Overcoming Attention Biases 61
such as your emotions, your thoughts, your bodily sensa-
tions, and aspects of your environment.
Mindfulness has been well established as a valuable
practice. Many research psychologists have found that
mindfulness can help transform both your perspective and
your relationship to your emotional experiences. This
occurs in two ways:
- Mindfulness serves as an intentional way of self-
regulating your attention so that you remain
focused on your present- moment experiences,
including emotions and related thoughts. - It cultivates an attitude of openness and accep-
tance to whatever arises in the present moment
(Bishop et al. 2004).
Ultimately, mindfulness will allow you to work toward
reducing your anxiety and achieving a critical distance from
your emotions and thoughts that foster anxiety.
Mindfulness is a skill that you can learn through regular,
purposeful practice. By developing or enhancing your mind-
fulness skills, you can become more open, more accepting,
more objective, less judgmental, and less reactive toward
your daily experiences. This, in turn, will help reduce your
anxiety and allow you to more consistently employ a state of
mindful awareness across situations in your everyday life.
Indeed, many psychological studies indicate that mindful-
ness is a healthy way of regulating anxiety and other poten-
tially problematic mood states. For example, as your use of
mindfulness increases, your levels of worry and rumination
will decrease (Corcoran et al. 2010). Mindfulness is also