magine being asked to sit alone in a quiet room for 15 minutes with nothing to do – no phone, no music, no external distraction. In a well-known 2014 study, many participants found that task so challenging that they chose to press a button to give themselves an unpleasant electric shock instead of continuing to sit with their thoughts and sensations.
Because being with their own thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations can be so difficult, people often turn away from them. Smartphones offer constant distraction from boredom or stress, allowing users to disengage from their present-moment sensations and thoughts with a quick swipe or tap.
But avoiding unpleasant internal experience can backfire. Studies show that doing so is associated with a range of mental health problems, including anxiety and depression.
We are psychological scientists who study mindfulness and how it affects stress, health and well-being.
Mindfulness is a mental state that people can learn to cultivate through training. When people are mindful, they direct their attention toward their moment-to-moment bodily sensations, emotions and thoughts, and they meet those experiences with an attitude of curiosity and open acceptance.
Mindfulness can be cultivated through “mindful moments” in daily life, moments in which people intentionally stay present with what they do, hear, see or feel. However, formal mindfulness meditation involves sustained practice that systematically trains attention and acceptance. Our research shows that training acceptance during mindfulness meditation can substantially improve your emotional well-being.
Tuning into experience can be hard – and helpful
Popular culture often portrays mindfulness as a way of relaxing. But we’ve found that mindfulness practice can often feel surprisingly difficult. In one of our studies, participants who directed their attention to their thoughts and feelings during a 20-minute mindfulness meditation noticed six times more unpleasant experiences than pleasant ones.
This doesn’t mean they were doing it wrong. Turning your attention inward can feel challenging. Often, it brings you into contact with experiences that you normally try to push away, such as feeling bored, uncomfortable or agitated. However, we’ve also found that facing difficult experiences during mindfulness training can have positive effects.
In particular, adopting an accepting attitude toward your experiences seems to drive many of the positive effects of mindfulness. Our research shows that developing the capacity for acceptance through mindfulness meditation can reduce feelings of loneliness and increase positive emotions, such as happiness. It also reduces stress hormones and helps people notice more positive experiences during stressful situations.
In these studies, we have found that acceptance is the critical driver. When acceptance is removed from mindfulness training, these benefits largely disappear.
The power of learning to accept experience
A key part of mindfulness practice involves turning toward difficult experiences, such as like stress, boredom and pain, rather than seeking distractions or pushing those experiences away. It means noticing feelings and thoughts as they arise, sensing how they show up in the body, and approaching them with an attitude of acceptance rather than judgment or resistance.
A helpful way to think about this comes from the “two arrows” metaphor, which is rooted in East Asian Buddhist traditions. It teaches that there are two types of suffering, which can be likened to being struck by two arrows.
The first arrow is the unavoidable unpleasant experience that comes with being human – for example, feeling exhausted after a poor night’s sleep. The second arrow is how we react to that unpleasantness: tensing up, resisting it, replaying it in our mind, criticizing ourselves or trying to escape it. Often this second arrow adds more suffering than the original unpleasant experience.
In mindfulness practice, the goal is not to stop having unpleasant sensations and feelings. Instead, mindfulness helps people accept the unavoidable difficulties of that first arrow and to soften the second arrow by letting go of struggle with those experiences and reactions that make them worse.
For example, let yourself feel bored without immediately reaching for distraction. Acknowledge anxiety, sadness or grief with openness, instead of trying to suppress those feelings or fueling them with harsh self-criticism.
Practicing mindfulness in everyday life
One way to cultivate this attitude is to treat thoughts, emotions and sensations as guests in your inner landscape. Instead of fighting them or clinging to them, notice when they arise. Acknowledge and welcome them, and when they naturally change, let them go. Some people find it helpful to imagine holding a difficult feeling as they would a crying baby, with a touch that’s steady, supportive and kind.
If you want to try this in daily life, the next time you feel a challenging experience, pause and open to the experience for a moment. Notice what you are feeling. Where does it show up in your body – a tightness in the chest or heaviness in the stomach? Can you allow it to be there, even briefly, without trying to fix it or distract yourself from it?
Then observe what happens. Does the challenging experience change over time in any way? Do your reactions shift or soften with repeated practice? Remember that a brief practice is unlikely to produce instant relief, and expecting quick results can actually make it harder to stay open to your experience as it is.
Rather, our findings suggest that meaningful change comes through consistent, ongoing practice. Every small step matters. Over time, brief moments of responding to stress or discomfort with mindfulness can reshape how you relate to challenges and provide greater resilience and ease.
In the study where people chose electric shocks over sitting alone with their thoughts, being with their inner experience felt almost intolerable. Mindfulness offers a different path: not escaping that experience but learning to stay with it. In doing so, what once felt unbearable can become something you can meet with greater emotional balance and well-being.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.
