From Chaos to Calm – How Mindfulness Lets You Be in Charge
There’s no denying that having chaos in your life is going to happen. It might not be a constant, but it will happen.
When chaos does occur, some people run around in a state of anxiety or panic.
They don’t know what to do and how to calm the chaos. Regardless of what type of chaos you’ve experienced or are going through now, mindfulness can help.
It lets you be in charge and not your emotions or your thoughts.
What happens when chaos hits is that the outward or inward situation isn’t taking place in the present.
The chaos is because of what might have happened or what’s going to happen as a result of this chaos.
When you experience turmoil, your stress levels will skyrocket. When that happens, it can be difficult to keep calm.
Your mind will start to race and the negative emotions will spring up, multiplying one after another.
Chaos causes you to become distanced from peace. It hijacks your thoughts and pummels your emotions.
But when you practice mindfulness, it doesn’t give in to the chaos.
Instead, mindfulness allows you to have peace and focus despite the physical or emotional storm you might be caught up in.
It keeps you focused on the present and anchors your thoughts and emotions.
This helps you feel at rest even when you’re not. It bolsters your sense of purpose and ability to make decisions.
Mindfulness calms the anxiety and lets you be in charge of what you need to take care of.
During turmoil, your mind gets an influx of negative thoughts and when someone doesn’t practice mindfulness, those thoughts then cause the emotions to become more intense.
Mindfulness doesn’t stop the negative emotions from coming, but it helps you to be in charge of what’s going on in your mind and with your emotions because it lets you coral the thoughts that are trying to stampede.
It brings the wayward emotions back to the present and floods your mind with peace and purpose.
Mindfulness brings a peace to the negative emotions and thoughts so that you’ll be aware of them, but they won’t control you.
When chaos happens, most people end up being controlled by their emotions, by the anxiety and turmoil they feel.
But mindfulness will allow you to take a pause, view the situation and be able to make decisions that are based on reality rather than hyped up feelings.
Mindfulness will allow you to keep order in your thoughts and emotions even when everything around you is in crisis.
Being mindful will help to give you space to be able to keep yourself at peace.
Why You Should Replace Multitasking with Mindfulness
Multitasking means that a person is doing more than one task at a time. Because so many people are incredibly busy, multitasking has become a way of life.
On any given day at the same time, you’ll see people who are simultaneously walking, updating their Facebook, texting, and talking to people.
Because all of these tasks are going on at the same time, the brain is forced to react quickly, moving back and forth, constantly changing focus.
Studies have shown that not only do those who multitask not get more accomplished, but they’re more apt to face burnout, higher levels of stress and a poorer quality of life.
Your brain was not meant to deal with an overload of material in so little time.
When you multitask, just like you’re splitting your attention between things on your to-do list, you’re also splitting yourself figuratively.
You might be checking things off that list but no one thing has your full focus and neither do those you love.
When you’re in a relationship and your partner is speaking and you’re on your cell phone sending a text message, you’re not really listening to them.
Multitasking has helped to cause people to feel less empathetic toward others because people don’t really hear and aren’t really aware of the full scope of the situations they’re seeing or hearing about.
There’s another downside to multitasking. When you’re not fully present with what you’re doing or who you’re spending time with, you miss things.
You’ll discover that you have a tendency to spend a lot of time and energy on things that don’t really matter.
Multitasking keeps you perpetually distracted. The cure for multitasking is mindfulness. This means that you’re focused on the present.
You’re giving whatever task you’re doing 100% of yourself.
It means that whoever you’re interacting with is not having to compete for your attention because you’re 100% present with them.
Being fully present can help to deepen relationships with those you love.
It can also make you better at your job, more understanding of your coworkers and happier in all aspects of your life. When you’re being mindful, you’re focused.
You’ve got your mind and your emotions fully engaged.
By being focused, you’re aware of the task. Getting it done will be easier and you won’t be nearly as stressed.
When you focus on a person, you’ll be able to have a deeper connection without multitasking.
You’ll be fully engaged in your own life and in the lives of the people you interact with. Mindfulness can teach you how to keep your focus on the moment.
It can show you how to enjoy the day to day tasks and situations even if they’re mundane.
Plus when you practice being mindful, it’ll help you to recognize when you’re not. You’ll gain the intuition to know when something doesn’t really have your full attention.
Why People Resist Being Mindful About the Present
There are many reasons that people resist being mindful. When you practice mindfulness, it calls you to stop allowing the past or the future to be your constant focus.
A lot of people are stuck in rut thinking.
They constantly dwell on thoughts of the past or the future. The reason that they do that is because they’re not completely happy with the present.
It’s not where they want to be and they’re not who they want to be.
They don’t realize that mindfulness can help them find that acceptance and peace in the present that they’re trying to find.
People resist being mindful about the present because of fear about what they don’t know.
They’re afraid of losing control. When you’re faced with changes, not knowing what those changes are and how they’ll affect your life can foster resistance.
The problem is that change has somehow become associated with negative rather than being something that can open up new possibilities.
When someone doesn’t fully understand what mindfulness is, that can cause them not to want to have anything to do with being mindful about the present.
They resist the change because they don’t know what it’s all about.
They don’t trust that being mindful about the present is going to help them in any way. There’s comfort in the familiar even if the familiar doesn’t make them happy.
So they stay where they are, rather than step out and reach for what could change their lives for the good.
Whenever you have fear of the unknown and comfort in the familiar, you have a recipe for resistance to any kind of change, not just mindfulness.
The period in someone’s life can also cause them to resist being mindful about the present.
If they’re going through a time where things are wonderful in their present, they can be reluctant to be mindful because they don’t want to rock the boat.
