Insomnia can cause you to toss and turn throughout the night. It can lead you to waking up even if you do manage to fall asleep. Struggling with this annoying problem can drain your energy and make you feel a deep fatigue.
When you experience insomnia, it can affect your ability to concentrate on even simple tasks. It can raise your risk of having a serious accident, doing poorly at work, having problems in your relationships and even make you physically sick.
Not only will you feel the effects of insomnia physically, but it can affect you mentally, too. Insomnia is known to cause depression. Thankfully, mindfulness can put an end to insomnia and help you to get the sleep that you need.
The way that mindfulness helps is that it eliminates the myriad of thoughts that run through your mind. Unfortunately, unlike toys that can make irritating noise, but thankfully have an off button, your mind doesn’t have that.
This is known as being unable to turn your mind off. It’s why you can’t sleep. When your mind can’t rest, neither can your body. What mindfulness teaches for insomnia is that person experiencing it should practice concentrating on breathing techniques.
Not only can mindfulness help you get rid of insomnia, but it will enable you to feel well rested because mindfulness calms the entire body. It does this by lowering the stress level and raising the sleep inducing hormone, melatonin.
Because mindfulness is not addicting like over the counter sleep medications are, many doctors are now suggesting that people who struggle with insomnia turn to treatments like mindfulness.
The steps that you’ll need to take to get a good night’s sleep using mindfulness are simple. First, you need to make sure that you’re comfortable. You also need to make sure that you have quiet around you.
Don’t have a television or music playing in the background. Make sure you’re away from any bright lights, because bright lights stimulate the brain. Once you’re in place, sit quietly.
Secondly, focus your attention on how your body is feeling. You’ll notice that you feel stressed or tensed. Concentrate on drawing in breaths and as you breathe out, mentally let the stress go.
You should inhale and exhale for a count of five breaths. Third, focus on the sensations that you’re experiencing through your senses. What you hear, smell and feel. Concentrate on these senses for a count of five.
As thoughts run through your head, let them. Don’t judge them because this is what can cause you to tense up. Refocus your attention on the sensations. Remain in this exercise until you feel completely relaxed and ready for sleep.
Too many of us will use food as a means of helping us deal with stress. Some people eat without even realizing what it is that they’re doing. They check or zone out while eating.
This is why you can reach the bottom of a bowl and be surprised to find that all of the food is gone. You don’t even remember eating it all. The problem with eating to feel better about stress or not paying attention when eating is that it can cause weight gain.
Mindful eating can help you be fully present every time you eat. When you’re fully present, this can stop the cycle of eating without realizing what it is you’re even doing. Anyone can practice mindful eating that can help you get rid of unwanted pounds or manage it if you don’t want to gain.
Even if you have health problems that make it difficult to lose weight, mindfulness has been shown to be helpful with losing weight and maintaining that loss. When you practice mindfulness, it causes you to be conscious of the food that you eat.
From the beginning of the meal to the end, you recognize and experience each bite. This practice can also be applied to when you have snacks – which is an eating habit that causes many people to gain extra pounds.
When you practice mindful eating, it causes you to take your time and enjoy the food that you’re eating. When you eat slowly, this gives your brain time to register that your stomach is full so you eat less, too.
Mindful eating can be a natural way of helping to end wrong food associations that can lead to conditions such as binge eating. To get started with mindful eating, you have to make sure that you’re eating to get it out of the way or just because you’re supposed to.
Don’t eat while you’re working or driving or watching television. When your mind is otherwise occupied, you can’t focus on the enjoyment of the eating. Some mindful exercises can help you lose weight and keep your weight managed.
When you eat, pay attention to how the food tastes. Concentrate on how the flavors of the food stand out separately rather than as a whole. Become aware of the spicy taste or the sharp flavor.
Enjoy the feeling of the food, the shape of it and notice whether it’s solid or soft. As you eat, relax your mind and body. Keep your thoughts focused only on the eating and nothing else.
If you’ve always eaten a certain way such as sitting in a specific chair or using the same dinnerware change it up and use something different. Sit in a different chair. Face a different direction.
Use your opposite hand instead of the one that you always use. You can practice mindful eating by having a small piece of chocolate or a raisin. Pop the bite into your mouth and become aware of the texture of the bite, of the sensations that cross your tastebuds.
By becoming aware of food, you can eliminate the kind of rushed eating and overeating that leads to weight control issues.
