The word Mindfulness is everywhere these days, it’s buzzing around in the medical and psychological communities. It gained traction in the west in recent times and now everyone has heard it. When people practice mindfulness, their ability to focus increases, their ability to concentrate, cope with physical and emotional pain increases, and they enjoy life more. Practising mindfulness has even been shown to prevent depression relapse in some cases.
Mindfulness is just living in the present and noticing, feeling everything that’s happening around you. It’s to make you more compassionate in life. So that you can live to your fullest. It’s also known to increase happiness and decrease stress as it’s side effects. Mindfulness sounds good, and in this article, we’ll go through the ways you can make mindfulness a part of your life.
Start in the Morning
It’s a great habit to start practicing mindfulness in the morning as it is the start of the day. Doing meditation in the morning by focusing your mind on your breath is a good way to slow down and notice things. You should also focus on your surroundings and environment. The sound and the air near you when you’re meditating for Mindfulness.
Focus on what you’re doing
Mindfulness is being present at the moment, Focus on what you’re doing means if you’re doing a task, you should be completely involved in it. While eating your meals, focus on the texture colour and taste of the food. Focus on what ingredients it contains. While working on a puzzle, focus on the puzzle completely, understand every part of it and then make a decision. While walking in a park, focus on the trees, the grass and the nature around you.
When your mind wanders, Bring back your focus on breath
There’s the term “Monkey mind”. We all have this monkey mind in us and it keeps thinking random thoughts about the past or the future events of our life. We can’t stop our thoughts from coming to our minds though. What we can do is stop noticing those thoughts by focusing our monkey mind on something else. We can focus on the breath as soon as we realize that our monkey mind is taking control over us. When we train this part of our mind and control it. We become more mindful of our actions as there are fewer impulse decisions.
Spend Time in Nature
Spending time in nature can help you become more mindful. When we take a walk in a park, we tend to notice the greenery around us and the nature around us. This gives us time to slow down a bit and be more present. In Japan, there’s a therapy in which if you are mentally stressed you need to spend one day in nature to calm yourself down. Spending time in nature also makes you more empathetic and affectionate towards the life around you.
Do things a bit slower
Take your time while doing things, you might be doing tasks at a very rapid pace. When we increase the speed of our work, we tend to not notice the intricate details that go in while we’re doing something. Slowing down by even 20-25 percent while doing something gives us time to notice the smaller things. Which makes us more mindful of what we’re doing. We tend to think that this will make us slower at work, but it lets you focus more and optimize what you’re doing.