It’s the same way if things are bad in their present.
They won’t want to rock the boat and make changes because they’re afraid that things will only get worse.
Sometimes, people resist being mindful about the present because they absolutely hate anything that pulls them out of their normal.
Because they don’t have a good grasp of mindfulness, they can’t understand the positives associated with it.
When a person has a mindset that’s always looking backward at how good things “used to be” they can resist mindful living in the present.
If they have a mindset of how good things are going to be “in the future,” then they can resist the present.
These people have created fences in their lives mentally and emotionally and they don’t want to stray beyond those fences.
There are some people who base their self esteem and love themselves based on where they used to be or where they’re going.
They wrongly believe that to have to be mindful about the present, they’ll have to lose themselves. They don’t realize all that they stand to gain.
Visualization Meditation for Better Mindfulness Throughout Your Day
Visualization meditation is the practice of using meditation to focus on a visual item. By focusing the attention on the visual item, you can keep the mind focused.
When you keep the mind focused, you stand to gain a host of benefits.
You’ll experience benefits physically. If you have blood pressure that tends to run a little higher, visualization meditation can lower your blood pressure.
If you experience some emotional struggles like feeling fear or sadness, visualization meditation can help you overcome that.
By using visualization to increase your mindfulness throughout the day, you’ll discover exactly what your thoughts are doing to you.
You’ll see how “where” you focus your thoughts can impact your life.
When you don’t focus your thoughts, they can run the gamut from dwelling on the past to jumping ahead to the future that hasn’t happened yet.
When your mind doesn’t keep focused on the present, you can limit the productivity and success that you can achieve in your life both in your personal and professional side.
Visualization meditation can increase your mindfulness so that you realize the times when you’re causing internal harm to yourself with your thoughts.
You can even be caught up in thought patterns that keep you trapped in a certain mindset.
The problem with staying trapped in a certain mindset is that your emotions are tied to your thoughts.
If you think sad or angry thoughts about the past, especially if those are things that hurt you and you can’t change them, then your emotions will quickly follow suit.
What you think about not only can sway your emotions, but these thoughts can produce physical side effects such as higher blood pressure, weight gain, and more.
Visualization can help to strengthen your mindfulness which will let you stay focused on the current moment.
It can be especially helpful because the mind can start to wander. When you have visual clues, these can bring you gently back into focus.
The visualization process can help you to go through your day aware of the present but not judging it.
This in turn can allow you to be calmer even when there’s a stressful event taking place.
Not only that, but when you have better mindfulness, it means that you’ll be able to see things as they are which will allow you to make choices that aren’t based on the past or in the future.
When you use visual meditation, it can help you to see where you want to be in life and can help you to focus on present goals.
Visualization can help you to have better mindfulness that can lead you to make changes that you want to make.
It can also make you in tune with your emotions, which can then be used to let go of any link with thoughts that might be impacting your health.
Trusting Your Intuition By Being Mindful About Circumstances
You’ll face a variety of circumstances in your life. But how you face those circumstances can either help you find your best life or it can weigh you down.
The circumstances you find yourself in can sometimes call for you to make fast decisions.
When you practice mindfulness, you’ll learn how to cut through the inner dialogue in your brain to find the ability to trust your intuition.
When you trust your intuition, you’ll discover that you’re making better decisions about all of the areas of your life.
You’ll want to begin by focusing on where you are in the present. Take some deep breaths and concentrate on the breathing.
Unfortunately, circumstances are often the deciding factor that we use to make our decisions.
We look at the circumstances and think that we can see the whole picture, but we don’t. Your circumstances never tell you the whole story.
So what happens is you can make choices based on what’s not even a reality.
These circumstances can cause you to react using your emotions. You’ll end up second guessing yourself when you don’t practice mindfulness.
When you do practice mindfulness, you’ll be fully present, which means that you won’t be looking at the circumstances to be the deciding factor in your choices.
What mindfulness does to help you is it teaches you to not get caught up in whatever is going on around you.
It shows you how to take a step back and stop, refocusing your thoughts on where they should be.
You’ll learn how to respond using your intuition. Your intuition is something that you simply know instinctively.
Some people refer to their intuition as knowing in their gut that a choice was either right or wrong.
When you second guess your intuition, you’ll get knots in your stomach because you’re not one hundred percent convinced that you’re doing what’s right for your life.
Mindfulness allows you to tune in to your intuition.
Your intuition allows you to stop spending too much time trying to reason with or think about your decisions.
When you spend a lot of time thinking over the choices that you make, it can cause you to become overwhelmed with choices and ideas.
This can make you begin to experience self-doubt in your abilities to make decisions. Trusting your intuition can prevent you from overthinking your decisions.
When you overthink something, you can go over and over it in your mind.
It can cause you to not make any decisions because you’re so afraid you’re going to mess up.
It can also cause you to become frustrated and make a choice just to get it over with.
Practicing mindfulness can help you with any circumstance.
You’ll feel a sense of peace and learn to recognize and trust yourself when you practice mindfulness that allows your intuition to govern your actions.
Time Management Tips Using a Mindful Method
Regardless of what you do with it, there are only twenty four hours in a day. No matter how hard you try, you can’t make more time.
You can, however, find more time using a mindful method.
With mindfulness, you can take control of the time that you do have and by managing your time, you’ll feel as if you do have more than twenty four hours in a day.
Mindfulness is the key to time management that not only lets you get more done with the time you have, but you’ll also be less stressed.
To start, if you’ve learned about a complicated time management system that never seemed to work for you in the past, you need to stop striving.
Using elaborate time management methods aren’t what you need, especially if they only add more of a burden.
