Brilliant Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, 2nd Edition

Living in the moment: the ‘eat-a-peach’ challenge

An exercise conducted in the first session of many mindfulness groups involves nothing more complicated than eating a piece of fruit while concentrating fully on the experience and how it affects you. The rationale is that we spend much of our lives in a state of divided attention. A bit like a computer with several programs up and running at the same time we are quite capable of automatically running depressive processing subroutines alongside whatever else we are doing.

By learning to live fully ‘in the moment’ and gently bringing awareness back to bear on incoming sensory information (the feel of the peach in your hand, the levels of muscular tension in your body, the feeling of the warm evening ...