3 Simple Steps Towards Mindfulness
Table of Contents
Note: I’ve chosen to steer from “calls to action”. I don’t want to pile onto your list of things you “should” or “shouldn’t” be doing. These are practices I use in my recovery from perfectionism, which I do feel the need to note is very much a work-in-progress. Ironically, my only piece of advice is to take or leave advice. You do you, and do it proudly.
Journaling
Gratitude Practice
<= 5-minute Meditations
What is Mindfulness Really?
There’s a lot of buzz and existing thought leadership around the concept of “mindfulness”, along with quite the robust articles and blogs on how to practice it (example: Positive Psychology’s post here). If you’re here, you likely have heard things like how helpful meditation would be, how we all should practice being more mindful, and maybe, if you’re like me, you have a picture of zenned-out people, sitting quietly with their eyes closed and speaking with soft whispers.
There are the technical definitions of the word - Wiki link here - and while the resources seem to infinite, the answers felt abstract to me for the longest time.
“Mindfulness is the practice of purposely bringing one's attention to the present-moment experience without evaluation…” (Wiki Link)
As previously mentioned here, I am working through my perfectionism. Where this shows up when I was learning about and getting started with mindfulness was by an “all-or-nothing” mentality.
If I can’t meditate for 60 minutes every single day on a cushion in perfect silence, then what’s the point?
Fact is, while the above might work for some people, a mindfulness practice doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s not absolute. It’s not an all-or-nothing process. Mindfulness techniques can be dolloped into parts of our lives. Every little bit helps, and it’s my experience it’s a cumulative, snow-ball effect.
I find when I’m mindful, and checked in with my mental health
I’m more fun to be around
I’m more relaxed
My head hurts less
I eat less candy (my nemesis)
I move more
I laugh more
For me mindfulness is simply being aware of my shit and how it’s showing up at the moment.
This can be in the form of “self-awareness” or “emotional intelligence”. This includes things like:
being aware of my emotional triggers so that when they come up I have the space to think: “this isn’t anything personal; it just is” before reacting
being aware of my habits so that when I go to do something, I realize I’m doing it (labeling) and why (triggers)
being aware that feelings and things aren’t “good” and “bad”; they are; they come; they go
Knowing the above, labeling thoughts / events, thinking about feelings / habits, bringing all of the things that would normally process and happen in the sub-conscious up to the conscious helps me get through the day, maintain relationships with people around me, and most importantly, with myself. With more conscious living and reactions, I feel calmer, more at ease with unexpected turns of events, and less worried.
How to Get Started, Simply
Journaling
Why
I find that when I start to tell people a story, I can vocalize my reasoning behind a reaction much better than I can think about it in the moment. For example - if someone says something and I react defensively, when I later tell someone about the interaction I can tell that person exactly why I got defensive, what emotional triggers were hit upon, and even what I need to do to rectify the situation after the fact. What I wasn’t doing well was having that reasoning process in the moment so that I could prevent the defensiveness and the need to go back and apologize / explain myself / etc.
Journaling allows me to work that reasoning out without needing to talk to another person each time. I find when I write out a story the outcomes are much the same as vocalizing it. My brain immediately kicks into gear - ordering events, analyzing what was said and why, and what my reaction was.
By practicing this reasoning more regularly (I’d like to say daily, but let’s be real — 3-4 x a week), I found my brain would start to practice this reasoning more in the moment. Same someone would say something, hitting on the same trigger as always, and I find myself talking to myself about how “they’re just triggering me; it’s really not as bad as I think it is” and reacting differently. Sometimes it’s a direct: “no, I won’t be doing X” but without the defensive tone. Sometimes it’s just letting it all go and not addressing it at all. Depends on the person and the trigger. Regardless, the reaction is more conscious in the moment. This in turn allows me more peace-of-mind later. I’m not replaying interactions and making a list of amends after everyone leaves me*.
I also found journaling helped me identify patterns. Much like any data processing effort, the more you document and write, the more likely you are to learn something. I was able to identify more triggers, more habitual reactions, and understand more of who I am, making it easier for me to stay calm.
In my experience, the need to stay calm is most important during an anxiety episode. This is how people stay calm under pressure — whether it’s a presentation, a challenging project, realizing a huge error was made, or meeting new people. Pressures and episodes vary for everyone, causing different levels of anxiety. Being able to calm myself down, realize the patterns I have, and address them with thoughtful reasoning, I can keep my mental and physical health headed in a positive direction. Journaling helps me with this.
