Mindfulness in everyday life: catching the moments you react on autopilot

Mindfulness in everyday life means noticing the small gap between something happening and how you respond to it, so that you can choose your response. PiViva's Mindful Choices helps you spot a situation that keeps recurring, where you tend to react on autopilot, and plan a more deliberate response for next time. It draws on Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programme, founded at the University of Massachusetts in 1979.

Why do you keep reacting in the same way?

Most of us have a few of these. There's the email that makes your jaw tighten before you've finished the first line, the comment from one particular person that gets under your skin every single time, or the moment in the evening when you find yourself picking up your phone without ever having decided to.

It all happens so quickly that there's no real choice involved. Before you know it you're three replies into the argument, or forty minutes into scrolling, and only then do you notice what's happened.

Afterwards you find yourself wondering why you always do that, and wishing you'd responded differently. The encouraging thing is that those patterns can change, a little at a time, once you start to notice them, and noticing is a skill that anyone can learn with a bit of gentle practice.

What is mindfulness, and where does the evidence stand?

In 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts and developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, usually known as MBSR. He adapted Buddhist attention practices for a secular hospital setting, so that they could be taught to patients and properly tested.

They've been tested a great deal since then. A 2015 meta-analysis by Bassam Khoury and colleagues found that MBSR reduced stress, anxiety and depression in healthy adults, with the largest effect on stress. A 2014 review in JAMA Internal Medicine by Madhav Goyal and colleagues found moderate evidence that mindfulness programmes can help with anxiety, depression and pain, although the effects were small and no better than other active treatments.

So mindfulness helps, gently and gradually, and it's no magic cure, which is a perfectly reasonable place to start from. The idea at its heart is that small gap. When we're on autopilot there isn't one, and paying attention is what creates it, and that gap is where a choice becomes possible.

How does Mindful Choices work in PiViva?

You start by picking a situation that keeps coming round. Then you write down what actually happened, what a more deliberate response might have looked like, and what you'll do differently when the situation turns up again.

It works best if you take one situation at a time and write it up the same day, while you still remember what set it off and how it felt.

Please don't worry if you can't catch yourself in the moment at first, as very few people can. You'll probably notice an hour afterwards to begin with, then ten minutes afterwards, and then one day you'll catch it as it's happening and find you have a choice. That's the natural progression, and it usually takes a few weeks, so it's worth being patient and kind with yourself along the way, just as you would be with a friend who was learning something new.

What if you'd like to practise more formally?

The audio library in Listen has tracks to help with that. On the Ristretto shelf you'll find short resets of around ninety seconds, such as "Three breaths before you speak" and "Put the last meeting down", which are ideal for the moments between other things. The Americano shelf has music and voiceless audio for longer, calmer stretches when you have a little more time.

If your autopilot reactions seem tied to a belief, perhaps something like "they never listen to me", the ABCDE Model can help you take a single moment apart and look at the thinking behind it. And if you'd like to turn your planned response into a habit, you can write it as an Implementation Intention, so that the situation itself becomes your reminder.

Little by little, those moments that used to catch you out can become moments where you get to choose, and that can make your days feel calmer and far more your own.