You need something simple, which is why people find that mindfulness works for them.
With mindfulness, there are several tips you can follow to manage the time that you do have.
First, stop. Stop trying to run full speed ahead every single day followed by falling into bed exhausted only to have the whole thing start again the next day.
You need to focus on what it is that you have to do.
Take a few minutes to think about the tasks without stress and without feeling pressured to get them done.
By using mindfulness, you create a calm oasis in the middle of the busyness that can give you clarity when it comes to making decisions or choosing what has to be done.
Not everything that ends up on the to-do list is top priority. You can gain this brief respite with mindfulness by practicing some deep breathing exercises.
This will help to focus your mind and relax any anxiety you might have over needing to get stuff done.
Once you focus, make sure that you’re being compassionate with yourself.
Don’t allow those negative thoughts that tell you that you should have started earlier, should have worked harder, etc.
Become self aware of what you are doing and practice treating yourself kindly.
Once you’re focused and aren’t judging yourself for what you need to do or for any past time management problems you may have had, you need to look over what you have to do.
It can help to write a list. Look at whatever is on your list that’s causing you to feel pressured or anxiety.
If those are things that you can’t let slide, then do those things first to get them out of the way – things that weigh on you can cause mental weariness.
Then, decide what will happen if you don’t do everything on your list.
The purpose for this exercise is that far too many people have a list of “must-do” when those things aren’t necessary at that exact moment.
You can only do what you can do. By practicing mindfulness, you can focus and gain clarity about what you must do with the time that you have.
It will help you to see what you can put off, what you can do less often and any areas where it might be more beneficial to hire someone to complete the task.
Mindfulness gives you the perspective to know what must be done.
It can also help you to see the things that will only drain your time but offer no real benefit to your life.
These are things like surfing the Internet mindlessly, which can often lead to an abundance of thoughts racing through your mind and most of those being negative.
Take time between a fully loaded day to focus on your surroundings. These mental breaks are mindful awareness exercises that help you relax.
Some people find the use of mindfulness bells helpful.
These are bells that will ring to help you to take a moment and focus on the present and what you’re doing at that moment. It helps you to practice mindful awareness.
Tackle Persistent Health Problems with Mindful Awareness
When you struggle with persistent health problems, it can become frustrating, especially if it limits you physically.
While there are many avenues that you can take to address the health problems, not all of these solutions offer the kind of help that addresses all aspects of the body.
These aspects are the mind, the body, the emotions and the spirit connection.
Mindfulness is a treatment that can be effectively used to address health problems – even the kind of health issues that stick around for months or years.
The therapies used in mindfulness can help you to improve your life, and let go of any anxiety that was caused as a result of the health issue.
There are many forms of health conditions that can be healed from mindfulness such as ones that are tied in to stress.
Health problems that are caused by addictions can also be healed. If you struggle with health problems that are acerbated by depression, those can be helped as well.
Mindfulness allows you to be fully aware of present in your life.
It can show you how to let go of the stress and difficulties associated with health problems.
You’ll also learn how you can stop worrying about the past or the future with your health and how to lay aside any expectations about your body.
With mindfulness, what you’ll do is to concentrate on where you currently are with your life.
You’ll begin a session by concentrating on what you’re experiencing through the use of your five senses.
This will vary, depending on which sense you’re focusing your mind on.
When you keep your focus what mindfulness does is it allows you to stop the cycle of negative thoughts that are often present when you don’t feel well.
You’ll be able to release the thoughts of the past. These might be thoughts about how much you’re struggled or how good your health used to be.
You’ll also be able to release the fear that the future may bring on worsening problems with your health.
You’ll be able to remain in the present and fully enjoy each moment. One of the things that some people say is that they don’t have time to practice mindfulness.
You don’t have to take time out of your day and do nothing with mindfulness.
It can be done even when you’re busy doing some kind of activity such as cleaning the house, mowing the lawn or taking a walk.
Mindfulness will help you tackle the health problems through breathing and other techniques.
One of the benefits that many of those who use mindfulness reported is that the pain linked with their health problem diminished through the use of this practice.
Reducing Overwhelm by Letting Mindfulness Take Over
Every person in the world knows what it’s like to be overwhelmed at one point or another. Some people live lives where overwhelm is more the norm than not.
That can be chalked up to being busier than ever before, it can be chalked up to habits and also not knowing how to say no even to the good opportunities.
But regardless of the reason, when overwhelm hits, your stress levels rise and your body reacts with the same hormones that you get when you experience the “fight or flight” feeling.
Living in a state where you often feel overwhelm isn’t good for you and you can reduce it by allowing mindfulness to take over instead.
Mindfulness allows you to see what’s actually happening.
That means that you become aware of the emotions and any thoughts that are driving what you do.
You take the time to focus on the present and discover what’s at the root of what you’re doing.
For example, are you taking on too many projects because you have workaholic tendencies and you tie who you are into what you do?
Once you see what’s really happening, you’ll recognize the emotions within you that are contributing to or causing the overwhelm.
Some of these emotions will be anxiety, fear or depression.
If you still hear the track from negative track from self talk that’s a sign that your emotions are contributing to the overwhelm you’re experiencing.
Mindfulness teaches you how to stop the train of overwhelm and see yourself with honesty.
It allows you see that you’re worthy, that you’re valued, and that you deserve compassion.
You’ll learn how to stop judging yourself and in some cases, stop hating yourself.
By practicing mindfulness, you’ll be able to be true to who you are, even internally and you’ll be able to do it without condemnation by your own thoughts or emotions.
When you learn mindfulness, it can reduce overwhelm by showing you that what you think and feel are just in existence.
