Conscious awareness is an important ability that influences the quality of life yet it has unfortunately become rare among both young people and older generations due to the rise of the digital age. According to psychology professionals, one of the reasons that screen time that people spend daily has increased is Covid-19 epidemic. After Covid-19 period, the opportunities and conveniences of technology came into prominence. For instance, lots of occupational services started to be processed through online or video calls and many people gained professions based on social media such as being influencer or social media manager etc.
It must be accepted that technology offers so many opportunities and professional paths, still according to Siegel and his friends (2009), the conscious awareness has become a point which is seen as an important asset. In view of the fact that our minds are constantly stimulated, living with a calm and conscious mind has become harder. Conversely, one of the fundamental parts of being human is the potential to be conscious, acting consciously.
Today, conscious awareness is called “mindfulness” in short, which is called “Sati” in Buddhist teachings dating back to 2,500 years. In those teachings, “Sati” means attention and remembering. And it is addressed in four dimensions: observation, remembering, wise judgement, contemplation (Siegel et al., 2009). Observing the environment and your inner world as it is, in a state of open awareness signifies observation. Focusing on a specific object voluntarily states remembering. When evaluation between harmless and harmful mental judgement is added to the remembering dimension, wise judgement emerges. There must be a distinction between the thing itself and how you perceive it to see how we change the understanding of things around us. At that moment, if we question thoughts like where they come from and why, the contemplation dimension emerges (Berthon and Pitt, 2019).
According to Kabat-Zinn (1994), awareness is a kind of conscious focus on acceptance and the present. There are a couple of fundamental reasons behind why people have started to take an interest in mindfulness, such as the increased cost of mindlessness and the appeal of spirituality purified of religiosity (Berthon and Pitt, 2019). Among these reasons, one reason has attracted significant attention from researchers and theorists and it started to contribute fresh therapeutic approaches rapidly: The positive impacts of mindfulness on psychological disorders (Pratikta, 2019).
Mindfulness based interventions include body scans, seated meditation, mindful yoga and non-judgemental awareness etc. It is observed that MBIs have alleviated conditions of attention-deficit disorders, anxiety disorders and depression, eating disorders (Pratikta, 2019). Mindfulness based therapies aim to make people who suffer from anxiety and ruminations calmer and stronger to the urge to react worry (Vollestad et al., 2011).
Research on mindfulness based therapies has shown that conscious awareness exercises decrease the strength of anxiety experiences and ruminations which mainly occur from the uncertainty and need for control. Also, randomized control trials have shown that mindfulness based stress reduction interventions with active control treatments provide better outcomes compared to medications (Breedwelt et al., 2019). Secondly, people suffering from ADHD generally prefer to use medications yet some individuals seek alternative treatments due to the fact that for some cases medications are not sufficient (Lee et al., 2017). Lastly, according to research on eating disorders, people with EDs are found less mindful than people without EDs (Sala et al, 2022).
Bringing all these points together, mindfulness or conscious awareness is the ability to stay in the present and accept whatever comes and tramps in the mind without judgement (Sala et al, 2022). Although mindfulness practices were once regarded as spiritual, owing to the innovations and increased comprehensiveness of clinical interventions in psychology over the past decades, they have evolved into therapeutic applications with great potential. I believe that the growing interest in Eastern psychology research will contribute new therapeutic theory approaches which integrate existentialist philosophy and mindfulness practices, on account of the rising problems caused by inattention, overstimulation and the pace imposed by the capitalist order.
References
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Berthon, P. R., & Pitt, L. F. (2019). Types of mindfulness in an age of digital distraction. Business Horizons, 62(2), 131-137.
Breedvelt, J. J., Amanvermez, Y., Harrer, M., Karyotaki, E., Gilbody, S., Bockting, C. L., … & Ebert, D. D. (2019). The effects of meditation, yoga, and mindfulness on depression, anxiety, and stress in tertiary education students: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10, 193.
Kumar, A., & Sharma, A. (2024). Mindful Media: Mental Health Challenges in the Digital Age. Blue Rose Publishers.
Lee, C. S., Ma, M. T., Ho, H. Y., Tsang, K. K., Zheng, Y. Y., & Wu, Z. Y. (2017). The effectiveness of mindfulness-based intervention in attention on individuals with ADHD: A systematic review. Hong Kong Journal of Occupational Therapy, 30(1), 33-41.
Pratikta, A. C. (2020). Mindfulness as an effective technique for various psychological problems: A conceptual and literature review. J Prof Guid Couns, 1(1), 1-13.
Sala, M., Vanzhula, I., Roos, C. R., & Levinson, C. A. (2022). Mindfulness and eating disorders: A network analysis. Behavior Therapy, 53(2), 224-239.
Siegel, R. D., Germer, C. K., & Olendzki, A. (2009). Mindfulness: What is it? Where did it come from?. In Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness (pp. 17-35). New York, NY: Springer New York.