How Mindfulness Can Counter Feelings Of Hopelessness

Current events and the daily grind of life has added heaps of stress to everyone. For many people who were already stretched too thin with obligations to family, children, work and many other distractions, the final straw has been recent changes to the world that we live in and the pressure of social media and other external forces. Mental health is at an all-time low in the United States and many people express a sense of despair or hopelessness.

Feeling defeated and completely without reserves is not at all uncommon and many people have accepted it as the way they see the world for so many years that they have forgotten how to feel joy, hope or peace. This is a very unhealthy place to be and the fact that people do not see this as an abnormal condition speaks volumes about the times that we live in.

Thankfully, meditation and mindfulness practice can offer a solution to the struggle that many are facing.  Meditation and mindfulness practice are easy to add to your daily routine and they have been proven to actually re-wire your brain to make you healthier, happier and to react with patience and optimism to even the most trying of events in your life.

What is Hopelessness?

Hopelessness is defined as a feeling of despair, or a lack of hope. While it is not alone considered to be part of depression, when paired with other symptoms it can indicate more serious mental strain. Hopelessness can be caused by stress, anxiety, lack of confidence or sadness.

For many people, hopeless feelings will pass after a few days but for others, hopeless thoughts become a habitual way of thinking that can impair their ability to react to anything in life with hope or positivity. The brain learns by repetition and repeated reactions to life events that are founded in hopeless thoughts can actually train your brain to feel hopeless no matter what is going on.

Reacting from a set point of hopelessness can lead to you feeling depressed and heavy-hearted about everything, even if not everything in your life is hard or bad. Thankfully, mindfulness can change the set point of your brain from hopeless to hopeful through daily practice.

How Mindfulness Can Help You Counter Feelings of Hopelessness

Mindfulness practice is the daily practice of taking time to calm your thoughts and let your worries slip away. To practice mindfulness, you simply need a quiet room and the ability to sit down and breathe deeply. During this practice, you focus only on the present moment and remove worries and stress from your mind.

For many people, mindfulness practice opens new pathways in their brain to see current events and daily life from a new perspective. Once the brain has calmed down, things that seemed overwhelming moments before can feel trivial and not nearly as hard to grapple with.  Allowing your brain to calm down and rest lets it heal and offers you the chance to hear your own inner dialogue.

Perhaps you have been feeling hopeless over current events. Taking the time to be mindful and let those events slip from your present state of mind lets them become much less important to your daily thoughts and your inner dialogue. Once those pressing thoughts are removed from your inner thoughts, you will be able to hear your body asking you for more rest, for some exercise or for companionship.

Freeing your inner dialogue lets you actually attend to your needs instead of becoming obsessed with things that you cannot affect and which will only breed more anxiety for you.  Imagine being able to simply know that you need a nap and just going and taking one? Imagine also if you were able to just turn off the news and walk away to go do something happy that benefits your well-being?

Mindfulness is a practice that can actually make you physically healthier as well. Studies have proven that adding even fifteen minutes of mindfulness practice to your daily routine can allow your brain to heal and serotonin levels to increase in your brain. Increased feel good hormones lead to more activity and happier interactions with other people. Mindfulness can literally make you healthier physically as well as mentally.

Meditation and mindfulness practice has been shown to shrink the amygdala, which is the fight or flight center of the brain. Resting and healing the amygdala makes it much more likely that your fear center will not drive your reactions to daily life and your feelings about people and events. Being able to react to life with optimism is not possible while your amygdala is doing the reacting for you.

People who are using their amygdala to react to life are just using their flight or fight response to attend to daily events that do not require fear and stress. For those who are struggling with hopelessness, fear and anxiety are often companion specters that bring them down on a daily basis. The power of meditation is that it can reverse the damage to your brain that is done by a constant bombardment of stress and anxiety.

If hopelessness is ruling your life and daily tasks feel insurmountable and daunting, then mindfulness is the right choice for you. Even if you have a hard time settling your brain at first, don’t give up! Your body and mind will learn to seek out the quiet offered by mindfulness practice and it will become a habit to be able to find a quiet mental state.

Adding just fifteen minutes of meditation to your daily routine will re-wire your brain and remove hopelessness from your daily outlook.  You don’t have to accept hopelessness as a way of life! You can heal your brain on your own by meditating daily and your life will become hopeful and happy once again.