The reason that some people experience overwhelm is because they have the wrong reaction to what they feel.
Emotions are not always comfortable and so people shy away from wanting to allow these feelings to simply be.
So then they end up with overwhelm because they have these emotions that tie in to their self worth and they end up thinking they’re not worthy.
Mindfulness calls for you to acknowledge the thoughts and feelings but not to hold on to them. You acknowledge and then release it.
But when you’re acknowledging it, you do so with compassion and this reduces the overwhelm that you would normally feel.
When you let mindfulness take over, it can deal with the thoughts and feelings that you have that dictate your actions.
Overcoming Grief in Your Life Through Mindfulness
Grief is sorrow that is felt whenever there’s a loss. This can be the loss of a relationship, the loss of an ideal or the loss of a loved one.
Grief can be short term, chronic or crop up again years after you’ve experienced the loss.
People grieve in different ways but when grief isn’t dealt with, it can impact your physical health. You’ll notice more aches and illnesses than normal.
Grief can cause you to feel anxiety, anger, fear, and depression.
It can cause you to withdraw from your family, friends and avoid any other type of social contact.
Grief can affect your belief system and cause you to question things you used to believe.
There are various treatments for grief, but one of the most natural and effective at helping to deal with both short and long term grief is mindfulness.
What mindfulness does is to allow you to keep your mind on the present, on what you know to be true.
When you practice mindfulness, you’ll immerse yourself in a lifestyle that will help you understand the fleetingness of grief.
Like all emotions and experiences, grief will not last forever.
Mindfulness will help you to focus what you think about and how you feel about those things as they pertain to the here and now.
You’ll be able to come to terms with whatever it is that you’re grieving about.
When you make mindfulness a habit, it can help you to not let grief be the center of your emotions.
Any kind of loss will result in grief and that’s natural. It’s also healthy because you need to go through the stages of grief.
Those stages are mentally or emotionally denying the loss, feeling angry about the loss, bargaining – which is an inner argument based on if only or what if scenarios of what you would do if only the loss could be reversed, depression and finally, accepting the loss.
Mindfulness can teach you how to walk through the grief of your loss by showing you that the grief is not a constant. Every day the grief will change in intensity.
Some days the grief will feel devastating and you might wonder how you can possibly continue on.
Other days, the sting of the grief won’t feel as sharp. You’ll begin to see the positives again. You’ll reach acceptance.
Through mindfulness, you’ll learn exercises that can help you get through the grief.
You’ll learn how to sit quietly and focus on the breaths that you’re taking. As you’re focusing, you’ll begin to think about the grief and how you feel.
Don’t shy away from the thought.
Instead, acknowledge it. Once you acknowledge the thought, release it and bring your thoughts back to the present.
Mindfulness to Defeat Negative Attitudes
The attitude that a person has is based on their thought patterns and linked with emotions. It can be displayed as actions.
Negative attitudes often have a foundation of resentfulness at their core.
This resentment can be caused by a person’s point of view of themselves, of other people or toward life in general.
If you struggle with negative attitudes, you’ll want to deal with it as soon as possible.
There are numerous studies that have linked negative attitudes toward health problems, job performance and relationship struggles.
When you become stuck in a negative attitude, it can keep you imprisoned and lead to anxiety and depression.
You can set yourself free from any kind of negative attitude by practicing mindfulness.
The key to defeating negativity is to stop fueling the thought patterns that fed into it from the beginning.
The more you allow your thought patterns to center on negative things, the more ingrained within you a negative attitude will become and it will be your default response.
Mindfulness can bring you a positive attitude along with peace and joy.
When you practice it, what mindfulness does is to help you realize what your negative attitude patterns are.
An attitude is not a single occurrence. It’s something that’s developed with layer upon layer of negativity and this usually begins with your thoughts.
Negative thoughts are a direct result of your emotions.
Your emotions can become a direct result of your thoughts.
The two are tightly connected. Mindfulness will help you to be able to see the negative thoughts that are creating negative attitudes.
You’ll learn how to deal with these thoughts when they do enter into your mind so that you’re not dwelling on them.
When you have a negative attitude, it’s often too caused by anxiety.
You’re worrying about what has happened in the past or what come your way in the future. You struggle to believe that good things can occur in your life.
This kind of negative thought pattern becomes a negative attitude and you learn not to expect anything good.
This is the kind of self-defeating attitude that mindfulness can help you to overcome.
When you get trapped by a negative attitude, you don’t just view the world around you through cynicism and negativity, but you see yourself that way too.
You’ll turn on the inner critic you have and you’ll constantly rehash what you see as your flaws.
You’ll drag into the forefront of your thoughts all the mistakes you’ve made in the past and all the mistakes you believe you’re going to make in the future.
This feeds into feelings of low self-esteem which then feeds the negative attitude.
Mindfulness teaches you how to break this feeding frenzy by focusing on what’s good and what’s true in the present moment.
It allows you to set yourself free from any past regrets and any future expectations and simply live in the now.
Mindfulness Through Mantra Meditation
Mantras are a way that people can meditate by using sound. The sound helps the person to focus or to be fully aware of the present. What the sound is can vary.
For some people, they simply use a sound such as “om.”
Others will use a word or phrase. Whatever it is that’s used is the key that the person uses to associate with clarity and perspective.
Mantra meditation can help to achieve mindfulness, which will help the user to become self aware, to find self compassion and to calm stress.
Mindfulness achieved through mantra meditation can help bring peace to a mind that’s always racing with various thoughts.
This mindfulness through mantra meditation can also help calm emotions such as anger, fear or sadness.
When you practice a mantra, it can call a mind that’s wandering with a multitude of thoughts back to the present.
