What is mindfulness and how can it be beneficial for autistic people?
Explaining the benefits of mindfulness and how it can support autistic people in their day-to-day lives.
Mindfulness is the mental practice of paying attention to the present moment with openness, curiosity, and without judgment. It often involves techniques like focused breathing, body scans, or mindful awareness of one’s thoughts and feelings. The goal is to increase awareness of one's experiences, both internal and external, in a non-reactive and accepting way, in the efforts to becoming more immune to the thoughts and feelings that causes anxiety in the first place.
Before we can apply mindfulness in practice, we need to understand the concept and its history first, as well as its effectiveness for supporting those with anxiety conditions and those on the autistic spectrum. In ancient times, mindfulness originated from Buddhist philosophy and practices and fundamentals of its teachings is to create awareness to the present moment and cultivating positive affirmations to one’s thoughts and feelings without judgement.
Over the decades and up to present times, across Western society since the 1970s, mindfulness has become something more than just meditation and benefits highly when combined with a exposure therapy, like: cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). This therapy requires individuals with anxiety to challenge their distressful or anxious thoughts and feelings, in efforts of becoming less fearful or anxious about them and build resilience in their occurrence, with the aim of these thoughts and feelings becoming less frequent over time.
Mindfulness can also be used for those that have physical conditions and to those that want to practice more gratitude about the things they have in life. As we all live in a fast-paced world and day-to-day life struggles take hold of people’s time and effort, it’s very easy to neglect our overall health and well-being, physically and psychologically, and unconsciously heading towards a path of burnout and despair.
So, it’s very important that we all have awareness of our thoughts, feelings and sensations that our bodies are giving signals to; most people usually ignore them but it’s our bodies way of telling us that there’s something just not right and we need to take notice before it gets uncontrollable and take us to potential dark places.
Awareness is only the first step to recognising our thoughts and feelings and the sensations that affects our bodies. The next major and hard step is creating strategies using mindfulness and other therapeutic methods to build resilience in our thinking patterns for those thoughts and feelings that become anxious or distress about and take positive and proactive actions to overcome the anxiety or fear attached to your thoughts and feelings.
According to the National Center of Health Statistics (NHIS) in the USA, in 2022, over 35 million Americans (more than 14% of adults) reported practicing meditation or mindfulness regularly and a study involving over 12,000 patients found that mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) significantly helped them with reduced anxiety, depression, and stress (CDC, 2022).
A study done by University of Southampton in the UK found that the participants involve in the study that just undertaking 10 minutes of daily mindfulness can significantly boost well-being, reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety, and motivate healthier lifestyle choices, including improved exercise, eating, and sleeping habits (UoS, 2024). They also mention that the economic impact of mental health and anxiety amongst UK workers costed approximately £57.4 billion per year.
Mindfulness can offer a range of benefits for autistic people, helping them navigate the world with greater calm, clarity, and self-understanding. Here are some ways mindfulness can be supportive:
1. Improved emotional regulation
Autistic people do feel emotions more intensely or struggle to identify and manage them.
Increasing awareness of emotional states.
Creating space between feeling and reaction.
Supporting better coping with intense emotions.
2. Reduction in anxiety and other mental distress
Autistic people live with high levels of anxiety due to sensory overload, uncertainty about life, and social pressures.
Promoting relaxation through breathing and grounding.
Offering tools to manage sensory or emotional overwhelm.
Interrupting anxious thought patterns.
3. Enhanced focus and attention
Autistic people can experience distractibility or have difficulty shifting attention from one thing to another.
Training the mind to sustain attention on one thing at a time.
Helping refocus after distractions.
Supporting smoother transitions between tasks or environments.
4. Better internal awareness
Introspection is the sense of the internal state of the body, and many autistic people do struggle with this.
Encouraging people to notice breath, heartbeat, hunger, or pain.
Helping develop language around internal experiences.
Supporting more accurate responses to physical or emotional needs.
