5 Easy Mindfulness Tips for Everyday Situations

Mindfulness — most usually achieved through meditation — is a state of mind that helps people enjoy their everyday lives to the full. Cliched as it is, the key to a more relaxed self is to be happy in your own skin, to feel contained in your situation. The problem is, not many people can actually achieve this state of mind. As we have all realised by now, not lying to ourselves is the biggest challenge one can face. “I’ll start tomorrow”, we keep saying until we forget why we wanted to start something new in the first place.
Donut resist the temptation of a quiet mind

Brainpower

The human body is incredible. We have a HUGE brain that requires a lot of energy to sustain, roughly 20% of your resting metabolism goes to fueling your brain. We have muscles that can adopt and learn amazing and complex things in a matter of months. A few things we could do:

• We can achieve basic fluency in an easy language in 48 days.
• You can learn to play basic piano in 6 months.
• It takes 200 hours of reading to become an expert in your chosen field.

“200 hours is a lot!”, you might exclaim. Yes, if you dedicate an hour a day to reading, that’s around half a year. In the same time, that means you can become an expert in rocket science in half a year (with a little exaggeration)! You don’t even have to be an internet billionaire either, although I guess it might help. But you can dedicate a lot more, should you be able to concentrate better.

Focus

The key element is the ability to focus on the task ahead. It is extremely easy to get distracted, we are surrounded with devices and services designed to be addictive. I mean, an average person touch their phone over 2600 times a day. This is a crazy number. It means — given we spend 16 hours a day awake — that we touch our phones 3 times every minute. Once every 20 seconds! Just wow. Man, do we need to break from some of our bad habits.

Anyway, the question of focus. Meditation can help to achieve better concentration abilities by training the mind. Meditation is often misinterpreted; I’ve touched on this subject and my first year of active meditation in a separate article:

To summarise it up, you have to be comfortable sitting in silence and incorporate all distractions that surrounds you, let it be the TV turned up too high by your significant other or kids running around, into your meditation sessions. Ultimately, you want to be able not to be distracted by anything.

Don’t run away from distractions; mould them into your everyday life, come at peace with them.

By doing so, you will start swimming with the stream, not against it. Incorporating mindfulness into your everyday activities sounds trivial, but this statement can’t be further away from the truth. Just as a seemingly easy task as sitting in silence is hard, being mindful before and after your meditation session is even harder. We live our lives on autopilot, hovering over menial tasks. We can’t find peace in our lives because we don’t know where to look for it.

Tricks of the Trade

Here are 5 tips to help you incorporate mindfulness in your day even if you think you haven’t got time to tend to it:

1. Look up: Finding mindfulness in the most trivial tasks is the hardest. You can’t concentrate on walking because it comes so naturally. What to concentrate on? You take one step then another and eventually your mind will drift away. One way to break the habit is to look up when you walk. We only observe our surroundings by looking straight ahead, but architects have this very strange habit of placing a lot of interesting looking ornaments high above the pedestrian’s field of view. Therefore, even if we walk the same routes every day, we can find things interesting enough to keep us present.
2. Listen to your ears and nose: Another way to tame your mind to concentrate on current affairs is to block out your vision. This doesn’t mean that you must close your eyes while walking on busy streets (that’d be silly), but instead of focusing on vision only, try to listen to your ears and nose to pick up sounds and smells around you. People often walk around with headphones on, not like anyone listens to sounds of the streets anyway. By not focusing on your eyes only, you can unlock a hidden layer of perception and actually enjoy being out and about.
3. Gradual increase: There is a big temptation — especially if you are using an app to meditate — to ramp up the time spent meditating by doing longer sessions from day 1, so you’d have a feeling of instant gratification. As with acquiring any new skills, it takes time and perseverance to master mindfulness. Start with shorter sessions, and increase the length of the sessions gradually. Don’t forget that you are building a habit and you are practicing mindfulness for your own benefit. There is no point in cheating and there is no prize for hitting milestones earlier. You doing this for yourself, in your own pace.
4. Do one thing at the time: This might be the toughest challenge of them all. What was the last time you had a meal without either watching television, reading a newspaper/book, talking to other people or most likely, checking your phone? You shouldn’t be a hermit and meet people, but on some occasions, try to just eat. Like, taste the food and enjoy it. We oftentimes try to multitask although we can’t. As a result of this, we won’t be able to appreciate either of the tasks we perform. Should you do one task at a time, you’d give your brain a chance to devote its full attention to one activity and be more present.
5. Challenge yourself: Meditation is all about focus and bettering your own capabilities to improve concentration. Just like in any other activity to be mastered, you should constantly challenge yourself while practising so you’ll be able to fully engage yourself in the task. What you would like to achieve is a flow state; when the task ahead feels just out of reach so you feel challenged and motivated as opposed to frustrated. Getting out of our comfort zone is extremely important and could feel overwhelming at times. In the same time, by just doing what feels comfortable for us won’t get us anywhere far.

If you found any of these tips useful, please feel free to leave a comment and/ or clap. Be mindful and curious, friends!