Meditation offers a lot of benefits but far too often what happens when people meditate is that they’re giving lip service to the meditation, but the mind isn’t on what they’re saying.
Their focus is skipping from a thought about what’s going on at home to what they have to get done at work.
This kind of thinking doesn’t allow the user to get the most benefit from meditation because the focus is gone.
When you utilize mindfulness through mantra meditation, then you can keep your focus on the meditation.
The reason that you’ll be able to do this is because the mantra helps you become mindful, which in turn keeps the thoughts focused.
Mantra meditation can help you achieve mindfulness because you can focus on the mantra itself.
You can focus on the sound that you hear, and on the way that your mouth moves to shape the sound or phrase.
You can also focus on the breaths that you take while you’re saying the mantra.
For people who don’t want to say a mantra sound or phrase out loud because they may be somewhere that they’re not alone, they can chant the mantra in their minds.
This will also help you to reach mindfulness. Mantras can be used to condition the mind to focus which is the core of mindfulness.
By speaking aloud or mentally speaking the mantra, this works to anchor the user in the present and keeps the focus on the awareness of the present.
Some people use short, one word mantras such as the word calmness or the word peace.
If you’re not sure which mantra to use, you can search for some that will fit what you’re looking for. Some mantras will have a deeper spiritual meaning than others.
Mindfulness Helps You Tame and Eliminate Stress
Because stress is so widespread, most people have started to believe that it’s something they just have to put up with. But you don’t have to live with stress.
Mindfulness is a technique that can help you control and get rid of the stress in your life.
Stress can impact your brain. It impacts the way that you think because it causes your brain’s cortex to actually slow its ability to reason when you’re under stress.
This is why people who experience stress can often make choices that aren’t in their best interest.
What practicing mindfulness does is calms the brain’s reaction to stress – which in turn calms the body’s reaction to stress.
You’ll gain a healthy way to cope with and get rid of anxiety.
During mindfulness exercises, what you’ll learn to do is to be fully present in your life.
You’ll learn how to be aware of what’s around you, of how you feel, and of the thoughts that are going through your mind.
These exercises can focus on a portion of each – such as thoughts and feelings – or they can separate them out so that you are only focusing on one at a time.
You might simple direct your attention to how you’re feeling in the moment.
Or you might instead pay attention to the sounds of the birds you hear or to the movement of the wind in the trees.
The idea is that you’ll be paying attention to what’s going on where you are right now rather than focusing your attention on whatever it is that caused you to experience stress.
To deal with stress, something else that mindfulness does is help you let go of the need to judge whatever it is that’s going on.
You won’t get on the hamster wheel of running the heavy situation over and over again in your mind.
Mindfulness is used so that you don’t carry the negative emotions stress can bring with you into the present moment.
It also prevents you from continually thinking about the stress.
You learn to let go and to simply be, to accept what your present moment in time is offering.
When you can utilize the ability to practice mindfulness, you can eliminate stress.
You can do this because the negative feelings and thoughts from the past won’t be what you focus on.
By using mindfulness to remain in the present, you also don’t reach for the future.
So much stress enters into our lives because of past issues. We worry about the past, but we do the same about the future.
We spend hours, days, months and even years fretting and stressing over things that haven’t happened and may never happen.
Dwelling on the past and worrying about the future increases stress. Mindfulness controls stress.
It teaches users how to let go of anxiety and tension and live fully in the present.
When you practice mindfulness, you don’t allow your mind to wander and dwell on things that can cause stress or keep the stress alive.
Pick something specific to focus on and allow it to give you clarity about what really matters.
Mindfulness Clues You in to Emotions You May Not Be Conscious of Right Now
Mindfulness has numerous benefits.
It can help you be fully present, show you how to gain self acceptance, raise your self esteem and it can help you to be in control of your thoughts and emotions.
But there can be times when you can emotions simmering within your body that you might not even be conscious of right now.
When you practice mindfulness, you have an awareness of what’s going on within your body emotionally that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
For example, sometimes people will have a lot of anger. They may even react to simple situations with an irritability or anger that seems misplaced.
By engaging in mindfulness, someone who struggles with thinking they have anger could find that what they’re actually feeling is grief.
Once they understand and identify the root of the emotion through the use of mindfulness, they can gain control of that anger.
When you’re aware of your emotions, you can change it.
Mindfulness can help you become conscious of your thoughts by focusing on your thoughts and feelings as they are currently.
You’ll be able to see if you’ve been fueling your subconscious with negative self talk that leave you uneasy, but you can’t quite put your finger on what’s going on with you emotionally.
By using mindfulness to clue in to your emotions, you’ll be able to more easily recognize them when you feel them.
This will help you grasp why you may have an upward or downward turn in emotions.
This can be especially helpful for people who can’t understand why they just don’t feel right.
They have an intuition that something’s going on with themselves but they can’t pinpoint it and mindfulness can help with that.
Mindfulness will allow you to focus on the inner self and bring what it is you’re not conscious of to the surface.
For example, you may have a sense of unease that you didn’t even realize was rooted in fear.
Once you establish that and recognize it, you’re able to call it what it is.
When you go through your day to day living, you can gather up outside stimuli to your emotions.
But you don’t grasp how something or someone made you feel until you practice mindfulness.
By not knowing what you’re feeling, you can react to something and not really know the why behind your actions.
You only know that something that happened or something someone did or said elicited you to speak quickly in response, almost like you had the answer waiting.
As you go through exercises that help you identify what you’re feeling and bring the emotions to the conscious level, you can change the way that you think or respond automatically to something.
When you become conscious of what you’re feeling, it can help you learn to see things from a different perspective and sometimes, a better perspective.
