Topic: Relationship satisfaction with mindfulness

ERP 142: How To Increase Relationship Satisfaction With Mindfulness

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Welcome to The Empowered Relationship Podcast, helping you turn relationship challenges into opportunities and setting you up for relationship success. Your host, Dr. Jessica Higgins, is a licensed psychologist and relationship coach who shares valuable tips, tools and resources for you to dramatically improve your relationship.

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Hi, thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is #142, How To Increase Relationship Satisfaction With Mindfulness. Before we get started, let’s just take a moment and center into the focus of this intention, of the Empowered Relationship Podcast, which is to be more skillful in doing relationship well.

In my mind, the landscape of long-term intimacy is gonna provide curriculum for our growth as an individual, as well as our growth in relationship. In that curriculum, we will feel challenged at times; with any learning curve there is gonna be challenge, which comes with a level of emotion. We might feel fear, “I don’t know if I can do it…!”, or scared of something happening, like “I don’t wanna get hurt”, or “Oh my god, I want this so much. I’m afraid of failure!” There’s a lot of things that we can feel when we are aiming for a goal and we’re trying to achieve a higher level.

The conversations that happen on the Empowered Relationship are in line with that. I bring to you many topics that I feel are helpful, as well as bringing to you other experts in the field that have a voice about particular topics that they’ve either researched or have studied deeply in, and just really wanna provide you with a well-rounded conversation, which also includes your questions. So when you have a topic that you’re interested in knowing more about that relates to relationship and couplehood, I invite you to submit that.

You can do that by reaching out to me on my Contact page, or directly via e-mail, [email protected]. You can find my Contact page by visiting DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Contact, and you can find all the ways to reach me there.

Okay, let’s just right in. Again, today’s episode is 142, How To Increase Relationship Satisfaction With Mindfulness. I am continuing this topic because I feel it is so extremely important. The more that I have been really focused on pain, how we avoid pain, as I discussed in episode 140 and 141, how critical this practice of some level of mindfulness, and I realize in the last two episodes I did not go into great description about what mindfulness is, what it looks like in relationship, how it’s beneficial… So today I’m gonna be sharing a little bit more about that.

Just before preparing to record this podcast episode I had a session with a client of mine, and he was sharing about a trip that he took with a friend, where they were in Southern Utah and doing [unintelligible 00:04:06.28] exploration. When he was talking about how nice it was to be in a natural environment — he said at one point they were on this overlook at either sunset or sunrise (I wanna say sunrise), and it occurred to him, even though they were pretty close to the road, that for lengths of time – I think he said in the span that they were at that lookout, because his friend was taking photographs of the sunrise over the landscape – he said three cars passed; but other than that, it was pure silence. There was no places, trains, cars, people, kids, dogs – none of that. It was pure, natural sound. They call it soundscape.

I heard a segment on NPR years ago about the advocacy of protecting natural soundscape, particularly in national parks.

As he was talking, he was describing how beneficial it felt to really have no sound distracting him, and that it really allowed this place of peace and presencing that I don’t think we get very often, unless we intentionally go into nature, where we’re off the beaten path, and don’t have all the sounds of city.

The other thing my client was describing in [unintelligible 00:05:47.24] some of them were more technical and difficult to navigate… So if you imagine a very narrow ravine and you’re essentially at some segments walking sideways and almost inhaling to make yourself smaller to fit through these crevices, and sometimes you have to scale and boulder up, and then boulder down…

He was describing on one of the trails that there were unexpected people, one of which was a couple, and very small children. And he said what was really great to be a part of was watching other people and being a part of assisting — people were all helping each other out. There was this one portion where the two children were on this ledge as their parents were trying to get to the next level, and other people helped [unintelligible 00:06:47.01] the children to keep them safe, and then hoist them up… And he just said “I really enjoyed feeling this sense of helpfulness and community…” In everyday life we are so busy, distracted and consumed with our list, our schedule, and basically tasks that we have set out to do that we are not available for this type of engagement.

We’re also on different wavelengths, we have different agendas, so we’re not always trying to accomplish the same goal. So when we are in nature, we are in the presence of a group and there’s a task to be accomplished, it does set the stage a little more nicely to be able to support one another… But there’s two things in what I’m sharing, one of which is just the ability to drop into the moment and feel a sense of presence, which is silence, in the here and now…

Very rarely do we take pause to just absorb the moment. There are a few things that invite this, and again, nature is one of them that we will be – especially beautiful nature – invited into experiencing it more richly and fully by using our senses… That’s observing the landscape with our eyes, the different hues of color and shadow, and the terrain, and also listening.