5. Reduced sensory overload meltdowns
By learning to notice early signs of stress or sensory overload, autistic people can act sooner to prevent meltdowns and helps self-regulation.
Increasing self-awareness before sensory or emotional limits are reached.
Teaching grounding techniques to reduce overload.
6. Improved social interaction
Though mindfulness doesn't directly teach social skills, it can help with dealing with social situations.
Reducing anxiety during interactions.
Encouraging presence and active listening.
Supporting self-regulation during difficult conversations.
7. Greater self-acceptance and compassion
Autistic people do face stigma and misunderstanding from society, which can lead to pressuring themselves to masking.
Non-judgmental self-awareness.
Acceptance of one's unique mind and experiences.
A more compassionate, neurodiversity-affirming view of self.
8. Better sleeping routines
Stress, anxiety, sensory sensitivity, and intrusive thoughts often disrupt sleeping routines and quality of sleep.
Calming the nervous system.
Easing rumination.
Creating a bedtime routine with grounding and breathing.
As a sufferer with anxiety on the autistic spectrum, I’ve used mindfulness and other therapeutic methods to overcome my anxiety, which has been bad at many times in my autistic life. When I first heard of mindfulness, my thoughts were: “what on earth in this load of rubbish?” and had a closed mindset to it.
That was until my anxiety was very bad a few years ago and found very difficult to leave the house, which all of this was caused by intrusive thoughts about something bad or embarrassing was going to happen to me if I travelled too far from the perimeter of my house. I know by listening to that it sounds silly, but until you understand how deliberating anxiety can be and the ways it manifests to the point where it affects the sufferer’s day-to-day living, you can’t be in the position to criticise the anxious individual.
During this time period, I did contemplate on going to the doctors and get some anti-depressants to help with the overbearing sensations of anxiety that was going through my body but, judging from past experiences prior to this period, I didn’t want to go back into the hamster wheel and was determined to climb myself out of the well. It was very hard and did take some time but I managed to overcome most of my anxiety for the better; I did all this without any support from the NHS or other healthcare services.
As part of my recovery process, I decided to understand mindfulness and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) better to become basically my own therapist and establish a virtual toolbox of different methods and ideas that can help me massively to overcome my overall anxious state. I still use some of these methods even to this day as habits I’ve developed to self-regulate my wellbeing and safeguard myself from getting into the dark-cloud depths of anxiety again.
Alongside mindfulness, I use calming music during times of doing my work and when I go to bed. This helps soothe my mind to concentrate on the music being played and being present, whilst allowing the anxious thoughts and feelings to fade away. Whilst undertaking this exercise, I’d also incorporate breathing techniques as an anchor to focus on in the moment of extreme anxiety.
Whilst there’re many resources out there that can help you understand the concept of mindfulness, there’s one resource that I’ve read and apply some of its techniques is a book, called: ‘The Little Book of Mindfulness’ (2014) by Dr Patrizia Collard. Her book explains about how doing mindfulness techniques for just 10 minutes a day can lead to less stress and more peace in your life; this echoes the research I highlighted earlier in this newsletter.
This books details about methods that helps challenge your thought patterns, embrace gratitude in your life and using everyday chores or duties that can be seen and used as ‘opportunities’ to practice mindfulness or meditation, like: cooking and eating foods as a way of focusing on the present moment rather than letting your mind drift away in the dark clouds of anxiety and distress. Also, it teaches about demonstrating self-compassion into your life and other techniques that can identified as yoga practices.
The steps I suggest that’ll help people learn about and apply mindfulness to their unique circumstances.
Use a journal to write down your thoughts and feelings
By using a journal to write your thoughts and feelings experienced on a daily basis will help you offload your mind with things that are causing you to have anxiety and stress. As the old saying goes: “writing your problems down on paper makes them lighter to deal with”. Also, by writing your thoughts and feelings over the course of many days and weeks, this gives you an overview of what triggers your anxiety or stress, the occurrence of these thoughts and feelings and how did you respond to them.
