Mindfulness is a technique which can help people manage their mental health or simply gain more enjoyment from life. It involves making a special effort to give your full attention to what is happening in the present moment – to what's happening in your body, your mind or your surroundings, for example – in a non-judgemental way. Mindfulness describes a way of approaching our thoughts and feelings so that we become more aware of them and react differently to them.

Practising mindfulness makes me feel more connected to my body and gives me a breathing space between thought and action.

How can mindfulness help?

Mindfulness can help you to:

• increase your awareness of your thoughts and feelings
• manage unhelpful thoughts
• develop more helpful responses to difficult feelings and events
• be kinder towards yourself
• feel calmer and able to manage stress better
• manage some physical health problem, like chronic pain

Watch Rebecca, a mindfulness teacher, talk about how mindfulness helps her.

Does mindfulness work for mental health problems?

Studies show that practicing mindfulness can help you manage mild depression, anxiety and other common mental health problems. The National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) – the organisation that produces guidelines on best practice in health care – recommends:

• using mindfulness, including MBCT, to treat mild depression and to help prevent further episodes of depression
• not using mindfulness, including MBCT and MBSR, to treat social anxiety

Mindfulness does help me with my mental health issues. It's not the cure and it won't work every single time, but it has helped me to alleviate anxiety and depression by centring my thoughts.

Research into whether mindfulness could help more complex conditions, such as psychosis and bipolar disorder, is still in the early stages – so it is not clear how beneficial mindfulness could be in helping people to manage these conditions. In some cases, mindfulness has made the symptoms worse for people suffering from trauma.

For more information on deciding whether to try mindfulness, see Is mindfulness right for me?

When I'm in a particularly unwell state mindfulness is not beneficial, as I cannot bring myself into the present at all.

This information was published in April 2016. We will revise it in 2019.