Feeling a little out of sorts as you read this? Take several deep breaths, slowly inhaling and exhaling. Move your shoulders up and down. Focus on being present in the moment. 

After a short time, you should start to feel a bit more aware of your surroundings and your feelings. 

This simple act of resetting? It's called mindfulness, and consistently engaging in this practice not only can reduce stress, but help improve your physical and emotional health.

“It is a core skill for building attention control,” said Nicholas Barr, assistant professor in the UNLV School of Social Work. “Mindfulness is [objectively] observing your internal mental content — your thoughts, feelings, behavioral urges, and physical sensations — and then actively acting effectively in the context of that inner experience.” 

Barr was introduced to mindfulness in his early 20s while living in a monastic institute in Northern India called The Institute for Buddhist Dialectics. He says adopting the practice positively impacted the trajectory of his life.

“It made me much more able to manage intense inner experiences, and it really encouraged me to try to help others who maybe were dealing with [their own] intense inner experiences and didn't have a good way to manage them,” Barr said. “After that, I became a clinician and then a researcher doing this type of work. None of that would have happened if I hadn't developed this practice in my 20s.”

Barr’s research has shown how mindfulness-based interventions can help military veterans who have gone through combat experiences. As Barr notes, these veterans often experience psychological stress, depressive symptoms, and post-traumatic stress disorder. So he — along with his fellow researchers — conducted a study to see if veterans who were open to practicing mindfulness could reap some benefits.

The results were positive.

“We found that those combat veterans who had experienced firefights and had higher mindfulness scores were lower on PTSD scores,” Barr said. 

These veterans also felt less insecure about getting help to manage their mental health, he noted. “Combat veterans with mental health symptoms who scored higher on mindfulness also experienced less stigma, and were therefore more likely to seek mental health care.”

Barr also developed and implemented a mindfulness-based study for young adults experiencing homelessness. His research in this area revealed how teaching youths mindful-based interventions improved their behavioral health and ability to cope with traumatic experiences. He noted that youths experiencing homelessness are at-risk for being victims or perpetrators of violence.

This past fall, Barr also co-launched a mindfulness training program for emergency responders, as part of the Tourist Safety Institute at the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs. 

New tools for your overall health toolbelt

While mindfulness is not a cure-all, Barr says developing these tools can help people become more resilient, improve interpersonal skills and professional and familial relationships, and manage the day to day that life throws our way.

“Instead of reactivity and avoidance, we want people to be able to master their inner environment by observing and describing — in a  nonjudgmental way — their thoughts, feelings, behavioral urges and sensations, and then deciding the best response based on their goals in a given situation,” Barr said.

There are physical health benefits, too. For instance, deep breathing exercises can help reduce heart rates, blood pressure and glucose levels, according to the American Heart Association. 

We further tapped into Barr’s expertise to learn more about the concept of mindfulness and its benefits.

Mindfulness is about more than slowly breathing in and out, right?

Yes, it’s more than an exercise in breathing and just being present. Certainly those are components, but it’s more about an orientation toward your inner experiences in everyday life — specifically observing and describing nonjudgmentally these inner experiences in whatever situation you’re in. 

That's really what we mean by mindfulness. But it is contingent on strong attention-control skills. One of the specific techniques for developing strong attention-control skills is observing breath meditation, a formal exercise where you try to pay attention to your breath. 

Inevitably, something will happen that distracts you, and your thoughts will run toward that distraction. That’s OK. Just remember to bring attention back to the breath when these distractions happen. It’s no different than being  in the gym and doing repetitions of a particular exercise to strengthen muscles.

For years, there had been a lot of stigma surrounding the need to address one’s emotional and mental health. Are we seeing that change?

We are, but more in sort of the national conversation and context. And younger generations have really worked hard to reduce that stigma, as they’re more open about seeking help for mental health needs. 

But we’re still waiting for some of that de-stigmatization to filter up, especially to very high-stress, demanding occupations like first responders, particularly law enforcement. 

An analogous profession might be the military, where we’ve seen a lot of effort — and some success — at the national level to reduce this stigma. But it’s been challenging.

Are you concerned that mindfulness is a trend that will inevitably go away?

The term has gotten a lot of attention in the West, and there’s a sense that perhaps it's a bit of a fad. I can’t disagree with that, in terms of the way mindfulness has been talked about in popular culture. But what I really like to stress is this idea of learning to master the inner environment through strengthening your capacity to pay attention to inner experiences that you want to [focus on] — not what the loudest thought is, what the most intense emotion is, or what the most recent behavioral urge is. And that’s often how many of us operate day to day. 

Here’s an analogy: Have you ever been watching TV and looked at an app on your phone, then after you close it, you tap on it again? You probably didn't even mean to do it; it just short of happened subconsciously. 

Well, we do a lot of these autopilot-type behaviors in our day-to-day life when the consequences are more serious. So what mindfulness can do is help strengthen our capacity to pay attention — just like strengthening a muscle in your body by working out, right? The repetition of noticing distraction and refocusing on both your purpose and on your breath is what builds our capacity to pay attention.

Once you get to that point and then put the spotlight on the internal experience that you want to examine, it unlocks a lot of other skills.

Who can benefit from practicing mindfulness? 

In my view, and this is consistent with the research literature, it’s a universal skill that can help a range of individuals and populations. So what does that look like?

Well, the first thing to understand is that practicing mindfulness — and observing and describing our inner experiences without judging them — helps us to feel more in control of our thoughts, feelings, behavioral urges, and physical sensations.

If we do the opposite — where we are not being mindful — we're sort of at the mercy of whatever the loudest thought is, whatever the most intense feeling is, whatever the strongest behavioral urge is. Then we may engage with those things without really wanting to. 

So instead of trying to control our thoughts and feelings, which is very difficult to do, we can instead learn to strengthen and control our attention. That way, no matter what those thoughts and feelings are — or how strong they are — we can choose what we pay attention to. By doing that, we experience more of a subjective sense of control over our daily life actions.

Once we have the ability to purposely pay attention to something, we can apply that ability to situations in our everyday life. That allows us to engage in behaviors that are more consistent with our goals and values, rather than just reacting.