Mindfulness Can Teach You How to Have More Compassion
Compassion means to have sympathy for other people and yourself. It’s also known as sensitivity, concern and kindness.
Though most people do feel compassion for others, in today’s harried world, that compassion can quickly dissolve into impatience, anger and a judgmental attitude.
The person that most people struggle to have compassion for is the one that looks back at them in the mirror.
This is one reason that some people struggle with feeling enough compassion for others.
You can’t give what you don’t have to share. When you practice mindfulness, you’ll be able to feel more compassion for yourself and for others.
This means that when you interact with other people, you’ll do it in a focused manner, really paying attention to what they’re saying.
You’ll be fully engaged in the conversation and able to focus on what them without allowing your mind to be somewhere else.
Compassion is something that can grow if it’s nurtured.
It takes practice through mindful exercises to listen purposefully, to communicate and truly hear the answers of the other person.
When you practice mindful compassion, it lets the other person know that you care about him or her.
As a result of this, you’ll discover that your relationships, both personal and professional ones, will improve.
Mindfulness can show you how to be open to the experiences and the heartaches as well as the joy of other people.
It allows you, through compassion, to walk a mile in the other person’s shoes. There are benefits to using mindfulness to increase your compassion.
People who are compassionate experience less stress than people who have little or no compassion.
Mindfulness also helps to foster positive emotions over negative ones which fuels a greater compassion.
When a person is filled with negative thoughts and emotions, it can be difficult to be compassionate toward others.
By being mindful, you can focus on the positive emotion and release the negative.
Every time you practice mindful compassion, the amount of compassion that you have will grow.
You’ll be able to be more relaxed too and whenever something happens that can be frustrating, because you’ll have more compassion, it will help you respond in a kinder manner.
Mindfulness can help you take the first step toward developing a deeper well of compassion, too – because it will help you to be aware of the present emotions you experience.
During mindful exercises, you’ll learn how to give yourself kindness even when aware of thoughts and feelings that aren’t so kind.
When you learn self compassion, your compassion toward others can’t help but grow.
Mindfulness Can Help Those Afflicted with Anger Issues
Far too often, we tend to think of anger as emotion that we shouldn’t have. But anger is simply an emotion.
It’s what you do with that anger than can become something that it shouldn’t be.
If you get angry and lash out physically at someone, that’s the kind of anger that’s harmful.
But normal, non-violent anger is a tool that everyone has that can help their life to be better.
For example, if there’s injustice in your life, anger toward the situation will often motivate you to make changes to put a stop to the injustice.
It can help be a motivating factor that can benefit your life.
However, if you struggle with anger and you know that it’s a problem, then mindfulness can help you to deal with the issues that trigger the anger.
For everyone that experiences anger, there are emotional or physical triggers.
When you’ve worked hard all day only to find that the tasks you asked your kids or spouse to handle were blown off, that can be a trigger to cause anger.
It’s hard to work all day and then have to come home and take care of more responsibilities.
You can stop anger by focusing on what you’re feeling in reaction to that trigger. Normally, your stomach will tighten and you’ll tense up all over.
To release these physical symptoms, practice mindful breathing.
Breathe in and out slowly with deep breaths for the count of five. Picture the breath entering and leaving your body. Delve into the thoughts that are fueling your anger.
Most of the thoughts that drive anger center around things like you feel you’re being taken advantage of or you get tired of thinking no one is listening and you’re having to deal with the same issues over and over again.
Use mindfulness to examine these thoughts non-judgmentally and one by one, release these thoughts. Pay attention to how the anger is affecting you physically.
This mindfulness can help you see how the anger is hurting you.
The anger will calm as you focus on the breathing and letting the thoughts of why you’re angry clear away.
Once you’re no longer as angry as you were when your emotions were first triggered, use a mindful means of talking to the other person about what you feel.
Make sure that you keep in mind the other person’s feelings.
What they did, didn’t do, said or didn’t say may have been completely unintentional.
Discuss the situation calmly and be on the lookout for communication means that add to the anger.
Some of these are things like thinking negatively about the other person while you’re talking to them or assuming that they know exactly why you’re angry and just don’t care.
Mindfulness can help you to not place the blame on anyone when you’re communicating. Anger is an emotion that belongs to the person it rises up within.
No one has the power to make you feel anger if you don’t want to and mindfulness can help you to control it within yourself.
Mindfulness Addiction Therapy
Seeking therapy for an addiction can be a good way to set yourself free from a behavior that you don’t want to have any more.
Some therapy treatments focus only on one particular addiction.
Mindfulness addiction therapy can be used to successfully treat any addiction.
Because mindfulness helps people to focus and be aware of the present, this can help them to learn how to react when their body starts sending out signals for the substance.
There are many triggers that cause the body to react with a signal for a substance and one of these is stress.
When you feel stressed, the emotions that go along with stress can trigger whatever addiction you may have.
Mindfulness addiction therapy teaches people ways to deal with addiction and how to bring them under control by changing the way that they respond to the emotions and desire for a craving.
When you practice mindfulness, it can center your focus on your breathing and help you to learn how to be more conscious of your thoughts and actions.
Because of this, it can help you when the addiction cravings begin.
You’ll gain a better sense of control as well as being more mindful of making better choices for yourself and what’s healthier for you.
One of the things that can cause an addiction to hold people in its grip is the cycle of a habit.
Negative emotions can trigger a negative response, which then causes a reaction in you that’s negative but you might have set up as positive.
For example, the addiction smoking is often triggered by stress or negative emotions in relation to negative situations.
