Dealing with the Discomfort of Mindful Living

The first thing you need to know is that everyone has slip ups. You will, too. So don’t beat yourself up whenever you seemingly fail at mindfulness. The fact that you are observant about it and recognize it later is a step in the right direction.

Your mental and physical self might resist the practice of mindfulness. You don’t want to battle yourself, but instead recognize the feelings and push back and greet them with something that centers you, such as meditation, deep breathing or visualization.

Some people try to rush the process and make a change quickly so they can escape the discomfort they feel. Mindfulness shouldn’t be a process you hurry through. These quick fix solutions are rarely the right option.

You don’t have to sit still and meditate on something for hours on end, but at the same time, don’t be in a situation where you embrace your awareness and latch on to the first option you consider just so you can go back to not having to think about something.

Many people find that their initial foray into mindfulness is a very physical and emotional process. You want to learn how to be relaxed when you do this. Find a comfortable position, whether it’s seated or lying down in the beginning as you learn the ropes... 

Preparing Your Life for Micro Mindful Habits

Mindfulness is all about living life with intention. Most people never even explore or understand what they want to do. They simply go through each day making quick decisions without careful thought.

Later, they suffer regrets and wish that they’d done things differently. They could have, if they’d slowed down and practiced mindfulness. It might take a little longer as you’re learning how to do it, but once you know how, it becomes a normal part of the process, so it speeds up for you.

Think about your intentions in life for whatever it is you want to improve. Don’t just wake up every day and go to work – think about where you want to be a year from now. Instead of living in a house with a spouse who feels like a roommate, think about your intentions for a healthy marriage and what that looks like.

Know ahead of time what your health goals are, your financial dreams and so on. When you spend a little time mapping out your intentions, it makes the decision-making process easier...

Small Changes Add Up to Big Results

Some people try to discount micro habits as useless, but these small changes add up to big results if you adhere to them over time. They’re far less intimidating and easier to implement.

Let’s use nutrition improvements as an example. If you want to get healthy or lose weight, you probably dread the overhaul on your diet that you’re used to trying to make. Usually, this extreme change fails miserably.

There’s a better way to implement micro mindful habits with your usual eating routine that will ease you into better health and weight loss without causing you to suffer the shock of a major change.

For example, if you’re trying to eat healthier, you might go to your favorite restaurant and feel the urge to order your traditional meal on impulse. But with a bit of micro mindfulness involved, you’ll be able to look back at how that meal has affected you in the past and what you want to happen in the future.

In the past, the chicken-fried-chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy and casserole sides and a large soft drink has caused you to gain weight. But you love that meal and don’t want to say goodbye to it forever.

Instead of thinking about the need to eat healthier for the rest of your life, which can be disheartening, try going about it in a micro mindful way. Take each day and every meal as a separate and new opportunity to do better.

As you analyze your order, you might feel the tug of wanting to stick with your favorite go-to meal. Instead of forcing yourself to say no from the very beginning, ask yourself what you can do to make the order better... 

How to Be Mindful in the Moment

When you’re living life as usual, it’s sometimes hard to even remember to be mindful at that moment. The way most people live today, they’re multitasking – on their phone, handling texts or emails as they’re sitting down at a restaurant or working on something at their job.

The first thing you want to do is remind yourself periodically to be attentive and tuned in to what you’re engaging in. You may even need to set little alarms once an hour to check in with yourself until it becomes an automated habit.

Once you go into mindfulness mode, take a deep breath and clear your thoughts of everything but the task at hand. You want to use all of your senses and allow any emotions to flow through you without trying to stifle them.

Before trying to make any kind of decision, be observant about your feelings and what you see or are experiencing at that time. Don’t make judgments about them, such as feeling stupid for having a certain reaction... 

Mindful Living Is the Antidote to Overwhelm

Change is hard, regardless of what area of your life you’re focusing on. When you’re used to doing things a certain way, and have ingrained and automated habits that guide you, it can be difficult to pull away from them.

The good news is that what you’ve been doing, you probably do without giving it much thought. So any bit of attention you give to an issue you want to resolve will allow you to make new decisions based on past experiences and results.

Mindfulness is a concept that might make you feel unnerved in the beginning. There are many things we do out of comfort automatically so that we don’t have to feel guilty or bad about our choices.

When you’re being mindful about something, it means you’re focused on it and applying common sense and thoughtful consideration to your options. You’re looking realistically at what results you’ll get if you make one decision over another... 

Micro Mindful Living Habits

When you want to make changes in your life, it can sometime feel daunting when you start thinking of everything that you want to overhaul. From your sleep schedule and nutrition regimen to your career pursuits and relationship efforts.

What usually happens on a day-to-day basis is we coast through life allowing things to occur until it reaches a breaking point, where you feel like you have to do something about it.

Then it feels like change has to happen right in that moment, which is an unrealistic expectation to make of yourself. Instead of embracing an unachievable goal, try to integrate micro mindful living habits that will put you on the path to success in whatever it is you’re trying to achieve without overwhelming you in the process. ....