A good post-mortem of my day or of an episode helps me understand the why so that I can wedge space between trigger and reaction. Once I have the space, I can start to break the habit loop that maps in my brain, reroute it, and all the while keeping my stress levels in check.
How to Journal
Choose a medium. I use my “Notes” app with my Apple account. It’s free, shows up on all of my Apple devices, and my notes can be locked so only I can see them.
Set a reminder. I use the “Strides” app (paid for version lets you have way more reminders to do things).
Just do it. Doesn’t have to take long. Doesn’t need to be formal. Doesn’t need to be fancy. There are days I write for 30 minutes. Days I write for 2, get distracted and don’t come back. Days I write multiple times, or not at all.
*as an aside - I have social anxieties. Not enough to prevent me from doing things, but enough to cause me stress after things like happy hours or parties. One thing I found that transformed my anxiety, counterintuitive to me, was to not drink alcohol at these. If I was at a work happy hour, I would order 1 alcoholic beverage but spend the rest of the evening drinking soda water. When I’d get back to my hotel or home, I found I ruminated much less of the evening, slept much better, and overall was less stressed.
Gratitude Practice
Why
In preparation for particularly difficult things, I take some mental time to practice being grateful. The practice itself isn’t fancy or structured. I think it’s a version of reframing, although I’m not entirely sure. I may have picked this trick up in therapy sessions, off a podcast, or in a book. At this point I can confidently tell you I have no idea why I started doing this or who’s idea it was, but I find it helpful. A great example (I think this example was from a TED talk somewhere) is when I have a presentation I’m dreading, to instead say things like “I’m excited for this presentation to be over.” It’s a simple reframe - instead of walking around saying: “UGH, I really don’t want to do this.” I started saying: “I cannot wait for this to be over so I can stop thinking and worrying about it.” It wasn’t a magic bullet, but it did help. I do also think it changed my tone during those meetings, from one of “wuh, wuh” to a “Hai guys! So excited to be here!” Because I was. I genuinely was grateful the time had finally come so I could get it over with!
For a while before reframing presentations, I had been practicing gratitude (and also using the Loving Kindness meditation if I had the forethought or time) before interacting with people who might trigger me more than others. If I know I have something planned, I can take 60 seconds to list of 3 reasons I’m grateful for that person. It shifts my mind from one of defensiveness to one of positivity. It reframes what they say, as they’re saying it, from an emotional trigger to more of what it more likely is - them just saying something.
I’m finding I am surrounded by negative thoughts, feelings, and news. Between social media, the state of the world, and some of the interactions in real life, there’s a lot to drag someone’s mental health down. I spend a lot of time being careful about what I read, who I interact with, and where I get my news from, yet there are things out of my control, believe it or not.
For the things out of my control, having a tool to pry out positivity and reframe my mentality helps me see situations and people for what they really are - not 100% good, not 100% bad, but somewhere in between. Every thing is just existing, and the only thing that’s positive or negative is how I left them effect me and my stress levels.
How to Practice Gratitude
Identify the “thing”. For me, if I’m journaling and my mood is negative, or if I’m dreading something, that’s my “thing.”
Quickly list off 3-5 things that are positive about it. If I’m journalling, I literally stop, drop down a couple of lines, label the next section: Things I’m grateful for about X, and then type out the positive thoughts. If I’m not at my computer, I mentally check them off silently.
Post-mortem after the “thing”. I make a mental note after the fact (or journal on it, if I journal timely) on how the gratitude may or may not have impacted my time. Typically the gratitude practice helps, even if it’s just a little bit, which helps me snow-ball the impact into the next dreaded thing.
<= 5-minute Meditations
Why
Meditating is another way to wedge space between trigger and reaction. I find when I practice meditation, I generally feel more grounded, I feel more rational (and less reactive), and I feel more focused. This helps me with all of the things listed at the top - be more fun to be around and generally feel less stress. I also find it helps me as I work out and as I work, work.
If I run into a challenge working, using the grounding techniques of breath-work and meditation, I have this magic reset button. It helps me persist. It helps me reframe. It helps me stay non-judgmental and out of my head. All of these things lead to overcoming the challenge eventually. Persistence and staying out of my head was the key to all of my data work. If I couldn’t cultivate those skills, I couldn’t do my job.
These days, meditations are everywhere. I actually found it overwhelming - how do you choose what’s best?? And once you find an app, how do you choose which meditation to do?? In the end I decided not to care, and to just do whatever. It’s so freeing to let go of those types of choices.
