How the Lockdown Taught Me to Slow Down and Be Mindful

Plus psychological advice on practicing mindfulness and slowing down.

LIFE LESSONS

Plus psychological advice on practicing mindfulness and slowing down.

Image by the author.

I am finally noticing the slow passing of the seasons, leaves falling down in the fall, lakes freezing in the winter, and flowers blooming in the spring. What did it take for me to start seeing the changing nature around me? It took one ugly lockdown.

Over a year ago, I remember discussing with my friend how you barely notice the change of the seasons when you live in the city. You only feel it’s winter when temperatures suddenly drop. Except this change was never sudden.

Of course, the seasons always change gradually. It’s just that I had never stopped to observe it. I was so caught up in my world of overworking and planning my busy travels, that I forgot to be in my present.

How Lockdown Walks Changed My World

And then everything changed. Suddenly we were forced to take a step back and stay right where we were. We could not travel or go to work. Many of us lost jobs and the professional objectives we were striving for.

It is fair to say that many of us lost our sense of purpose. Without being able to do anything that defined me professionally, I felt a deep loss within my personality. I was finally facing myself as a person not defined by my work and travel.

As the only activity left to do in the lockdown, I started going on walks around my neighborhood. At first, I found them boring. There isn’t much going on in the parks after all.

But then something happened. After a few weeks, I started noticing subtle changes in the color of the leaves. For the first time, I paid attention to the animals that I would come across. I even discovered a species of frogs I had never seen before!

Swans on a frozen lake (image by the author).

This seems like a straightforward thing and you might be thinking you knew all of this all along. I also thought I did. But there was something in my perception of this newly discovered nature that clicked. I finally allowed myself to really observe it. I was not just walking through a park on my way to have dinner with friends. I went to the park to just be there.

I accidentally discovered mindfulness.

Mindfulness means:

Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, p.4).

The Vacation Effect

I noticed that lockdown was not the only occasion that had this mindfulness effect on me. Whenever I was on vacation, I felt like I was paying attention to everything around me. You might think that’s because everything is novel when you are in a place that’s new and different. But that’s not exactly why.

Last summer I was on vacation in a coastal town, and there I saw a type of decorative brickwork on a church. I stopped to appreciate it and even took a few pictures. I would’ve sworn I hadn’t encountered it before.

Two weeks later, when I was back in my neighborhood, I realized that a church only two minutes away from my place has the exact same type of architecture! So, it was not the novelty that attracted me.

The reason why we notice even the small details on our vacation trips and admire them is the same as in the case of the lockdown. We simply slow down and allow ourselves to stop and pay attention to the world around us.

Melbourne, St Kilda (image by the author).

So, is there a way to take something out of this and implement it in our daily lives outside of lockdown and vacation? Psychology might offer some answers: We can practice mindfulness and the art of slowing down.

How Mindfulness Works

If you venture on Google Scholar, you will find countless scientific articles explaining the benefits of mindfulness in psychotherapy (see Sources below). What strikes me as the most valuable takeaway from these articles is the fact that mindfulness can be practiced and learned. Here is some advice on how to do that.

Shapiro and collaborators outline three axioms of mindfulness in their article in the Journal of Clinical Psychology: Intention, Attention, and Attitude.

Figure and quote from Shapiro et al. (2006:375): “The three axioms of mindfulness, Intention, Attention, and Attitude, are not separate stages. They are interwoven aspects of a single cyclic process and occur simultaneously. Mindfulness is this moment-to-moment process.”

These axioms can be understood as processes you need to constantly go through when practicing mindfulness.

The role of intention is to understand why you are practicing mindfulness. Maybe you want to be in tune with your feelings or find peace with the loss of control we all experienced in the face of the pandemic. This personal intention, which might also change over time, is what will keep you focused and motivated to continue practicing.

Attention means simply paying attention. This is what I experienced during the lockdown. I observed my present moments just as they were, without any external judgment. This is why I could finally notice the frozen lake, the swans, and the sunset.

Attitude is a conscious commitment to bringing acceptance, kindness, and openness to your practice, as observed by Shapiro and collaborators. The accepting attitude is exactly what allowed me to admire the beauty of the nature around me. It took me several walks in the park to finally accept my lockdown reality and develop this open attitude.

For a practical approach to mindfulness, you can see this YouTube video (shared below) by renowned psychologist Marsha Linehan. I also recommend her book “DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets,” filled with exercises for practicing mindfulness in the approach of Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT).

Marsha Linehan explaining mindfulness skills in DBT therapy.

Now that I know the theory of what I experienced during the lockdown, I can intentionally implement the three mindfulness axioms in my yet-to-come post-lockdown world. Because we all know how easy it is to get immersed in crazy life expectations, once everything starts ticking again.

And while the pandemic has forced me to step out of the whirl of my intertwined professional and personal expectations, I feel empowered knowing that I can create a conscious effort to keep myself grounded in who I am at the present.

Go and Practice!

I hear some of you saying: What exactly can I do right now to find my intention, attention, and attitude?

That’s easy. Just book some time off. Not vacation, I mean take a few hours off every day. Use those hours to go to the park, stop to look at a butterfly, a squirrel, a fallen leaf, or a sparrow flying around. Soon enough you will realize why it matters and why you want to keep doing it.

Sources:

Brown, K. W., Ryan, R. M., & Creswell, J. D. (2007). Mindfulness: Theoretical Foundations and Evidence for Its Salutary Effects. Psychological Inquiry, 18(4), 211–237.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. New York: Hyperion.

Linehan, M. M. (2014). DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets. Second edition. New York: Guilford Publications.

Shapiro, S. L., Carlson, L. E., Astin, J. A., & Freedman, B. (2006). Mechanisms of Mindfulness. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62(3), 373–386.