Mindfulness in general means to be fully aware of what you are doing, while you are doing it. This means, for example, that while eating breakfast you would be “mindful” only of the various sensory experiences of eating the food; you wouldn’t be thinking of that upcoming business meeting.

Mindfulness meditation is a term often used in the practice of psychology so that meditation can be taught without seeming to have any religious implications. Many meditation techniques, such as “centering prayer,” Zen Buddhism, and even Transcendental Meditation, are quite similar to the idea of mindfulness meditation, and yet there is nothing religious about any of them. They are all nothing more than psychological techniques to achieve some form of relaxed, focused mind.

Mindfulness can be relaxing because if you focus just on the one thing that occupies you in the moment you don’t have to deal with the anxiety of future concerns. Mindfulness meditation draws on this realization and allows you to relax by focusing just on your body in its immediate surroundings: heartbeat, breathing, environmental sounds, etc. The idea is to notice these things without judging or interpreting them. Random thoughts, for example, are noticed as transitory things that simply come and go. If you don’t focus on them, they soon go away as easily as they came, and so they don’t bother you—or cause SNS arousal. Accordingly, mindfulness meditation is a very passive process.

Stress-Performance Curve -- Click your browser «Refresh» if image or background fails

Performance-Stress
Relationship Curve


There is, however, a problem with mindfulness meditation: since it’s a passive process, you cannot stay relaxed unless you do nothing but meditate.

The explanation for this odd fact can be found in the traditional Performance-Stress Relationship Curve, which looks like an inverted “U”. At zero arousal, you have zero performance—which means that you’re either sleeping or meditating. At maximum arousal, you also have zero performance—here, you’re incapacitated by panic. So, curiously enough, the only way to have any performance is to have some arousal.



This curve idea is really just common sense about physiological arousal, and it may not represent anything particularly scientific about what “stress” may or may not be.


This means that if you are performing any activity with a moderate to high level of arousal, such as driving a car, being in a state of mindfulness does not in itself reduce SNS stimulation. (Remember that mindfulness while sitting quietly can be relaxing because sitting quietly is not inherently threatening.) Therefore, although mindfulness can help to increase performance—because it increases focus and awareness—to have optimal performance you also need to use an active form of relaxation, such as progressive muscle relaxation, autogenics, or prayer, to keep SNS arousal from becoming excessive.