6 Steps for Living in The Moment

Living in the moment is freedom. When you can live in the here and now, you’ll gain freedom from worry, self-doubt, and guilt. Living in the moment promotes better health, improves relationships, and helps overcome stress. Use the following six tips to learn how to live in the moment for a happier and healthier life.

• Get out of your mind – Any time you notice you're in your mind and thoughts but not actually enjoying or participating fully in whatever you’re doing right this moment, get out of them. Use a word or strategy to help you notice when this happens, such as grounding by seeing right where you are. When you overthink everything, it’s hard to move forward. The more you think, the more you will likely mess up or become stressed.

• Don’t focus on your future – Instead, do the thing you’re worried about. Do it now, if possible. Yes, maybe you want a house, but you don’t have the money for the down payment. It’s okay, don’t worry. Start saving money and move on from that thought. Please don’t dwell on the fact you are not in a home yet. The only authentic action you can take right now is to save money, so focus on that. Only focus on what you can make happen.

• Be ok with nothing – Living in the moment means you may not always be actively doing something. You might just be sitting there, and that is ok. Look around you and see what you might not have noticed before while you were to worry about doing something. You might find or learn something new about yourself. Boredom is a catalyst for creativity.

• Let go of the past – Forget about the mistakes you made in the past.  View your mistakes as learning lessons never to repeat. Stop using the valuable time you have now thinking about your past mistakes or what could have been. Instead, if you are thinking about “what could have been,” go out and make it happen now.

• Understand your why – Why do you feel the need to live in the moment more? What exactly are you doing that is preventing it? Focus on it and see what you can do to fix it or eliminate the roadblocks in place, preventing you from focusing on the now.

• Lose track of time – Stop looking at the clock every time you go somewhere or while you are doing something. Living in the moment means you are enjoying it, and time will go by fast. Don’t distract yourself with things that don’t matter now, like what time it is. If you look up and are worried about how much time has passed or that the event is about to be over, you are already distracting yourself. Immediately stop and get back to what you were doing.

Living in the moments allows you to value life and free yourself from stress and other needless worries. It will enable you to open your life to contentment and ultimate happiness. If you work on living in the moment, you will find yourself feeling happier in the long run.

What Does it Mean to Be More Mindful?

Most of our lives are immersed in analyzing the past and planning for the future. Because of this, most of us don’t even know what’s happening right now. Often, we just go through the motions in our daily life without fully experiencing it. However, if you want more happiness and success, now it will help you to become more mindful.

Fully Experiencing What is Happening Right Now

As you read this, are you also watching TV or listening to music, or trying to stop your cat from jumping on the kitchen table? Instead, try reading this and blocking everything else out. It’s only going to take about three minutes of your life to read this without interruption.

Letting Go of Expectations of What You Are Experiencing in the Present

If you have an important event to attend, it’s easy to allow expectations to rule the moment. You may even go into the situation with too many ideas of what is going to happen that ruins your experience. Instead, try to stay grounded so that you can truly feel what is happening.

Taking Pleasure in Every Task Each Moment

Even tasks like washing dishes can become pleasurable if you think of it right. You can enjoy the feel of the soft bubbles on your hands in the warm water, as well as the end results of doing that task by celebrating a mission accomplished

Experiencing the Flow of Creativity

When you are genuinely focused on the now, you’re more likely to get your mind into a flow state of creativity. That’s when you do something (even something hard), and you cannot realize time is passing as you do it. It’s so fun and pleasurable that it’s almost as good as sleeping.

Not Judging the Experience Just Experiencing It

One thing that gets in the way of being mindful is placing judgments on an event or experience. Next time you go to an event or even when you’re eating dinner focus only on the experience and not putting any type of judgment good or bad on the event.

Bringing Awareness to Everything, You Do Every Day

Mindfulness can bring so much awareness to the things you do each day. If you usually eat without thought, think about it as you do it. If you normally multitask stop. When you can do things with full awareness it’s always more fun.

If you feel as if life is too rushed, find ways to bring yourself into the present so that you can fully experience what is happening right now. Stop thinking and start feeling. Feel the sunshine on your body as you mow your lawn, smell the fragrant air when you go to the lake, and enjoy breathing in and out right now.

Mindfulness at school: Thousands of pupils will be given meditation lessons to help them 'cope with pressure'

• Schemes will test different approaches to improving children’s mental health
• The trial, to run until 2021, will be one of the largest of its kind in the world
• It will teach students ‘innovative techniques’ such as mindfulness and relaxation

 Thousands of pupils will practise mindfulness at school to help them deal with the ‘pressures of the modern world’.

Pilot schemes in 370 primaries and secondaries will test different approaches to improving children’s mental health.

The trial, to run until 2021, will be one of the largest of its kind in the world. It will teach students ‘innovative techniques’ such as mindfulness, relaxation and breathing exercises to ‘help them regulate their emotions’, the Department for Education said. Pupils will also have sessions with mental health experts...;

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