Learning to keep and write a journal is a habit that I’d learnt from scratch and did help massively to make my thoughts and feelings as a result of high anxiety state lighter. It also helped with identifying my thinking patterns that was causing me distress and discomfort, which serves as a major step in the recovery process of challenging my perceptions for anxious thoughts and feelings and a strategy of how to expose my fears by putting myself in situations that cause anxiety, with the aim of weakening my anxious response to those scenarios.
Create a fitness and wellbeing regime into your life and honour it well
Many therapists and psychologists over the years after conducting many research studies, they’ve found that having a good fitness regime and being in touch with nature is very beneficial towards combatting severe anxiety and mental health and increase the chemicals in our minds that improves our moods and overall wellbeing. Exercise is a great form of activity to practice mindfulness techniques and breathing exercises as your mind and body is concentrating on doing a physical activity and is important for autistic people to be not only mentally well but physically as well.
When I suffered with severe anxiety, it was very hard to establish a fitness regime into my life, but I pushed myself into doing something that was positive, even just going for a walk in my local area, was the starting blocks to get my mental health on track. Eventually, this regime expanded into joining my local fitness centre, which was very beneficial and gave me a purposeful routine to building resilience and strength to overcome my anxiety in the long-term and be in a better place, mentally and spiritually.
Reacquaint yourself with the lifelong hobbies and interests you enjoy or engage and develop new ones
An important part of the recovery process of severe anxiety and mental health is participating in hobbies and interests that you enjoy or did enjoy before your wellbeing took hold. By expanding your hobbies and interests into new things are an excellent way for the mind to be occupied, which diverts your attention away from the thoughts and feelings. The same with having a fitness routine, engaging with your hobbies and interests are other opportunities to practice mindfulness techniques and you’ll see a difference in your wellbeing over time.
As part of my recovery process, I reengaged with my hobbies and interests, like: playing archery, pool, gym and swimming, and outdoor bowling, as well as embracing new interests, like: photography, as something new and potentially build into a business project. One of the main reasons why I neglected my hobbies and interests in the past was due to being so busy and fixated on college work and completing my accountancy apprenticeship. I’ve learnt from that mistake and have told myself that I’ll build a life outside of my work, as they both are equally important and never sacrifice one for the other.
When formulating an opinion on mindfulness and can it benefit autistic people, it demonstrates that the concept can be a valuable tool and cognitive skillset for those on the autistic spectrum to learn and have in their virtual toolbox when in moments of extreme anxiety and troublesome mental health. Despite the scepticism people can have when reading about mindfulness for the first time, but upon conducting further self-research and education into the subject, autistic people will find that it can be a helpful and healthy way for them to challenge their perceptions for the anxious thoughts and feelings they’re having and forge a sustainable path towards peace and harmony.
The decades of extensive research done by many academic and health institutions have shown that mindfulness has evolved from being a Buddhist philosophy to a practice of a meditation form that teaches patients to create awareness to the present moment and cultivating positive affirmations to one’s thoughts and feelings without judgement. Attributes relating to the benefits that mindfulness can have has shown that autistic people can overcome their anxieties and mental health woes, as long as they’ve got an open mindset and willingness to change their limiting beliefs and perceptions.
I’ve relayed my experiences of using mindfulness to overcome severe anxiety that was keeping me mentally trapped and has helped me forge a sustainable path of healthy living and keeping me grounded in what to do to hopefully prevent future relapses. By using the range of steps, from journaling, creating a fitness regime and participating in existing and new hobbies and interests, autistic people can build a visual toolbox of methods and strategies that they can use to combat moments of high anxiety and distress. By using positive affirmations that one can tell themselves, that can bring grounded positivity to their lives, embrace the uniqueness of what makes them the person they are, and always remember that you are enough and will always be valued and cherished.
Sources:
Just ten minutes of mindfulness daily boosts wellbeing and fights depression – study reveals UoS (2024)
National Center for Health Statistics | National Center for Health Statistics | CDC (2022)
The Little Book Of Mindfulness (2014) by Dr Patrizia Collard