My client described for the first time in a long time being able to hear the breeze as he turned his head, in each ear – his left ear and his right ear – and just this sensation of being able to observe that. I think in normal everyday life there’s too much going on to even notice that.

The second thing that I am bringing attention to is the sense of connection with another human being, that when we are present and available, we’re much more likely to engage. If there’s a need, we wanna help. There’s a powerful bond in being able to share the work together… And as we talk about couplehood and relationship, we have a huge opportunity to be able to show up for one another in this fashion, but so often, again, we are distracted, preoccupied, and otherwise consumed to notice these opportunities.

A major drawback to this high-achieving productivity pace that we often run is that we have expectations – of ourselves, and of our relationship. And this trap often leads to burnout, and a sense of feeling pressure, anxiety, depression… There’s no real break. Or we feel selfish to invest in self-care. Then when we talk about relationship, often many of us wish that our relationships were self-sustaining… That a good relationship just works, and it’s easy. We’ve heard that before, and on some level I think we would wish that. We would all want it to be easy, of course… But like with most things, when we don’t invest or give it time, attention, care, it doesn’t grow and flourish.

You wouldn’t plant a garden and neglect it and hope to turn around three years later and that it’s this beautiful, abundant garden, that has flowers and beautiful herbs and plants and vegetables, and maybe even fruit trees, and what your mind would imagine, with bees, and butterflies, and birds… Just this gorgeous, abundant, beautiful garden – that would not just occur with little care and attention.

Where this gets even more tricky is when we experience a life difficulty, or a relationship challenge. As I talked about in the last two podcasts, we all have the inclination to avoid pain. It’s not comfortable, it’s not pleasurable, we’re wired up to seek pleasure and avoid pain. But if we don’t look at the long-term benefit and the long-term cost, using our higher levels of thinking and recognize that we by avoiding often are creating more suffering… Which I went into much more detail, so if you’re interested in those two episodes, I encourage you to check them out; again, episode 140 and 141.

Mindfulness – I wanna describe it in a little more detail, so we al have a sense of what we’re talking about. Mindfulness, in the last 10+ years, has gotten a lot of press. I’m sure you’ve read an article or some type of blog post about the benefits of mindfulness. There’s been a tremendous amount of research, particularly in the field of positive psychology, in the way of mindfulness. Many of you may even associate mindfulness with meditation.

I wanna also just include and really bring attention to that mindfulness is something we are all doing already, and that is honing our focus and attention. I am sure – I’ll kind of give you some examples, so you can relate to – that we’ve all had a sensation of this experience. I think one of the classic examples of just — hopefully, we’ve all had an experience when we were young, whether or not it was a summer day and we were playing with our friends, or we were in the park, or we had a pet that we were playing with, like a dog, and playing fetch, but we are fully absorbed in the moment, and we are experiencing without worries or fears or any care of the world; we’re just very much enjoying the present moment.

Some other examples – I have people that have told me about… I don’t know how to ride a motorcycle myself, but as I’ve heard the description, that really there’s a lot of risk when you’re driving a motorcycle, especially at high speeds, or in traffic, there’s a lot of risks of getting hit or falling, and you have to balance, and there’s many things to be thinking about… And so for some people who like to ride a motorcycle and enjoy that activity, talk about it as a form of meditation almost… That if you’re distracted, that’s gonna be dangerous; if you’re preoccupied, it’s gonna be risky. Your life is in jeopardy.

Therefore, when you’re on the motorcycle at high speeds, you have to be in that moment, observing everything acutely, as your life depends on it. So therefore, it is a meditation of focusing the attention. We wouldn’t call it maybe classical meditation, in the sense of a sitting practice of breathing, and noticing the inhale and noticing the exhale, or perhaps focusing the mind on a specific object or mantra, but when we’re imagining, or if you do ride a motorcycle, you can probably reference a memory, that there’s the focus.

Another example would be even playing a sport. There’s the phenomenon of being in the zone… There’s this sense of being relaxed enough to be agile and mobile, and basically being able to perform. Then there’s the attentiveness – again, being distracted or preoccupied is not gonna be helpful. You wanna be in the moment, focused on if there’s a ball, or a racket, or whatever the sport is, you need to be fully cognizant of what’s happening; if you’re gonna lose track of the ball, you’re not gonna be able to perform.

I think they even talk about people who play golf – it’s such a mental focus, and they say that with beach volleyball, that it’s very much a mental game, and that it’s very much training the focus and mind.