The negative response is that you then choose to smoke. When you smoke, the nicotine release causes you to feel relief from the stress, so you see that as a positive.
This reinforces the effect of smoking. Mindfulness can break the habit by allowing you to deal with the nicotine craving.
Practicing mindfulness will show you that a craving is simply a feeling that you can focus on rather than run from.
It teaches you to find the connection between the craving and what’s going on internally. It’s the same concept with having a food addiction.
People who have a food addiction will turn to food to deal with emotion.
Plus, certain foods do have an addictive quality to them. When you eat food, it makes your emotions feel better for a while.
These emotions, such as happiness, then reinforce that the habit is good.
Mindfulness can help you break the food addiction by showing you how that food is neither good nor bad and by being aware of the sensations within your body, you can control the cravings.
Taking drugs is something that people often do in order to escape from the pressures of their life.
By taking the drugs, they gain the escape which also reinforces the addiction.
Mindfulness can help to take away the control that a drug has over a person’s actions. An alcohol addiction can also benefit from practicing mindfulness.
Learning mindfulness can make you understand the feelings that you’re experiencing that are causing you to have the alcohol addiction.
You’ll learn not to judge yourself for the feelings that cause you to crave the alcohol and you’ll also learn to accept yourself with positive reinforcement rather than giving place to negative self-talk.
Mindfulness can set you free from situations that may cause you to want to give in to the addiction.
Mindful Self Compassion Helps You Live a Better Life
When you have compassion for yourself, it means that you treat yourself kindly despite times you feel that you’ve messed up somehow.
Mindful self compassion means that you foster thoughts that make it easier to be your best self while treating yourself well.
Self compassion is a struggle for some people because they have a reel that plays in their head that constantly berates them, telling them how they failed or how that they’re not worthy.
For others, it’s a struggle because they may have had situations from their childhood years where others who should have been kind to them weren’t.
It’s never too late to learn self compassion and how to apply it to your life.
When you practice mindful self compassion, it means that you put a stop to that negative talk inside your mind that you let beat yourself up.
It also means that you treat yourself kindly in your day to day living.
You stop doing things that are detrimental to your physical health or to your emotional health.
Some of the things that self compassion may help you to let go of is working to much, unhealthy eating habits, giving in to stress and putting up with relationships that aren’t good for you.
Mindful self compassion allows you to see your faults, but not dwell on them.
It allows you to recognize that you’re human and enables you to let go of past mistakes that you still hold over your own head.
Not only will you learn how to treat yourself kindly and lovingly, but you’ll be able to do the same toward others.
When you understand self compassion, it can help you be able to bring emotions under control.
This will let you stop allowing stress to push you toward anxiety or sadness or frustration. It will also help you be able to react to things without blaming yourself.
You’ll learn how to treat yourself with respect and how to encourage yourself rather than shaming who you are or things you’ve done.
Learning how to use mindfulness to find self compassion doesn’t meant that you believe you have no faults.
It means that you don’t call yourself names, you don’t think of yourself as a bad person.
You just love yourself as is, faults and all.
For people who have trouble grasping the concept of self compassion, think of the way that you treat the people that you really love.
You treat them kindly. You show understanding for their faults and you let it go when they let you down.
That’s the same way that you need to treat yourself – like a trusted and valued person that you love and want good things for.
Mindful Living Can Help Slow Down the Aging Process
From the time that you’re born, your body begins to age. Some people end up aging faster than others.
Some people know that the key to slowing down the aging process is found in mindful living.
When you practice mindful living, you not only add years to your life, but you live a better quality of life as well.
Scientific studies have shown that there’s a direct link between the emotional health of a person and his or her physical health.
When someone experiences negative emotions such as ones fueled by stress, it can speed up aging because it has a negative effect within the body.
When you practice mindfulness, you can slow down the aging process because you’re fighting back against the causes of aging.
Inside your body, you have DNA that act as caps on the end of your cells. These caps are called telomeres. These are needed to help your cells continually divide.
As time passes, these telomeres would gradually lose their length and the result would then be cell death.
You can prevent the shortening of the telomeres by practicing mindful living.
The connection between mindfulness and the length of telomeres rests in an enzyme known as telomerase.
This enzyme is responsible for keeping the telomeres at a healthy length. One of the key factors that can impact the length of the telomeres is stress.
When you have stress, it damages your cells and can lead to cell death.
There are many health conditions that can be linked with the telomeres once they begin to shorten. Among these are heart disease and some types of cancers.
When you have stress, especially if you have a lot of it, this will cause the telomere length to shorten faster.
But, you can change that by learning how to live mindfully.
When you live mindfully, you can defeat the stress that’s causing so many negative reactions within your body.
You can learn how to do mindful exercises that can boost the grown of the telomeres.
When you practice mindful living, you focus on the present and you don’t practice self negativity and you don’t judge what you think or feel.
What mindfulness does is it boosts the amount of telomerase that’s present in your body.
You learn how to stop the cycle of negative emotion and thoughts that tie in to stress.
Mindfulness also boosts positive thoughts and emotions which are linked to physical well being and the aging process is slowed.
Mindful living will allow you to have better concentration, gain self control and allow you to have more compassion for yourself and toward others.
Mindful Goal Setting to Let Your Present Guide Your Future
Goal setting is an important task if you want to create the future that you want. Mindfulness is important to your future even while you’re focusing on the present.
Mindfulness in the present is what can steer you toward the future that’s meant for you to have.
When you practice mindfulness, what it can do is guide your future by steering your thoughts and emotions toward a course of events that lead you.
Through mindfulness, your goals will be where you want to go but will be set in reality and not based on perception.
Mindfulness fights back about perception and this is important because our perceptions don’t tell the truth.
