Metacognition is a key component of mindfulness. It is the awareness, established from your observer self, of your thought processes and emotions, and the patterns behind them. But what if I told you that metacognition is more than this? It is the most powerful tool for your self-development, effective reasoning, and problem-solving, and is the secret for you to effectively cultivate inner wellbeing and resourceful states. Why? Because metacognitive states maximise your capacity for conscious awareness and disentangle you from the contents of your mind that could otherwise overwhelm you or distort or limit your perception.
How to Enter a Metacognitive State
As you practise mindfulness and bring your attention back from the contents of your mind, you become aware of those contents from your observer self as just mental events and automatically enter a metacognitive state. The mindfulness of breathing meditation is a good basic technique to bring your attention back, in this case onto your breath. Over time, the practice of mindfulness meditation will strengthen your presence in your observer self and enhance your ability to enter and maintain metacognitive states.
Using Metacognitive States to Treat Anxiety and Depression
When you practise mindfulness and come back to your observer self, you can witness your thoughts, emotions, and sensations and experience them with non-judgement as transient mental events rather than as aspects of your self or direct reflections of truth (Teasdale et al., 2002). This metacognitive skill can de-escalate and prevent mental overwhelm and is the basis of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which is used effectively in clinical settings to reduce and prevent anxiety and depression. Patients learn to use mindfulness to induce a metacognitive state in which they disengage from ruminative and anxious thoughts and see them as temporary events in the mind that eventually pass. By creating this metacognitive distance, negative thoughts are no longer fed or amplified with constant attention and identification. Since patients are no longer entangled in them, they no longer create spirals of reactive thoughts and emotions, and, in cases of clinical depression or anxiety disorder, they no longer trigger a relapse.
According to John Teasdale (1999), who helped to develop mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, mindfulness gives us the skills to enter the “metacognitive insight mode, in which thoughts are experienced simply as events in the mind” rather than “direct readouts on reality”, and this can prevent a relapse of depression. A study by Teasdale et al. (2002) found that depressed patients were less able to enter metacognitive states than non-depressed controls. Mindfulness reduced relapse in recovered depressed patients by increasing their ability to experience metacognitive states.
Using Metacognitive States to Focus and Reduce Mind Wandering
Mind wandering is unconscious, automatic thinking that takes your attention away from being present. Here are some ways it can negatively affect you:
- It can affect your mental health when it leads to overthinking with negative thoughts that spiral into anxiety or depression.
- It can affect your performance by causing you to lose focus, whether you’re working, learning, participating in sports, or engaging in an important activity that demands your full attention.
- It can affect you while reading or listening, reducing your awareness and comprehension.
- It can affect you when you lose sight of your choices and follow the train of maladaptive thoughts and automatic reactions.
- It can affect you when you dwell on the past or worry about the future, losing your potential in the present moment.
- It can affect you by causing you to lose presence and spiritual embodiment, hindering you from exploring and fulfilling your true life purpose and spiritual life path.
Mind wandering occurs due to a lack of metacognition, the requirement for effective focus. A metacognitive state also helps you to regulate your thoughts and emotions with metacognitive skills, enabling you to maintain focus by keeping these potentially distracting thoughts and emotions from controlling you. By entering a metacognitive state and holding it consistently, you can hold your focus, prevent your attention from wandering, and attend better to the task or required focus of attention. This practice empowers you, maximising your presence, potential, and aliveness in the present moment.
Using Metacognitive States to Be More Conscious and Free Your Mind
Pause for a moment and reflect on how metacognition can make you more conscious and less automatised and reactive. In a metacognitive state, you can maximise your conscious awareness and disengage from the automatic and maladaptive habits of thinking and reacting that otherwise imprison you. You disentangle from the events of your mind that have been running automatically and controlling you. Entering a metacognitive state is, therefore, the key to freeing your mind and, by extension, your behaviour. Whether it’s an addiction, a compulsion, or an unconscious habit of thinking or reacting, you can disengage from it by entering a metacognitive state with mindfulness. The repeated cycle of responding automatically to cues that leads to life-limiting habitual behaviour is then broken.
By entering a metacognitive state and being conscious of your thoughts as simply events of the mind rather than direct readouts of reality, you can reappraise your thinking and spot the distortions of thinking and biases of your mind that you were previously unaware of. Being in a metacognitive state gives you greater freedom of choice to change your thoughts, perspectives, and beliefs. It’s like stepping out of a box. This is why mindfulness, when integrated into a spiritual practice, accelerates your growth and frees you from the trance that keeps you in limited, unconscious states.
Using Metacognitive States to Explore Your True Self
Metacognition creates the space for you to be more present in your true self and to explore your true nature. It can be challenging to embody and explore your true self when you have become identified with your thoughts, emotions, and behaviour through routine. The same is true when your ability to be present in your true self is sabotaged by the endless distraction of thoughts, emotions, and external events and stimuli. Given that your authenticity and your embodiment of your true self are critical for your life fulfilment and spiritual self-realisation, building and maintaining metacognitive states for this purpose should always be a priority, and the skill of doing so should be taught as a basic human skill along with learning to read and write.
When you practise mindfulness to disengage from the contents of your mind and its continual stimulation, you can allow yourself to be. It is through your experience of pure being that your false identifications, including the labels that you and others have put on yourself, can fall away. You can then explore who you truly are by opening up to your spiritual nature and everything about you that was shrouded by your mind’s reactivity.
Summary
You can use mindfulness practices, such as the mindfulness of breathing meditation, to enter metacognitive states. Create these states by bringing your attention back to your observer self. Metacognitive states maximise your conscious awareness and put you in a more resourceful and empowered state, giving you greater freedom to choose your thoughts and emotions. As a result, you can self-regulate your emotional states, allowing difficult emotions to pass, which will reduce the likelihood of you entering anxious or depressive states. Additionally, you can reappraise the beliefs and perceptions that generate negative emotions, low mood, and cognitive distortions and biases. Entering metacognitive states also allows you to maintain your focus for optimum attention, peak performance, and presence. Overall, it guides you toward a more conscious and empowered existence, in which you are more fully yourself and living with the fullness of your being.
Next Step: the development of metacognitive states is a key part of my Mindfulness-Based Self-Development strategy. To discover how to use metcognitive states to enhance your self-development and wellbeing, book a Guidance Call.
References
Teasdale, J. D. (1999). Metacognition, mindfulness and the modification of mood disorders. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 6(2), 146-155. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0879(199905)6:2%3C146::AID-CPP195%3E3.0.CO;2-E
Teasdale, J. D., Moore, R. G., Hayhurst, H., Pope, M., Williams, S., & Segal, Z. V. (2002). Metacognitive awareness and prevention of relapse in depression: Empirical evidence. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 70(2), 275-287. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-006x.70.2.275
