What is Mindfulness?
Now might be a good time to congratulate yourself. You’ve just completed your first mindfulness exercise, one in which you brought mindfulness to the everyday act of eating. This is your first ‘taste’ of mindfulness. Mindfulness can simply be described as a way of paying attention. Paying attention to a single raisin is exactly what the guiding instructions were helping you do. But if you noticed, mindfulness involves paying attention in a particular way. The practice of mindfulness involves attending to your present moment experience, being curious about it but not judging it.
Meet Your Automatic Pilot
As you may have noticed while eating the raisin, paying attention in this way may be quite different from how you usually operate. Most of us have had an experience of driving home alone along our typical route, only to remember once we are in the driveway that we had intended to stop at the grocery store for milk. At times, we may or may not have been aware of where our attention actually was as we drove past the store.
Many people use the term “automatic pilot” to describe these types of experiences. The term describes the way that you might be acting without really being aware of what’s going on. Most of the time we don’t intend to be preoccupied; it simply happens. You have the thought to pick up the milk, and then as you start driving, your mind falls into the usual routines—driving straight home—and you are back on automatic pilot without realizing it.
We will explore this more in the upcoming sections.
Automatic Pilot Exercise
Automatic pilot can be very subtle but powerful. One way you can investigate this for yourself is to do this brief exercise—simply name the color that the following words are printed in. Try doing this as fast as you can.
Did you notice that you had trouble naming the color without reading the word? That’s because for many of us the act of reading is an automatic pilot activity. It takes mental effort not to read the word in order to be able to name the color of the word instead.
Reflections
- Why do you think people might have trouble with this exercise? What experiences do you think might be common?
- I kept reading the word and not the color.
- It took some effort to stop reading the word itself.
- I didn’t have any trouble reading the word itself.
- I read three words before I remembered to focus on the color.
- I am so used to reading that it just happens without my control.
Benefits of Automatic Pilot
There is a reason that humans have developed the capacity to function on automatic pilot. Paying attention is vital to learning a new skill, like learning how to walk. But once we have mastered a skill, it is often more efficient to devote our attention to other demands.
Of course, we never lose the ability to pay attention once again if the situation calls for it.
Automatic pilot lets us reduce our attention to routine and repetitive activities while allowing our attention to be more available for those very tasks that require more care. Think about how much harder your life would be if you had to bring deliberate attention to every step you took.