You might perceive that you’re a failure based on having made mistakes, but that perception is not reality.
If you didn’t make mistakes, you wouldn’t be human.
When you use mindfulness, it can lead you past thoughts and beliefs that can prevent you from having the future that you want.
Often, when we start thinking about the future, we label it with negative thoughts.
Things like “Oh, I’d never get that job” or “I don’t have the skills to move forward” and when we do that, we limit ourselves.
It can become cause and effect. Because you think that way, you might not even try. Plus, that negative self talk tears us down and erodes self esteem.
Mindfulness shows you how to use the present to steer gently toward the future but does in a way that affirms who you are and what you want.
You can focus on the present by creating goals that be beneficial to your success.
These are goals that you give yourself that are within your realm of your ability to accomplish them.
For example, if your goal is to open a restaurant, you would need to know what was involved in running one.
You would need to specifically know what steps you’d have to take to make that a reality.
Taking the overall picture and looking at it with a focus on the present can help you.
Mindfulness lets you see what goals you have to reach today in order to reach the future you want.
When you practice mindfulness with goal setting, you’ll be kinder to yourself when you hit a bump in the road.
Anything that you want out of life that’s worth having will be filled with roadblocks.
It’s just the way that life is. Mindfulness can help you not to berate and blame yourself when your goals don’t go according to plan.
Mindfulness can teach you how to keep the slate clean.
If something went wrong yesterday, the present moment is a brand new start. You won’t bring yesterday’s problems into today.
You’ll be able to quiet your mind and keep on heading toward your goals.
Mindful Fitness Tips for a Better Workout
Mindfulness is a technique that you can use to make your workout more effective.
When most people exercise, they don’t realize how closely associated the mind is with it. What you think and how you think can have a great impact on your workout.
Mindfulness can make a difference in whether you can stick with an exercise routine long enough for it to become a habit.
When you practice mindfulness, it can help you to have a better workout because it lets you focus on the goal that you have at that moment.
One of the reasons that some people have an ineffective workout or give up working out completely is because they fail to keep the focus on the present.
They look at where they want to be.
Any goal that’s in the future can seem a long way off.
Instead of projecting where you want to be with your workout goals, it’s better to keep your mindset on what you’re experiencing at the time of your workout.
You should want to get better and be able to have more stamina and do more repetitions, but that should not be where your thoughts are.
Rather than concentrating on wanting to be able to make it to thirty reps in two weeks, mindfulness can help you keep focused on adding a few additional reps for that day.
More often than not, when people work out, they’re not even paying attention to what they’re doing.
They’re working out and listening to the conversation around them. Or they’re listening to music or watching the television.
These actions take away the focus from the working out. By focusing, you increase your stamina and strengthen your mindset.
By using mindfulness to keep your thoughts on the present, you can teach yourself how to gain consistency.
A lack of consistency is one of the main reasons that people quit a workout routine. It’s easy to blow off exercising when you’re not practicing mindfulness.
Using these tips can help you be mindful for a better workout.
When you’re exercising, think about how it feels to move your body. Pay attention to the sensation of moving your arms and legs as you’re on the treadmill.
Picture the body weight going down and your strength rising.
Focus on your muscles as you’re working out and picture them lean and powerful.
Through each exercise that you do, choose one tense to focus on – such as what you can hear or feel.
Keep your mind focused on that sense only. This will help to keep you in the present.
For the times when you don’t feel like exercising, mindfulness can help keep you motivated.
Mindful Communication Tips for Couples
Being in a relationship can come with a lot of challenges and one of these challenges is communication. People don’t communicate the exact same way.
You may say something and think that you’re speaking lovingly, but your partner’s communication skills may interpret it as a slight.
If you want to better the way that you communicate with your partner, learning mindful communication is the best way to do it.
You’ll learn ways to communicate effectively and how to wade through any conversations that keep the two of stuck in a place where you can’t find common ground.
You’ll also learn through mindfulness what to do if you end up in an argument. Mindfulness teaches you how to communicate with an open mind.
Just because you have a clear picture in your mind and an opinion of how things should be doesn’t make it correct.
You have to be open to the other person’s thoughts, feelings and ideas.
Mindfulness teaches you to release any past feelings about communication with the other person.
It allows you to let the other person have a clean slate without any past offenses causing you to pre-judge the current conversation.
When you practice mindfulness, it will help you be able to talk without causing the other person to go on the defensive.
You’ll learn to listen in gentleness without bringing negative words or body language into the conversation.
When you have a point you want to get across, you’ll be able to talk about it without becoming defensive or without casting blame onto your partner.
You’ll be more receptive toward the other person when you practice mindfulness because you’ll learn to communicate while focusing on the other person.
You’ll be able to move the focus away from “I want” or “I need” communication to “you need” or “you want,” which will evolve into what you need as a couple that will benefit the both of you.
By practicing mindfulness, you’ll be able to foster an atmosphere that makes it easy for both you and your partner to share your hearts.
When there’s a lack of communication between couples, it’s usually because one or both partners don’t feel like they’ve been heard or they don’t feel like they can trust the other person with what they’re really feeling.
When you learn mindful techniques, you’ll learn not to presume that you know what’s going on inside your partner’s mind.
A lot of communication between couples is based on what you think the other person is thinking or feeling.
Mindfulness can give you the understanding to remain calm even when you’re dealing with a topic that might have pushed your buttons in the past.
When you’re communicating with your partner, you can practice breathing exercises learned through mindfulness to help keep you from becoming angry or defensive.
You’ll learn how to appreciate your partner’s many unique differences, how to offer encouragement, how to communicate with openness, honesty and gentleness.
