What is Mental Awareness and How Does It Affect You?

Note: This article is based on the work of Vanessa Van Edwards, in which she tells us about the meaning of mental perception and how it applies to us.

What is mental awareness?

Siegel's book states, "Mindfulness is a type of focused attention that enables us to see what is occurring inside our minds. It aids in our awareness of our mental processes without negatively affecting us. It allows us to stop acting unintentionally or on purpose and in line with ingrained responses and behaviors.

We can see and accept what is inside of us, possibly let go, and finally change it with the help of the focus skills that are a part of mental awareness. This is the usual action and moves us beyond the reactive emotional vortices we all tend to fall into.

In other words, mental cognition is the capacity to organize, describe, and make clear our inner emotional world and how it interacts with the outside world. While reading this book, you might think to yourself, as I did, "This is a great concept, but where is the science?"

According to Siegel, when we are awake or alert, the neurons in our brain fire and tangle together, activating this area of the brain. This neuroplasticity increases in the brain due to this tangle, aiding in the processing of emotions. We figuratively "wake up," the brain area required to deal with various emotions.

One example Siegel gives to help illustrate ​​brain activation is an experiment with taxi drivers. The hippocampus in the brain expands in taxi drivers, which is the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory. Siegel also explains the brain goes into neural pruning bouts, removing neural connections to reduce the various unused circuits so that the brain becomes more specialized and efficient.

Simply put, you can create your own mind.

Siegel suggests that people with mindfulness training shift their minds into a state where they can move toward difficult situations rather than away from them, which is the brain's sign of resilience.

Key concepts useful for mental awareness

1. “Naming your feeling and taming it”

Noticing and naming the state you feel and taming or habituating are among the chief principles of mental awareness, and I find this very useful and easy to adapt in my own life. If we name the feelings we experience instead of confusing them, we can treat them better. For example, consider the difference between saying: “I am angry” and “I feel angry.” There is a very clear difference between them; “I am angry” is a self-identification that constrains you, while “I feel angry” refers to the ability to recognize and accept feelings without overriding them.

2. Put an end to your aimless life

It's important to become aware of our thought processes without letting them control us. This is one of the key ideas Siegel outlines, which applies to my daily life the most. This enables us to avoid engaging in ingrained behavior, automatic reactions, and potentially dangerous emotional whirlpools.

3. Refine 9 prefrontal functions

According to Siegel, the prefrontal cortex's nine major functions—body regulation, harmonious communication, emotional balance, response adaptability, fear modulation, empathy, insight, moral awareness, and intuition—are crucial for the growth of mental cognition. These nine factors all contribute to emotional well-being, and mindfulness can help you identify any obstacles in each of the nine areas to release your mind's inherent capacity for healing and thought.

It was challenging for me to consider all nine aspects at once, but I was able to treat one aspect each week by simply paying attention to everything I had discovered about myself and my ingrained habits.

4. Three guiding principles

The main idea behind mental awareness is to concentrate thought or attention. Openness, observation, and objectivity are the three pillars that Siegel divides thinking into. This is trickier than it looks. However, I found it helpful when attempting to consider and pinpoint my emotions. I felt more composed and could easily get past them, at the very least.

I struggled with making more specific efforts to practice or even achieve mindfulness. Although Siegel mentions regular "mindfulness training activities," he rarely provides instructions on how to do them independently.

Here are some of the mindfulness training activities I gathered from the examples he uses in the book:

1. Play a game of nonverbal communication to imitate another person's expressions and infer their emotions.
2. Playing the game of nonverbal communication while silently watching TV and letting your mind fill in the blanks.
3. To help stimulate the senses, keep a journal with images, sounds, and smells.
4. Try drawing with different brain sides (the author suggests some books on this subject).
5. Recording emotions.
6. Putting our inner world into words.
7. Make "mind maps" of how we see ourselves, our relationships with others, and how we relate to them.
8. Tighten and release specific muscle groups to identify them.
9. Have someone say "no" in a harsh tone, then "yes" several times, and discuss how you feel when you are told both words.

Although I haven't engaged in any of these activities, I can see how they build on the mindfulness principles.