If you listen to episode 140 and 141, you know that I was deeply inspired by Lode Dewulf’s TED talk about how we are masters at avoiding pain, and really him inviting us into a practice of mindfulness, so that we can tolerate and be present to some of the experience of pain, but be able to move through it without creating stories about it, fighting against it, and this additional, compounded stress of suffering that we often do, that we create a whole heck of a mess for ourselves when – yes, the original pain is painful, no doubt, but what we do in relationship to that pain is far greater and far worse. So the practice of mindfulness – quoting him here, he says:

“Mindfulness is a mental state which is achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while very calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations.”

The goal here is to not grossly react, it’s to just observe. If you imagine being on a motorcycle and you’re feeling hot, to freak out about being hot – that’s not gonna help. It’s just how to stay present with “Okay, I’m feeling a little hot, maybe there’s some sweat dripping off the side of my forehead”, and just to kind of be with it. It’s uncomfortable, it’s not pleasurable, and if we are gonna freak out about it, that’s probably gonna make it worse. But if we just relax and we stay focused, we’re much more likely to get through it.

As a reminder – for myself included – we are prone to going into autopilot. Our brain, our body wants to be efficient, and not expand unnecessary energy. So if it feels as though it has a sense of what’s going on, it’s not gonna expand energy in trying to see what’s new… Yet the downside of that is that we can overlook our partner particularly, and think that we understand them, we know them, we’ve mapped them very well, especially if we have a history with them… Yet they are experiencing life every day in a new way, and they’re learning and growing and could have a new experience that you could likely miss if you think you already know. “I’ve already got them figured out. I already know what’s going on for them.”

Also, we are prone to negative thinking. We have a negative bias as we are tracking for threats, and we tend to see things from a threat-adverse, risk-adverse perspective. This is much more pronounced if we grow up in a family where negative thinking was a part of the environment, or if it was a coping strategy (you fill in the blank). If we have history with negative thinking, that’s gonna be the gravitational pull. The thermostat is set there, so for not being conscientious about focusing our attention in a directive way, we’re likely to go into habitual thought patterns.

This could also be distraction, preoccupation… I am prone to that, for sure. If I am lost in thought, my husband will sometimes approach the room or enter the room and say my name, and I’ll jump, because I’m totally lost in thought… Where if I’m in the moment, I hear him, or even if I don’t hear him, I’m attuned to him, and I just say “Yeah, what’s up?”, I’m just with him.

So this preoccupation and distraction takes us out of the moment; we’re thinking ahead, or we’re thinking about the past – what I should have said, what I should have done – and debriefing in our mind, and evaluating… So while we’re gifted with this being able to find ourselves in time and reflect on the past and anticipate the future, those two things take us out of the moment, so it then requires us to develop that practice of mindfulness, awareness of the moment.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is a major contributor to the field of mindfulness. There is a video that I have shared with clients that he was a guest speaker at Google, I believe, and was just talking about mindfulness… And there’s so many videos of him on YouTube and whatnot, so if you are interested in just searching “Jon Kabat-Zinn”, I will put a link to the video that I’m mentioning on today’s show notes, that can be found, again, on my website DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast, and you can find today’s episode, 142, How To Increase Relationship Satisfaction With Mindfulness, and you will see a link to the video that I’m referencing. He has written several books, I’ll also put a couple of links to those as well.

He says: “Mindfulness involves redirecting your focus and attention over and over again. At first, it will feel impossible.” He talks about us having a monkey mind; an untrained mind is basically bouncing around all of these different thought trains and distracting thoughts, and people tease that ADD kind of moment of like “SQUIRREL!” I think that comes from the movie Up!, where the dog had the device that basically vocalized his thoughts, and how he’d be in midstream and see a squirrel and be like “SQUIRREL!” It’s the distraction.

So an untrained mind is likely to be very much erratic and chaotic, and just fleeting and sways with the wind. The goal here is to train your mind. Jon Kabat-Zinn talks about similar if you were to get a puppy, or if you’ve ever gotten a puppy – you wanna house-train it. It would not be appropriate to let the puppy pee and poo all over the house; it would destroy the house. Similar with the mind – if we don’t train it, it has the propensity to kind of destroy our overall well-being. We can get caught up again in trying to fight against what is, and telling a negative story about what is, and then we create this level of suffering that I was talking about in the last two podcasts.

Similarly with the puppy – we would not let the puppy chew and tear everything up. It takes a level of training.

