Mindfulness

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is maybe a term you heard in your daily life. Maybe it’s something you heard about while improving your meditation skills.  Mindfulness is being defined in general as being present or giving your full attention to the present without judging it.

This is when you can fully focus on your tasks without thinking about things you are going to do after that task or what you are going to eat that night. Learning to improve your mindfulness will give you a lot of benefits. Mindfulness helps you take a distance from bad thoughts in different situations. You will be able to see your thoughts more clearly and be able to take distance between negative thoughts.

Why train mindfulness?

Mindfulness trains your own attention. Training yourself to keep being able to focus yourself on your present task is beneficial for yourself. You will also be more acceptable with yourself if making a mistake. Because you are paying more attention to yourself in specific moments you will be able to see your pattern of behavior more easily. This can come in handy when trying to remove things like bad habits. Read all about it over here.

It will also make you a lot more productive because you are only thinking about the task before you and nothing else. Because you are more focused tasks will take less time. With mindfulness you will be able to enjoy life more and recognize the beautiful things in different situations. It also teaches you on how to enjoy the smaller things.

Mindfulness will train yourself to keep your thoughts in place. Mindfulness will teach you to be more present and calm even when around negative thoughts. Because you are practicing on focusing when bad or negative thoughts, you will see it more clearly when these thoughts are coming through. Noticing when these thoughts come in the first step towards a more calm mind.

What mindfulness is not

A lot of people assume mindfulness as something with a floaty mind. Mindfulness gives you a more relaxing mind and will make it of course seem like floaty but actually will make your mind a more calm and present mind.

The important part of mindfulness is the fact that relaxation is not the goal of it but it’s one of the consequences. This is something you will experience during the journey but it is not the finish.

Mindfulness & meditation

Mindfulness can be taught easily through meditation. While meditating you are focusing on your breath or even focusing on a single thought. When you get off with your thoughts you will focus back again on your breathing for example.

This is also something you have to teach yourself during tasks. Even if you keep failing, keep getting back up and try. For some people it will be easy to learn because they are maybe doing it without even thinking about it.

Mindfulness exercises

Be aware of your typing

Feel how your fingers are gliding over your keyboard. Feel how hard you have to press until a number pops up on your screen. This movement are most of the time things we do without even thinking about. Well now try focusing on your fingers for a while and when you aren’t focusing anymore, bring your attention back to your fingers.

Keep your head in the conversation

Everyone has a conversation during their day but how much of that time are you actually paying attention? While waiting in a conversation we are of course listening to the other person but there are a lot of different things going in your head. You might be disturbing yourself on something.

Next time try focusing yourself only on the conversation. This will not improve your focus for these kind of things but will also make you a better listener. You will be able to make better connections with the person. You are making it a simple but really enjoyable moment.

Brush your teeth with full attention

Then next time you are brushing time, think about what you are focused. Most of the time you will think what you have to do after brushing your teeth. Now this time try focusing on brushing your teeth only.

If you are having trouble focusing on a thing like this, try focusing on the feeling. Try focusing on the feeling or even try a different combination of movements. You could also focus on switching on how to hold your teeth brush.

Eat without technology

Instead of eating while watching YouTube or while doing anything on your phone, you can focus on just eating. You could focus on the taste instead of blindly put food in your mouth.

This way you can enjoy your breakfast a lot more and are able to wake up a lot better. Being present while eating is a little moment of mindfulness in your morning.

Meditation

Meditation is all about training yourself on working with your own thoughts. You are making time for yourself to practice on something like this. All you have to do is: choose a quiet and peaceful place and focus on your emotions, thoughts and the feelings you get when you these thoughts come through.

At first you will need to learn and recognize these first feelings and things can even feel new for you. This is completely normal and these are your first steps towards your peaceful and calm mind.

The effects of mindfulness

A lot of things happen in your consciousness unaware. While training your mindfulness not only will you be more aware of the things you do and think but also about the 35.000 decisions the average human makes every day.

Not only does it increases your awareness, it also reduces stress, fear and helps you making decisions better. Mindfulness will make you a lot more self-conscious aware and will be able to help you in controlling your emotions a lot easier.

Of course if you are able to think more clearly and are able to focus on tasks more easily, you will be able deal better with problems, your level of creativity with rise and keep track of other things.

If you are having trouble with an addiction mindfulness is also a way of helping. If you are having thoughts of relapsing, mindfulness will make it easier for you to put this thought down. Giving in to these addictions will only suppress the negative thoughts and feelings for a short period of time. Because you are now giving more space and time in your schedule for these feelings and thoughts, it’s more easily to comprehend these.

Mindfulness & Buddhism

Mindfulness is one of the eight steps in the pad of Buddhism. Mindfulness plays a big role in the longer periods of meditation they do every day. They can meditate up to 6 or 8 hours a day so it’s important for them to be focusing on their single task of meditating and not wondering off the some other place with their thoughts.

Mindfulness with kids

Even these days the expectations for children are high and sometimes this can put children under a lot of stress. Mindfulness can help in situations like this. It can be taught in many playful ways and will be valuable later on in life. By teaching your child about mindfulness, it can analyze all the different feelings he gets and learns how to calm down in different stressful situations.

Children with autism, ADHD and even problems with different fears can be helped through the ways of mindfulness. Learning how they can deal with things and calmly make a plan for him-or herself.

Things to keep in mind

Things like this require time and discipline. It’s not like you will achieve if after one session. Of course you will see progress but the finish line is something you have to work hard for. Everyone will be having a different amount of time on when to exercise this and some will be fast learners on these kind of subjects. Enjoy the journey and the reward will come itself.