Is it mindfluness, or hyper-vigilance?
Mindfulness and hypervigilance are simply two different approaches to awareness.
On the surface, they couldn’t seem more different. Mindfulness conjures up sensations of openness and non-reactivity. It brings images of sitting meditation practice or taking a breath in the middle of an argument. Hypervigilance, though, taps into feelings of tension or anxiety. Just thinking about it starts to make my breath more shallow. The images that come to mind are wide, darting eyes and frozen stillness.
Practically, however, they can look deceptively similar because both of them are about paying attention on purpose in the present moment. The difference, though, is in the attitude toward what we notice.
Meditation Overwhelm
When I first dove into my internal world through meditation practice and other formal mindfulness practices, it was incredibly overwhelming (read more about that experience here). There were so many thoughts and feelings and sensations, and I did not know what to do with all of them. Sometimes it truly felt like I was drowning in all of the internal stimuli, and the impulses to distract from or get away from them were strong. The first many times I tried to practice, I just walked away in my frustration and overwhelm. Looking back, that response made sense: turning inward, actually paying attention to what was inside of me, went against everything that I had learned to do in order to protect myself. However, I ultimately became determined to reap the benefits that meditation seemed to promise and so started to practice in earnest.
The good news was that I had spent much of my life developing the capacity to pay attention. Specifically, to scan my environment for possible threats or problems so that I could avoid or fix them, aka hypervigilance. I was able to notice a change in the look in someone’s eye, a slight shift in their voice. I had become incredibly gifted at seeing the subtleties of the world and of the humans around me. My level of awareness was in some ways extreme (albeit exhausting). Regardless of the fact that I interpreted most of what I saw through a defensive lens, by the time I found mindfulness practices, I was incredibly practiced in noticing.
For better or for worse, intensive formal mindfulness training and practice gave me the opportunity to turn this skill inwards.
What I didn’t realize was that the internal experience that my first attempts at mindfulness revealed to me was interpreted much in the same way as the external threats that I was so good at detecting. As a result, I unwittingly spent the first many years of my mindfulness practices developing an inward hypervigilance rather than what I now know as mindfulness. Yes, I practiced awareness, but I did it in a way that kept me ready to protect myself from the overwhelm and intensity that I often encountered. It became a tool to more effectively control my experience in order to reduce or manage threats and discomfort.
Noticing
It’s not that I didn’t have moments of “true” mindfulness in these early years. I had experienced many periods on retreats, doing yoga, or in my more mundane daily life when I was able to bring an open, non-judgmental approach toward what I was aware of in my internal experience. Rather, it was that I was also constantly, though unconsciously, ready to scan my internal experiences to see whether there was a threat like the overwhelm I first experienced. Like most people, my systems of self-protection are incredibly intelligent and will use literally anything, including practices meant to build mindfulness, to try to maintain themselves.
With time and lots of sitting, my internal awareness was continually sharpened. I became able to put into words the slightest energetic shift in my body, the difference between how frustration and irritation felt, and the exact description of the difference between the sensations in my left and right hands. I even truly consciously felt my legs for the first time during a body scan on a meditation retreat. I could watch and describe more and more all the time.
What’s the point?
But what was the purpose behind all of this awareness? And what was my attitude toward what I was aware of?
On the surface, my purpose was to connect with myself and my life more deeply. That’s what I said I wanted and that was the alleged purpose of mindfulness practices in general. But I had an unconscious condition: I would only allow those deeper parts of me to be seen and connected to when I felt safe. The irony was that the process of turning inwards itself - the mindfulness practices - felt unsafe to my system. What I thought was simply me getting to know myself was actually a battle of sorts playing out between different parts of me.
The Hypervigilant Part Meets the Seeker
While I thought that my noticing was relatively objective, my awareness was actually primarily being used by the hypervigilant part of me, scanning for safety. It was cataloging and describing every sensation, but running it through a filter: Does this sensation mean I am going to get overwhelmed? Is this too much? Will I be able to handle what I find if I look closer? Maybe we should look the other way?
Another part, the seeking part, wanted desperately to connect with those deeper aspects of myself that were hidden, the same ones that the overwhelm consisted of. It believed that once they were contacted, I would experience that freedom, peace, and liberation that mindfulness seemed to promise (more on that another time). The seeking part of me pushed against the hypervigilance, seeing a particular version of inner peace as more important than safety. At the same time, it used the hypervigilance to see exactly where the deeper parts of me were. Where there was resistance or reluctance to go deeper, where the hypervigilance was particularly activated, the seeker knew that there lay the parts of me that I was disconnected from.
The hypervigilant part was scared of the seeking part going too far, and the seeking part resented the barriers that the hypervigilant part put in place to building a deeper relationship with myself. Hypervigilance became the “enemy” to my relationship with myself and seeking became a threat to safety, and so I spent years locked in this tension with moments of mindful awareness peeking out when it could.
