Mindfulness is the act of focusing your attention on the present moment, without judgment of what is happening within and around you. In mindfulness, you are encouraged to allow feelings and thoughts to arise within you and pass through you without arguing or trying to control them, simply by observing. You are encouraged to use your senses to focus on your surroundings, helping you recognize that what’s happening now is all you need to pay attention to.
Mindfulness isn’t just staying passive; it’s using your senses and your attention to ground yourself in the present moment, helping you live your life through deliberate and thoughtful responses, instead of immediate, dysregulated reactions.
Mindfulness targets depression’s toughest symptoms
Depression can lead to symptoms that include mood swings and irritability, rumination, negative self-beliefs, persistent sadness, hopelessness, and exhaustion, and thoughts and urges toward self-harm and suicide. There’s a large body of research that shows that mindfulness helps people cope with depression, but why, and how, does it help?
Mood swings and irritability
Emotional dysregulation is a hallmark of depression in both teens and adults. Mood swings, anger, sadness, and extended emotional reactions to seemingly neutral situations are all depression symptoms.
Mindfulness helps you both observe and let go of these mood swings through non-judgment, and it helps you make it through them without reacting to the emotional dysregulation. How? Focusing on either your surroundings or how you feel, without doing anything else in the moment.
Focusing on your surroundings, how things around you feel, smell, look, sound, and even taste, can help you recognize that your emotions and thoughts are not everything that is happening right now. This gives you mental space to address them in a way you choose, instead of snapping at others or having an emotional meltdown.
Focusing on your physical body, your breathing, how your skin is sensing the world around you, and even how the emotion feels in your body (making sure to not judge yourself) can also help you let go of the racing thoughts and urge to react, helping you sit with your feelings for a moment so they can pass through you, instead of lingering for too long or pushing you to react.
Negative self-beliefs, rumination, and hopelessness
Depression takes up a lot of mental space, leading to negative self-beliefs, worry, repetitive and cyclical thinking, also known as rumination, and feelings of hopelessness and emptiness. These thoughts can become distractingly loud and can feel like highly compelling truths, instead of just thoughts passing through because of the influence of depression on your brain.
Mindfulness can actually adjust how the brains of depressed people work even when they’re not deliberately engaged in mindfulness, creating long-lasting changes that make life feel much more like it’s worth living. It allows people to recognize but not get attached to thoughts that pass through their minds. “I’m a useless jerk” can feel hurtful and true for people with depression, and be hard to let go of, or can cause you to try to shove the thought away, paradoxically making the thought even louder.
When a difficult thought is approached with mindfulness, it can simply be a thought, one that probably isn’t fully true, that can stick around as long as it chooses (instead of trying to suppress it), and leave when it chooses (instead of getting attached to the thought through arguing with it). Rumination and worry can be cut short through mindful observation and acceptance.
Mindfulness also reduces self-judgment and improves self-compassion. “I’m useless” can become “I am having a hard time because of depression” through mindful non-judgment. With time and practice, this mindful approach to depression symptoms can reduce their influence, making them easier to handle and less impactful on your daily life.
Self-harm and suicidal ideation
Mindfulness helps reduce self-harm and suicidal urges, most likely through helping people experience and release difficult emotions and thoughts without judging or clinging to them. It’s thought that self-harm and suicidal ideation are both ways that some people deal with emotions or thoughts that are extremely distressing. The self-destructive thoughts and actions are a form of avoidance and rejection.
Mindfulness makes it easier to be with yourself and your thoughts (whatever they are) without judgment. Witnessing your thoughts and feelings as they show up in your mind and body, acknowledging them, and then letting them pass through you without argument or judgment of yourself for having them is the opposite of avoidance and rejection. You are accepting yourself, and how you think and feel, without over-identifying with your thoughts and feelings, and so you don’t have to resort to self-harm or suicidal ideation to cope.
Mindfulness is a key pillar of DBT
Dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, has four core pillars that are crucial to living a satisfying, self-respecting, and self-regulated life. These pillars include mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, distress tolerance, and emotional regulation. Within each of these pillars are groups of DBT skills that help people better incorporate these concepts into their daily lives.
DBT skills that focus on mindfulness include the Wise Mind, What, and How skills, but many other DBT skills in other categories incorporate mindfulness to make distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and emotional regulation easier to access. Being present in the moment and focusing on the now, without self-judgment, can make distressing moments easier to tolerate, it can make emotions easier to understand and cope with, and it can make interpersonal interactions easier to engage with, without strong reactions or self-abandonment.
DBT’s extensive use of mindfulness, in addition to other highly helpful mindsets and life skills, can make it an excellent choice for depression treatment, even for people with treatment-resistant depression. The clear evidence that DBT helps people with depression is a major component of the reasons it is used in THIRA Health’s intensive depression treatment programs.
Holistic depression therapy helps integrate the benefits of mindfulness
The goal of learning how to use mindfulness is to then incorporate it into daily life, to reduce overall emotional distress, and to consistently reduce depression symptoms. For therapy programs, dedicated mindfulness exercises are a helpful start, but adding holistic therapeutic approaches that include mindfulness components can further healing in meaningful ways that make mindfulness even easier to incorporate into daily life.
Creative expression can increase capacity for mindfulness
Creative artistic expression brings mindfulness into depression treatment through a few avenues. Being physically present and observing both what your body is doing and what is happening in front of you is integral to artistic activities like painting and sculpting. Prose and poetry writing bring in mindfulness of your mental state and expand your self-compassion, giving you an opportunity to focus on what’s happening in your mind and to accept it with less judgment.
Creative expression allows you to access your feelings and express them in different ways, helping you experience and understand your emotions more fully, eventually enhancing the ability of your brain to regulate negative emotions. Research also shows that making art reduces self-judgment, a crucial component of mindfulness. Art expression is subjective and very individual, and the satisfaction and self-connection of making art can help people quiet the negative self-beliefs and judgmental thoughts of depression.
Mindful movement helps connect the body to the mind in restorative ways
Depression pulls you away from the moment through negative thoughts, hopelessness, and self-judgment, and makes movement harder to pursue through exhaustion and feeling empty and unworthy of effort. There’s plenty of evidence that exercise has positive impacts on depression, but what about movement that incorporates mindfulness?
There’s a sizable body of evidence that shows when you reconnect to now, and move your body, using activities like yoga, walking, or qigong, all genders tend to find some improvement in depression symptoms. Therapy programs, like those at THIRA Health, that incorporate mindful movement like meditative walking, spending time in nature, yoga, and qigong, add mindful attention to your surroundings and your body state to movement, helping your mind get used to connecting the body, mind, and present moment, providing another avenue to improve your depression symptoms.
DBT-based intensive depression treatment in Bellevue helps people heal with multiple mindful therapy approaches
Mindfulness has been shown, in many ways and through many applications, to help specifically with alleviating depression symptoms. That’s a key reason it’s a core pillar of DBT, and is foundational to the treatment choices made at the DBT-based, holistic intensive depression treatment programs at THIRA Health. With a comprehensive, research-backed DBT program practiced with fidelity, alongside artistic expression therapy, mindful movement, and many other therapeutic approaches, THIRA Health provides comprehensive depression treatment in Bellevue, Washington, that takes a whole person into account with all treatment choices.
If you’re struggling with depression and ready to start the healing process, we encourage you to connect to THIRA Health today. Our evidence-backed residential, partial hospitalization, and intensive outpatient programs can help you reconnect to yourself and use mindfulness, along with many other helpful approaches, to create a life worth living!
