5 Easy Ways to Make Mindfulness Part of Everyday Life
The sun was just starting to set. It had been a particularly difficult and long day at work, and I was fighting my way through horrendous traffic to get home. Playing back the day’s scenes in my head over and over again and feeling close to tears, I realised something needed to give. I remembered reading an article about Mindfulness and how it had helped so many people. From that moment, I promised myself to make Mindfulness part of my everyday life.
I decided to take a 30-minute detour to the beach. As I reached the water’s edge, the scenery in front of me was lit up with the most beautiful oranges and pinks, and in the calm of that evening the sea was glassy and mirror like. With the window wound down, I could feel the lightest of breezes on my face. And for a while, I just sat in silence. The smell of the salt drifting off the ocean, feeling the chill along my arms as temperatures dropped. Suddenly the world, and with it my mind, fell still and calm.
What is Mindfulness? Mindfulness is a day to day process of being aware of our thoughts, feelings and the surroundings around us. It involves accepting our thoughts and feelings, without judgement, and tuning in to the present rather than allowing the past to direct our choices in life. They don’t have to be big things. I have learnt to notice and appreciate the simple things more, to take time out to be creative, to spend more time in nature, to be more conscious of my thoughts and to remember life isn’t just about being serous and grown up. And that is just 5 easy ways to make Mindfulness part of everyday life.
In recent years Mindfulness has really hit the mainstream media and has been offered as an escape for what most of us suffer from: increasingly busy and stressful lives.
“Mindfulness is a pause, in whatever form it takes, and gives us the chance to step back and just enjoy existing for a little while”
Mindfulness is understood to be rooted in Buddhist meditation and many studies have reported the physical and mental health benefits of practising mindfulness, and the positive impact it has on our lives. It can be incredibly easy to rush through life, and to not notice much about our own wellbeing and what is going on around us. Paying just a little more attention to the present moment, I found, can help us enjoy life more and develop a better understanding of ourselves.
So how did I become more mindful? Understanding the importance of being aware is easy enough but finding the time and space to really focus on improving our presence in the world is a little more difficult. My personal opinion is that mindfulness is an individual endeavour and finds us all in different ways. I like to think I’m now quite good at being mindful in my own way, although I have a different phrase for it. I’ve always considered it ‘enjoying existing’. And I do this by feeling the sun on my face, listening to the sea, and loving where I live.
I believe the most important thing, to truly feel the health benefits of mindfulness, is to find your own path to being present. That being said, it is sometimes hard to know where to start. Here are a few little changes I made to my everyday life to start on that mindfulness journey:
Noticing and appreciating the everyday
Taking time out to be creative
Investing in ‘Green time’ – Time outside, surrounded by ‘green’ plants and trees
Watching my thoughts
Remembering to ‘play’
Appreciating the Everyday (Or the secret to enjoying existing)
This is by far the main focus for my form of mindfulness. It’s all about the little things, and not forgetting to be thankful for all the wonderful moments we experience through life. According to Professor Williams, former director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, this is the best way of changing and disrupting the ‘autopilot’ mode that comes from everyday interactions. For me personally, that is what mindfulness has always been about. Finding that sweet spot in which you can really just appreciate the world around you, without any of the pressures and worries of day to day life. At that point, I can think internally about how I’m feeling, self-analyse and reflect on my wellbeing.
Taking time to fully appreciate yourself and your surroundings, and the everyday things that are so easy to take for granted, really gives us time to rejuvenate. I believe wholeheartedly that enjoying existing, for just a few minutes a day, is the soul food we need to start on a journey of improved mental health and overall happiness.
Taking time out to release our creative side
There are a multitude of reports that suggest that being creative can help people find their inner-peace. The concept of mindfulness is meant to be something that we can incorporate into our day to day life and being involved in art and creative past-times is a really fun, interesting and relatively easy way to do that.
Crafts that work with yarn seem to be particularly made for mindfulness. From spinning wool, to crocheting and knitting, they lend themselves to a steady and individual rhythm. Whilst my hands are regularly repeating the same pattern of movements, I find myself heavily focused and aware of the current moment.
Hand and wheel spinning wool are said to introduce mindfulness as part of the creative process, as the calmness and attention they demand to make a beautiful product can feel akin to that of meditation. Participating in these arts encourages us to take a break from the frantic pace that life can sometimes bring and puts us in touch with nature in ways that are difficult to find elsewhere. Awareness of surroundings, in my mind, is quite a key part of the mindful process.
Personally, I find that letting the wool run through my fingers and being a part of the creation of something new, helps me to remember the strong bond that ties the natural world together. It is an incredibly physical creative act, given the quiet it encourages, and with that comes deep thought and peace.
