More and more I am associating mindfulness as one of many over-marketed self-help practices to cope with the stress of modern life.
This mountain of books and methods to find calm or happiness appear to me as a stigma of how insane some aspects of modern life can be. Somehow, our society create a problem and sell you a way to deal with it.
Sometimes I am even thinking it is one of the built-in mechanism helping to keep the system stable.
Think about what other things today are cool but ultimately a fad in the future. When mindfulness was on the rise sometime in 2017, dare if you would question it! Corporations sold mindfulness like hot cakes. I’ve read some arguments that it can psychologically destroy you.
Along these lines, my psychiatrist was all about mindfulness. I’d spent my entire life working on being mindful of my actions and reinvented Cognitive Behavior Therapy in the process. For all the good it did me.
Without executive function, mindfulness is pretty much useless for self-improvement.
People misapply mindfulness all over the place and it drives me nuts. Maybe if we called it “paying attention to detail”, people would understand it better.
Mindfulness (in the Buddhist tradition, at least) is not a synonym for "paying attention to detail". From[1]:
> The practice of Satipatthana meditation centers on the methodical cultivation of one simple mental faculty readily available to all of us at any moment. This is the faculty of mindfulness, the capacity for attending to the content of our experience as it becomes manifest in the immediate present.
I can't speak to what your psychiatrist applied the term to, nor how it's been popularised.
I don't see mindfulness as being for self improvement. Its most precious function is for self observation and self learning. It is intended for one to 'wake up' to be able to see oneself as one is. In our 'normal' state of functioning, we are completely divorced from most of our own internal perceptions most of the time. Do you realize that you have a foot right now? Likely no, but when you read that sentence, you are able to remember that you have a foot, and you can feel it and sense it. Mindfulness is intended to grow the experiencing of oneself to encompass all aspects of ones own reality including the physical body, intellectual activity, and emotional states. At the extreme end of the practice, one may perceive these things singularly and at all times.
Where self improvement involves changing oneself and trying to achieve, mindfulness involves acceptance and not trying to force something.
>> Without executive function
...however, some people are damaged and will not be able to realize self observation. We do not expect those without feet to run.
Beeing aware of the sound you hear in your ear when it is silent and focusing on it is the best way to increase the volume, making it permanent and driving you nuts according to my ear doctor. Being oblivious to your body is in my opinion the healthy state.
Tinnitus is an interesting state. I've had it for quite a time, having had loud car audio systems and attending rock concerts in my teen years. I've tried doing as you say and focusing on the noise. It does seem to be more noticeable when I focus on it, but I've never had the experience of it getting louder when I stop.
There is also the case of bleeding as a direct experiment one can do. Next time you cut yourself and suspect you may have some blood, try not looking at it (reduces the mentation/expectation of blood), and focus exclusively on the feeling of the pain as much as possible. You'll find the bleeding stops substantially faster.