The other thing I had to let go of was having a “substantial” practice. I have this dream of someday having a meditation corner or room where I go and sit for hours a day and just be zen. Yet reality is I don’t have the actual physical desire to do this. The more I hung onto this as a “goal" (going goalless!) the less I meditated. I was experiencing the exact opposite of what I wanted. As stated in my “Going Goalless” blog, I decided if I have a habit I’m not doing, I was going to rethink it. Meditation was exactly that. It was a habit I kept ticking “No” for on the Strides app. This is because, mentally, I wanted to meditate for 30 minutes at a time, and just couldn’t carve that time out of my day. It also was because mentally I wasn’t counting unconventional mindfulness practice as meditation, when it probably could count. I was looking for the perfect (30 minutes, sitting on my cushion, silence) meditation before I’d check that box off as “Yes”.
I’ve changed my habit tracker to say <= 5 minutes of meditation. I’ve done this in the past with great success. 2-5 minutes between meetings, a few minutes on a walk, or whatever else I could cram into a day full of calls. I especially find it useful between things where I need a reset. If I am finding myself in a heightened state, whether it’s adrenaline, anxiety, or something else, if I take 2-5 minutes to breathe, it resets the state, and lets me show up to the next thing calmer, more focused, and less reactionary. It’s why we all take deep breaths (albeit dramatically) when we need to calm down.
Fact is, any amount of meditation, in my experience, is helpful.
How to Meditate
I recommend finding a default version of this that works. For example, when I don’t feel like meditating, or don’t want to pick one out, I default to the “Breathe” app for 2 minutes on my watch. This reduces the “getting started” friction.
Identify your 2-5 minute meditation medium. For me, I use the “Breathe” app on my Apple watch, a song I’m thinking about (like when a yoga teacher plays a song for savasana), or the 5 minute Loving Kindness meditation on the Calm app. Another option would be a simple timer and silence.
Get comfy. The “right” way to meditate is typically sitting upright with a straight back. Sometimes I can’t or don’t want to do that, but doing it the “right” way doesn’t stop me from at least doing something. I do try to be careful about being too comfy, though, because I do love a good nap, and that’s not usually possible or my intention when I sit to do my meditation. Sometimes I’m leaned back on my couch. Sometimes at my desk. Sometimes in my kayak. Sometimes on a walk. You get the idea.
Focus on something for the entire 2-5 minutes. If I don’t have something stationary, I focus on my inhales and exhales. If I’m kayaking, I focus on my paddles, right and left. If I’m doing a guided meditation or have a specific mantra in mind, I’ll focus on that. If I get distracted, I just pick up where I left off as soon as I become aware I was distracted.
Outcomes to Watch For
Mindfulness is supposed to have all sorts of medical benefits. It’s also touted for solving all sorts of mental health issues. There are a lot of resources citing papers and studies already out there.
The outcomes I have experienced myself, while listed above, are expanded on here.
I’m more fun to be around because I’m more relaxed, in less pain, and am sleeping better.
I’m more relaxed because mindfulness helps me embrace my flexibility. Our minds are so nimble and fast. They’re so much faster than we even realize. I feel relaxed because I trust my instincts more, I’m mindful of what my limitations and boundaries are so I can remain flexible within those, and because I’m more likely to recognize things aren’t “good” and “bad”; they just are.
My head hurts less probably because I eat less candy, move more, and am more relaxed. Hard to know what came first.
I eat less candy (my nemesis) because I am intercepting my triggers. When I reach for the sugar, I literally think “I don’t really want this because I’ll feel crappy later”, and then I either stop or I eat something more sustainable. Sometimes I still eat the candy, but I eat less of it because I’m more mindful about what and how much I’m eating.
I move more because I’m mindful of the fact that I feel better when I get outside, I have more energy when I lift weights in the morning, and the rest of my day feels more productive when I move earlier on.
I laugh more because I’m less worried about what’s going to happen and am in-tune with the right-now which is sometimes quite hilarious. I also pause more throughout the day, and often get to check out what my indoor and outdoor pets are doing, which again, are typically hilarious.
I also find I’m more willing to start new things because I don’t stress as much about if / when they’ll be done, if the parameters and environment are perfect, and if I “can” do it. All of the above helps me flex my “just try” muscle, so I’m learning more, getting a lot done, and all without adding a ton of stress into my life.
Not everyone experiences the same thing. I’d love to hear how mindfulness impacts you and your day-to-day!