Interestingly, some people believe that taking time out of our day for mindfulness can also lead to increased creativity. In-fact, companies are increasingly using meditation as a motivating practise, stress-reducer and creativity enhancer for their employees, and some of the most notable include the likes of Google and Goldman Sachs.
Danny Penman, author of “Mindfulness for Creativity”, suggests that “mindfulness meditation enhances the essential skills needed for creative problem solving”. Meditation, it explains, switches on “divergent thinking” and improves attention span – together these make it easier to register the usefulness of new ideas. It also supposedly nurtures courage, which will help build resilience in the face of setbacks. Research by Erasmus University in Rotterdam certainly suggests this is the case. According to them, ten to twelve minutes of mindful meditation is all it takes to significantly increase the scope of creative ideas.
Creativity and mindfulness are clearly intrinsically linked. Engaging creative work and pushing our limits can get us into a focused state of high awareness, and in return that mindful practise can boost our creative thinking. If we want to become more mindful but are struggling for motivation to meditate, we need to find the artistic inner us in some way; bake, knit, draw, paint, or sing. Doing something fun, something interesting and something that will keep our attention until our thoughts quieten as we enter that mindful state.
Getting outside and getting green
“Green time” is a phrase used to describe being outside and amongst nature. It refers to being in particularly green spaces, such as fields and forests, and the difference they can make to overall happiness and wellbeing. Spending time outdoors has been shown to lower stress and raise moods and improve mental health. A study by Chiba University in Japan found that participants that spent more time in a forest than a city had lower heart rates and lower levels of cortisol – Cortisol is a hormone that is often used as a marker for stress.
Just spending 20 minutes walking in the park takes us away from noise and smells that reminds us of everyday life, and according to research, is enough for us to be feeling the benefits.
It brings me back to my earlier point, about finding a place or feeling that we can use to become more in-touch with our inner selves. Getting out in nature gives us a way to refocus our minds, and to find that flow of thought that allows us to really take in our environment.
Getting outside also gives us a unique opportunity to digitally detox. Taking a step back from technology is a brilliant way to de-stress, and green time is as good a time as any to switch everything on to airplane mode and ignore the world. One of the biggest current problems with social media, and I am guilty of it myself, is the comparison game. The mental impact of comparing ourselves to others is known to be quite significant – So turning the link off to that world for even an hour could dramatically improves my mood.
Watching our thoughts
Mindfulness is about an awareness of our environment, and a focussed train of present thoughts that take us away from the stresses of modern life. In my experience, this takes practise. It is so easy for my mind to drift. I start with the intention to think solely about my breathing, and suddenly I’m planning the introduction to my next story or trying to schedule my weekend.
To really feel the benefits of mindfulness, it is said, you need to be practising regularly. Personally, this requires a particular attention to my thought pattern. I pay attention to my thought process every day, and with time, it has adjusted to being considerably more positive and present than it was before. It has become more of a way of life than just five minutes of meditation when I have time.
That’s not to say I try to be happy all the time, or that we should be. Mindfulness is all about acceptance of the moment we’re in. Allowing ourselves to feel how we’re feeling. I just take the time out of my day to be aware of it.
Letting ourselves experience different feelings is an important part of coping with life’s challenges, but mindful thought and being present has been shown in countless studies to lead to greater emotional stability and improved quality of sleep, which makes perfect sense as sleep quality is reportedly directly linked to stress.
Incorporating playtime and fun
This is one of the easiest, and most fun, routes to everyday mindfulness.
As adults, we often forget how important it is to play – and yet it is often the case that the people that appreciate life the most are the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously.
We’re never too old to have fun, and when it comes to feeling present there is never a time when we will be more in the moment. We’ve just had a significant amount of snowfall in the North of the UK. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of young families out taking full advantage of the first opportunity to sledge this year – but they’re not the only ones. Adults are just as good at playing as kids, if they give themselves the chance to.
I went sledging. It was absolutely awesome. But on the drive over I was concerned about being the oldest one on the hill (that wasn’t snowboarding or skiing). That really wasn’t something I needed to worry out. There were multiple other ‘proper grown-ups’ hurling themselves down the slopes too, and between us we had such a laugh.
Laughing releases endorphins that really make us feel great. And once we relax and let loose a little, it is quite easy to find humour in every little part of life.
Conclusion
Despite it sometimes feeling like some hidden mystery (I know it did to me), it is very easy to become involved with and start appreciating the impact of mindfulness. Some things most of us do already, other things we may want to give a go to start our journey to being more present. It doesn’t take big steps – just a willingness to incorporate small changes to our everyday lives. Being more in touch with ourselves and our environment can make a big difference to our health and wellbeing. So look around a little more, embrace your inner creative, take that break outside, get in the here and now and have a laugh. That is a few easy ways to make Mindfulness part of everyday life.
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