There’s no doubt that walking or running can help you lose weight and get in shape. It can also keep your heart in good cardiovascular health. If you practice mindfulness as you walk or run, you’ll also find that’s it a great way to get relief from stress.
Using mindfulness as you walk or run can help quiet anxious thoughts, bring your emotions under control and keep your thoughts centered on the present. When you do this, you’ll gain the ability to release the feelings that are causing you to feel stress.
By learning how to control your mind while you’re exercising, you’ll be benefiting yourself physically and mentally. You’ll need to keep your mind focused as you’re walking or running.
When you keep your mind focused, it turns off that inner noise that can make you feel unsettled. Once your mind is quieted, you’ll be able to hear your body as you’re exercising.
A lot of people think that exercising for fitness and stress relief is all about the body. They believe that it’s up to the muscles to find the right rhythm, but that’s not the case. There’s a strong body and mind connection that you tap into when you practice mindfulness.
This connection helps you be more relaxed as you move. It allows you to observe your atmosphere and gain a greater amount of energy. Your mind is the momentum that your body needs to get in motion.
It’s also the tool that can make your exercising healthier for you when you practice mindfulness. As you walk or run, focus on what’s going on in your body. Feel the sensations of the surface against the bottom of your shoe.
Pay attention to the position of your spine and the way your arms are moving. Get in tune with the motion of your body. When you practice mindfulness, you’ll learn how to breathe so that your body is able to get more oxygen which will help you on your walk or run.
As you move, focus your inhaling and exhaling by timing them along with your steps. You should be able to sync your breathing with your walking or running tempo. When you do this, you’ll increase your energy and be more relaxed because deep breathing has a calming effect on the emotions and the muscles.
Mindfulness lets you tune in to your body as you move. You’ll learn how to move and change the way that you move to induce a better run or walk. If you’re huffing and wheezing as you move, that’s a sign that you’re not in tempo with your breathing and it needs to be lined up.
When you keep your focus where it needs to be as you move, you’ll discover that your mind doesn’t become clouded with negative thoughts. You’ll be able to end your walk or run – not just full of energy – but calmer and happier, too.
There are countless people who struggle with chronic pain. Sometimes the pain is caused from a medical condition and sometimes it’s a result of experiencing damage to the body through an accident or abuse.
Most people are familiar with dealing with the stress of the pain that feel in their body. But, chronic pain doesn’t simply affect the body. It can also impact how you feel emotionally.
It’s perfectly normal when you’re dealing with long term pain to experience anger about what you’re going through. It’s also normal to get upset when others have a hard time understand the level of pain you’re experiencing.
If it’s left untreated, chronic pain can wear on a person so deeply that they can begin to feel depressed. Modern medicine tries to offer relief from chronic pain but in many cases, can only medicate the symptom rather than actually treat the condition.
You need something more than that. By using mindfulness, not only can you find relief for your physical symptoms, but you can also find help for the emotional side effects that are common when you have to live with chronic pain.
When you practice the techniques in mindfulness, it can help ease the way that your body feels pain. What mindfulness does is teach people to focus on the sensations of the body along with the emotional feelings when they’re struggling with pain.
This approach is in direct contradiction to the way that some treatments suggest not thinking about the pain. But not thinking about can actually add to the stress, which can cause even more pain.
By learning mindfulness, you can decrease the pain and gain a sense of peace as well. With mindfulness, you find a quiet place and focus on each part of your body and how it feels in regards to the pain.
You don’t judge the pain and you don’t fight it. You don’t view it as something negative either. You just simply become aware of it. While you’re sitting, concentrate on how your body feels in connection with whatever it is that you’re sitting on.
Become aware of the chair and how the floor feels beneath your feet. Picture each area of your body relaxing. Keep your focus centered on your body and don’t view the pain as anything other than a neutral thing within you.
While you’re focused on your body, slowly go over each area of your body. Focus only on that part. Become aware of the senses dealing with that part – such as whether or not it’s cold or warm.
If it feels free or restricted, if it’s against something soft or hard. The goal is to concentrate only on the senses rather than what the pain is doing in that area. After you practice mindfulness on each part of your body, slowly take in the whole body by becoming completely aware.
The mindfulness will help you be able to handle the pain emotionally and relax from the stress, which brings physical relief.
We all have ingrained habits when it comes to what we eat and how we eat. For some people though, there’s a struggle with eating that can result in an eating disorder.
