Mindfulness is a powerful tool to push judgmental, fearful, and unkind thoughts away from yourself. It’s applied both in attitude, practices, and behaviors. When it comes to judgments, we often both internalize harsh and critical thoughts upon ourselves and project such thoughts onto others based on their past actions or our predictions for their future actions. Mindfulness can help circumvent such negative judgmental thoughts.
What Is Mindfulness?
With mindfulness, you’re able to be fully aware and present in what you’re doing, where you’re at, everything else your senses take in, and put distance between happenings and your reactions. Mindfulness combines this awareness with the ability to not let circumstances and thoughts overwhelm you or cause you to be overly reactive. In other words, you’re not on autopilot.
Each human has a natural mindful nature. However, in today’s highly sensory world of hustle and bustle and technology distractions, being truly and completely mindful is something that takes practice and improves with each application. Did you know that research shows that you can actually remodel the physical structure of your brain with mindfulness?
How Does Judgment Improve Through Mindfulness?
Our ancestral background makes us social creatures by nature. Humans have long lived in tribes, making social judgment (both self-directed and outwardly directed) a huge factor in our mindset. It wires us to regret the past and fret the future, which in turn sets you on a path of negative reflection to find faults, activate criticism, and inflict judgment.
Mindfulness is used to downgrade negative emotional responses so that judgments are less reactive, less personal, and less important in your hierarchy of feelings and needs. By living in the present moment only, you don’t fall on the stumbling blocks of your own and others’ negative judgments. You become more self-aware and self-accepting.
Your thoughts and feelings can be carefully observed without the weight of judging them as good or bad. There’s an increased connection with your own physical and emotional state without getting sidetracked by self-criticism and judgments. Mindfulness allows you to weed out and control destructive feelings. You examine the current moment as it is, not as it relates to the past or might relate to the future.
Mindfulness to Avoid Judgment Must Be Consistently Applied
Keep in mind that mindfulness isn’t some unrealistic goal of eternal calm or muting the mind. As you feel judgmental thoughts invade, simply take note of them and allow them to pass by without judging them, yourself, or others.
The thoughts may try to capture your attention, pushing you back or forward into the weeds of negativity. When this happens, gently bring your thoughts back to the time and space at hand. Mindfulness is all about this consistent and recurring process of bringing yourself back to the present moment.