Jon Kabat-Zinn also says “Mindfulness is about paying attention to the present moment on purpose, without judgment.” Again, it’s that attentiveness, without being so attached; there’s a level of equanimity, of being present with what is, riding that wave with non-judgment and some level of acceptance and presence.

As I’ve been reflecting on mindfulness, I’m like “I wanna increase my practice of mindfulness”, and I absolutely do, and I don’t have a mediation practice, I don’t have  a sitting practice, but I was thinking the ways in my life that I do practice mindfulness, and I would encourage you to do the same, because my suspicion is that you have places in your life where you have trained your mind to be focused… Whether or not it’s being present to your child, perhaps playing with them and just being in their world and seeing their world through their eyes, and just being present and attentive and focused.

I know as a parent we don’t always get to live in that space, but there might be moments… Or perhaps there’s something professionally that you’ve trained yourself to do.

In my reflection, and being a psychologist and a therapeutic coach, a lot of my day is spent with clients, holding a presence and a space and an attention on them, and that I have trained myself through many, many years of training, education and practice, that even in days where I’ve gotten little sleep, or there is chaos going on in some form or fashion, I’m able to drop in and I can rely on that training… I know that I can zone in and be present and completely attuned and with them and mindful. Essentially, that’s a mindful practice.

So in some ways I’ve trained my brain, and it was good for me to recognize “Okay, there’s a lot of training that I have done in this realm, and I can apply it towards other areas”, and I think I have done that in the way of relationship and cultivating my own skillfulness in relating to my husband, and how mindfulness has been beneficial to our marriage.

Another place that I recognized I practice mindfulness is in yoga. I do my best to get to yoga several times a week. On a good week, it’s four times; on a not great week it will be one to zero… But when I do get to yoga – and every now and then I’ll get to class maybe even five times; that would be a brilliant week – I’m so clear at how it helps me let go and shed all the stress and tension of whatever pressures I’m putting on myself.

As I breathe and participate in these yoga postures, I am becoming more centered in the moment, becoming more aware of my body, my internal world, and clearing my mind. Yoga I think translates to the English word “yoke”, which is essentially the union of the body and the mind, and essentially is a mindful practice.

A couple more notes on mindfulness – mindfulness is a skill we can acquire. Again, there’s a learning curve to it, but it’s something anyone can practice. I’m surmising all of us  practice some level of mindfulness; we might not call it mindfulness, but we have some experience with being focused and aware in the moment.

Mindfulness is always available. In any given moment we can redirect our attention back to the here and now, and in times of distress this may take a level of repetitive concentration of redirecting over and over again. There’s been times where I might be overwhelmed, or stressed, and I literally have to almost have a mantra. The mantra could be “I feel my feet on the ground”, which could bring me back to center, help me feel more grounded. If I’m feeling pressure, and perhaps some stress about an upcoming deadline, and overwhelmed about the tasks that need to get done, if I can just bring myself back to the moment… Because in this present moment I am standing and I am breathing, and I am okay.

Redirecting the attention to the moment helps prevent the rabbit hole of worry, fear and anxiety. Mindfulness, as I’m describing, is a way to calm ourselves down when we’re distressed… Because again, as I talked about in my last two podcasts, often times part of the distress is the way we are reacting to the pain. So there’s some current level of discomfort, but the way that we are engaging with it often creates more distress, and that’s often in the way of worry and fear. We’re anticipating a future event that perhaps we don’t feel confident in dealing with, and so we feel some level of anxiety around that.

Last point that I’ll mention here about mindfulness is it gives us the space that if we can calm down and be present to the moment, we are gonna increase our awareness of what we’re experiencing, both internally and externally, in a situation. That gained awareness is gonna provide information so that we can choose how we wanna respond, versus having a knee-jerk reaction. This becomes particularly important when we talk about intimacy and relationship.

In the next podcast episode I’m going to be talking about how mindfulness benefits relationship, and I’m gonna talk specifically about seven ways that mindfulness can benefit your relationship.

Stay tuned for that, and if you have a specific question related to mindfulness and wanna pose that, e-mail me: [email protected], and I would love to respond to your question in the upcoming podcast.

Thank you so much for your interest in improving your relationship. It is important to learn how to increase relationship satisfaction with mindfulness to improve your connection.

Thank you for spending your valuable time engaging in this topic with me; I feel privileged to share this time. If you would like to reach out to me, again, you can find me on my website, DrJessicaHiggins.com.

Until next time, I hope you take great care.

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