Any abnormal eating pattern can be helped through the practice of mindfulness. When you engage in mindfulness techniques it means that you’re focused on what’s going on around you in that present moment.
It means that you release the judgment that you have when it comes to your relationship with food. Eating isn’t simply a process of putting food into your body.
Eating is connected to what your body experiences emotionally when you eat. For most people, this would be satisfaction, but for those with an eating disorder, it can be dread.
When you eat, the action can trigger emotions, whether they’re good or bad. If you struggle with an eating disorder, you might feel depressed at the thought of eating.
Or you might crave the food, but be unable to stand the thought of keeping it within your body. Mindfulness can free the negative connection you may have to food.
It can be used to rewrite the past negative experiences you may have had concerning food and lead you to a healthier understanding of eating. When you practice mindful eating, you’re aware of the food, but you don’t focus on the food – which is the basis of an eating disorder.
When you have an eating disorder, whatever you’re feeling and thinking is projected onto the food. The food becomes the enemy and overeating or undereating becomes of way of dealing with the emotions.
Mindfulness teaches you how to understand and find relief from eating disorders by changing the way that you think about food and breaking the cycle of emotions.
There are countless articles about eating disorders where the person who has the disorder isn’t even aware that they have a problem. This is because they’re not fully present, and not focusing on being present with their thoughts, actions or habits when it comes to food.
An awareness toward eating takes away the power of an eating disorder. It breaks the hold that the condition has over a person. In order to heal from an eating disorder, you have to learn how to associate food with becoming aware of your body sensations.
With mindful eating techniques, you would ask yourself why you feel the way that you do about food. But you would not ask yourself this in a judgmental way. The purpose of this exercise is not to make you feel bad about yourself, but rather to help you understand the reasoning behind your thoughts.
Mindful eating helps you to examine when it is that you feel hungry or you don’t and if there are any activities, thoughts or emotions tied in to that hunger or lack of hunger.
When you practice mindful eating, you’ll learn how you handle eating. Whether it’s something that you feel you need to just get through or if it’s something that you feel ashamed of.
Mindfulness will help you be able to be more aware of the behaviors you have toward food that aren’t healthy and lead you to establishing a new foundation with food that will allow you to heal.
We live in an online world more often than not. We have so much technology now that’s supposed to streamline our lives and make it easier to connect with the people that we care about.
It’s supposed to make it easier to do business and make good things happen for our careers. But strangely, the technology that was supposed to be the key to our happiness, comfort and success has the potential to backfire.
Instead of helping, in many cases, the use of technology has led people to deeper levels of stress, feelings of discontentment and lives so busy that they’re hardly living at all.
Studies performed on the link between stress and time spend on the Internet or social media sites can be misleading when they claim that spending time online can lower stress.
The factors involved in the studies don’t take into consideration the offline lifestyles of those involved in the studies. Technology in itself is neither good nor bad. It’s how it’s used that can make it something that can negatively impact your life.
The key is to use technology with mindfulness. You can incorporate what’s good and positive about being online and the various use of technology to connect with other people in a meaningful way.
For example, if you have family members that live a good distance away from you, it can make you feel happier when you connect with them instantly through a text message or through an online chat.
You can share updates about your life or send relatives photos of your kids instantly. When you use social media with mindfulness, it can help you to be able to better manage stress.
It can also lead to feelings of contentment and leave you with a more positive outlook. The dark side of being online is that there’s a great deal of negativity floating around in cyberspace.
There are numerous stories about people being hateful to each other, calling names, bullying, threatening or harassing. There are people who keep drama heightened through online fighting.
Even if you’re just an online bystander to someone else’s drama, if you experience that, your mind will register the same type of anxious response as if you had been involved and your feelings will follow the lead of your thoughts.
When you see how wonderful someone else’s life appears to be online, it can lead you to become discontent and irritable. It can make you focus on the negative instead of looking at the positive.
Online interaction can also make you feed yourself negative self talk – especially when you see others who are better looking, richer, have nicer homes, easier looking lives and appear to be having more fun.
Not only will you feel bad about yourself, but your stress level will go up. When you practice mindfulness in associating with your technology use, you’ll discover that your happiness level will increase.
You can do this by setting limits on when you’ll be online and how much time you’ll spend online. Refuse to keep your cellphone with you 24/7. When you are on social media or online, find ways to use it to do something positive such as encourage someone else.
