5 Simple Mindfulness Practices for Daily Life
Your day-to-day activities offer ample opportunities to call up mindfulness at any moment. Pausing to practice mindfulness for just a few minutes at different times during the day can help your days be better, and more in line with how you’d like them to be. Explore these five daily practices for bringing more mindfulness into your life:
Mindful Wakeup: Start with a Purpose
- Intention refers to the underlying motivation for everything we think, say, or do
- Setting an intention-keeping those primal motivations in mind-helps strengthen this connection between the lower and higher centres
- Doing so can change your day, making it more likely that your words, actions and responses- especially during moments of difficulty-will be more mindful and compassionate
Mindful Workout: Activate Your Mind and Your Muscles
- Be clear about your aim: bring purpose to your activity by consciously envisioning how you want your guide your session
- Warm-up (5 minutes): try any simple moves
- Settle into a rhythm (10 to 15 minutes): focus on matching the rhythm of your breath to your movement
- Challenge yourself: try faster speed, more repetitions, or heavier weights, depending on what you are doing
- Cool down: slowly slow down your pace until you come to a standstill, notice the way your body feels, and then rest
Mindful Driving: Drive Yourself Calm, Not Crazy
- Take a deep breath – this brings more oxygen into your body and widens the space between the stimulus of the traffic and your heightened stress reaction. In this space lies perspective and choice
- Ask yourself what you need – it may be in that moment that you need to feel safe, and at ease, or you just need some relief. Understand your own needs and give yourself the help you need
Mindful Eating: Enjoy Every Mouthful
Breathe before eating: We often move from one task right to the other without pausing or taking a breath. By pausing, we slow down and allow for a more calm transition to our meals
Listen to your body: Bring your attention inward by closing your eyes, and begin to breathe slowly in and out of your belly for eight to 10 deep breaths before you start your meal. After breathing, bring your awareness to the physical sensations in your belly
Mindful Pause: Rewire Your Brain
It’s estimated that 95% of our behaviour runs on autopilot. That’s because neural networks underlie all of our habits, reducing our millions of sensory inputs per second into manageable shortcuts so we can function in this crazy world.
Mindfulness is the exact opposite of these processes; it’s slow brain. It’s executive control rather than autopilot, and enables intentional actions, willpower, and decisions.
Every time we do something deliberate and new, we stimulate neuroplasticity, activating our grey matter, which is full of newly sprouted neurons that have not yet been groomed for the fast brain.