The Wisdom of Hypervigilance
While I will talk more about the seeking part another time, I want to highlight the very intelligent, wise work of the hypervigilant part of me.
Mindfulness is about practicing awareness from a place of spaciousness, openness, and non-judgment. But what if you don’t yet know those things in yourself? What if you intellectually get that those qualities are at the core of who you are, but your internal system does not have an integrated, lived experience of it? Beyond that, what if that core of you feels like a threat to the system? What if your system is constructed specifically to repress or protect that aspect of you that is capable of mindfulness?
Much of mindfulness practice says that if you pay attention for long enough, you will see a core aspect of who you are, that "basic goodness," like a sun coming out from behind the clouds. You will start to see the spaces between the thoughts, you will experience your deepest self as the watcher behind the content of what it watches, you will start to feel that tenderness toward yourself. Bare, non-judgmental awareness both comes from and can allow one to see your intrinsic qualities of compassion, kindness, and warmth. In Internal Family Systems, we call this the Self.
In all of my sitting, I have certainly spontaneously tapped into this source of mindful awareness. But, as I said earlier, it only happened when I felt safe enough to put down my defenses (in this case, my hypervigilance) and I had very little understanding of what it was that created the safety and how to create it myself. In my experience, it was random, unpredictable, and, worst of all, fragile. There was pretty much always a systemic backlash after touching in with that tender, compassionate, loving part of me. The noise would get louder, the anxiety more intense, or the depression heavier. Then came the grief and the longing to experience that openness again, but with little sense of how to actually do so other than just sitting around and waiting for it. So my hypervigilant part didn’t trust it.
What this meant was that not only was the seeking part of me a threat, but so were the experiences of openness, of truly mindful awareness. My hypervigilant part learned that connecting with the mindful quality of awareness was always followed by the very overwhelm it sought to prevent or avoid. Ironically, this led that hypervigilant part to use awareness to avoid the experience of mindfulness.
All the while, I was being told over and over again to let go of my defenses, to just notice them, to let them fall away, to trust the process, to just sit with it. Hypervigilance was seen as just a barrier to mindfulness and was not to be given too much weight or attention. While the intention there was good, there were pieces missing. The missing pieces were about the relationships between these different parts of me and how to work with them. I was missing the role of my hypervigilance and the messages it had for me.
And so until I recognized the need for that internal relational work, I did “sit with it” in a way, but not the way that I know was intended - my hypervigilant part “sat with it,” watching my internal world for each slight twinge or tingle like a hawk watches for mice in a field.
Our Defenses Are Not Our Enemies
I have come to learn that my defenses are not enemies to mindfulness. But as long as they are seen or treated that way, whether intentionally or not, they will rebel against the mindfulness agenda and fight for the noblest cause, which is to take care of me the best ways that they know how to.
I am not saying that mindfulness practices themselves are to blame. In fact, this entire unfolding, my ability to see and describe this internal process, is thanks in large part to the awareness I developed through mindfulness practices, regardless of whether that awareness was being hijacked and used in the service of hypervigilance or being used in the service of that spacious, loving core part of me. Mindfulness practices allowed me to notice the hypervigilant part of myself, the seeking part of myself, and that loving, open, spacious core of who I am (which is what actually sees all of it, including itself). But they did not teach me how to listen to, integrate, and build connections between all of them. It was conversations with friends, relationships with mentors and teachers, work with therapists, reading books, and journaling that helped me sort through all of what I brought my awareness to, whether that awareness was mindful or hypervigilant.
Sometimes what we notice in mindfulness practice doesn’t just need to be sat with, to be noticed - sometimes it actually needs our engaged attention, needs to be tended to directly. My hypervigilant part holds that information, it points out what needs tending to. I needed (and still need) to listen to the hypervigilance. Listen to its resistance to bringing awareness to certain experiences, sensations, or parts of me. Give it a seat at the table instead of saying it’s just another cloud going by in the sky. I know now that if I do not take a moment to really sit with and listen to that cloud, it inevitably turns into a tornado that will strike down any attempt I make to go deeper. This approach - going beyond noticing and into relationship with my internal experience - is what I did not get nearly enough of in my experience of mindfulness training. (I am, however, so grateful to see the ways that trauma-informed mindfulness is bringing that perspective as it makes its way into spaces where mindfulness practices are taught.)
I’ll wrap up by saying that It’s not actually wrong to be practicing hypervigilant awareness. The invitation is to ask that hypervigilant part, “So how are you trying to help me? What are you scared of happening if we bring a mindful quality to the things we are seeing? What do you need me to know before we keep going with this mindfulness practice stuff?”
I’m curious to know what it would say.
Curious about this approach to mindfulness?
If you think you have tried mindfulness once and decided it’s not for you (but you’re still curious!) or if you have tried mindfulness a million times and are looking to take your practice deeper, you’re welcome to schedule a discovery session to see if we’re a good fit.