Let go of the things online that are irrelevant to your life or that make your negativity or stress level rise. When you do go online, make sure that you have a defined purpose and a time limit and stick to that.
The way that you conduct yourself in your personal and professional life begins with how you use your mind. You can teach your mind to accept yourself and gain empowerment – or you can stay stuck in self-defeating behaviors.
You are what you think. When you want to introduce change into your life, you need to first accept and empower yourself before you begin altering anything. Your mind is the greatest tool that you have for living the best possible life that you can live.
Countless studies have shown that the brain is constantly working. Your brain can be wired to think or cause you to act in a certain way based on how you handle your mind’s ability to tap into your subconscious mind.
When you practice mindfulness, you can empower yourself and fine tune the subconscious abilities that you have. Using mindful strategies, you’ll be able to focus better, lower your stress and boost your confidence and self-esteem.
Once you learn to accept yourself, you’ll be able to have compassion for yourself, too. This will defeat any negative internal talk that you may have been practicing. Meditation is a strategy that you can use to achieve mindfulness in order to accept and empower yourself.
It helps users quiet the mind so that they can be fully in the present and accepting of the emotions and thoughts that they have. Choose a place where you’ll be comfortable so that you’ll be able to feel relaxed.
Some people choose to sit while meditating and others prefer to lie down. You can also practice mindful meditation while you’re walking outside or in your home. Relax and focus on what’s around you and how you’re inhaling and exhaling.
Be aware of the sensations you feel and the emotions that you’re experiencing. Another strategy that’s often used is deep breathing. You can start this the same way that you would with mindful meditation where you find a comfortable place and begin.
But you can also practice deep breathing while you’re active at home or at work. You focus on drawing in deep breaths and slowly releasing them. You can also use mindful replacement techniques.
These are strategies that call for you to be aware of the thoughts that you think about yourself rather than simply letting them pass through your mind. Whenever any negative self talk pops into your mind, you make a conscious choice to stop and correct the thought.
You correct it by replacing it with affirming words that help you accept yourself as you are. This helps you reprogram your thoughts to enable you to feel empowered rather than listening to words that hinder you and create self-doubt.
Having confidence means that you view yourself favorably. You know that you can do what you need to do, that you have the skills and talents to be able to handle yourself.
You trust that your instincts, thinking and abilities are sufficient. When you don’t have confidence it means that you struggle to accept who you are. You’ll lack confidence to do things because you simply don’t trust that you can.
You go through life feeling as if you’re not educated enough, skilled enough, smart enough, talented enough, pretty enough, or handsome enough. You judge yourself, often thinking of what you could have, should have said or done, and you always fall short.
What mindfulness does to help you change this and build your confidence is replace the feelings that you’re not enough with the trust that you are. Using mindfulness calls for you to not dwell on your past or on any negative experiences where you feel that you failed or fell short.
It helps you to not focus on the future or on what you hope to be and it helps train you to focus on who you are right now and see that who you are is good enough. You learn to accept yourself – and with that, a strong confidence in yourself is built.
Practicing mindfulness can also boost your self-esteem. Mindfulness can lead you to a life settled in the present. With living in the present comes a non-judgmental acceptance of who you are.
So many people have an internal voice that’s extremely ugly. This internal voice has been conditioned to speak this way by us. The disturbing results are that when we allow this internal voice to have a negative say, we can trigger stress, anxiety and even depression.
This self talk has a direct impact on how you feel about yourself. Learn to be aware of this negative self talk. If you call yourself names, that’s a sign that you’ve been engaging in negative self talk that can lower your self esteem.
Some people call themselves stupid or idiot. When they consider doing something, this internal self talk always tells them why they can’t. You’ll tell yourself things like “I’m not smart enough” or “I’m too dumb to do it.”
When you allow these thoughts to run rampant, you can get into the mindset that you can’t do something – that you’re unworthy – and then your feelings follow that internal self talk until it becomes a belief.
This habit can be so ingrained within you that the negative self talk plays constantly in your mind, so much so that it becomes like white noise. What mindfulness does is bring your attention to the inner dialogue that’s eroding your self esteem.
You learn what this internal conversation is doing to you and how it’s impacting your emotions. Mindfulness helps you learn to accept who you are without expectations or blaming. You’ll gain skills that you can use to learn how to raise your confidence and acceptance of yourself.