exercise, or by some sort of state change like standing up, moving around, or using the dropping anchor exercise.
So I'm hoping that gives you an overview of what we mean by being present, or staying here, and some of the reasons why it can be helpful. As i said there are loads of ways to build this skill and those videos are already in the process of being created and will be up shortly.
Thanks for watching everyone
Take care and goodbye
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