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by rjprins 1055 days ago
Stress is all about perception. With mindfulness you can practice changing the way you look at things. If you practice zooming out of things that induce fear and see a bigger picture this will generally reduce stress.

The mind has a natural tendency to zoom in on scary things. I guess that is our prey-animal heritage.

Certainly, for rightfully stressful situations immediate action is needed and mindfulness is not a solution, but in modern life almost all stress comes from the imagination. If you are not conscious of your own thinking fearful thoughts may suck you in indefinitely.

Mindfulness (and psychedelics) can greatly help with becoming (more) conscious of fearful thoughts and that enables you to deal with them constructively.

Clearly it depends on the type mindfulness. From the paper:

> mindfulness is typically defined as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment”. Core MBP elements are mindfulness meditation training, doing things mindfully such as eating or brushing one’s teeth, and collective and individual inquiry with a qualified teacher, using participatory learning processes.

Probably heightening consciousness while brushing your teeth is not the most direct way to mitigating stress.

1 comments

> Stress is all about perception.

No, stress is actually physiological. What your saying is limited to specific sources of stress.

The mind is the brain and the body. Stress is generated by the mind when contacting external objects, or when reliving past trauma.

There is no such thing as an external source of stress. You can't measure how much stress an object or situation is objectively emitting, because it is a response generated by the mind itself.

As such it can only be examined by the mind itself, and with that it can be mastered.

I didn't say anything about external sources of stress. I said sources of stress. External events cause stress in the body which can be measured physiologically and neurologically. The mind can be a contributing factor but it is absolutely not necessary. Injuries that you're entirely unconscious of can cause significant levels of stress which are measurable.
> Injuries that you're entirely unconscious of can cause significant levels of stress which are measurable.

The unconscious is the mind too.

Body and mind are interdependent, without mind the body would be dead.

> The unconscious is the mind too.

No, I think this is meaningless. What you're refering to is the brain. Positing a subcoscious mind adds nothing to the explanatory model since everything this supposed entity does is already done by the brain and pretty well understood at that. Occam's razor. You're stuck in old Cartesian metaphysics (dualism and parallelism) which has been superceded by better scientific undetstandings for quite a while now.

The mind is more than the brain.

Dualism is proposing that there is a clear division between mind and body, which is your original claim that I'm debating.