Tiny Buddha

Author: Benjamin Fishel

  • 30 Simple Mindfulness Practices to Help You Focus and Be Present

    30 Simple Mindfulness Practices to Help You Focus and Be Present

    “The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” ~Thích Nhất Hạnh, Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

    Do you ever feel like you’re too busy for meditation?

    You understand the benefits, and you’d really like to commit to it. But you’re a busy person. You have deadlines to meet, food to prepare, bills to pay, kids to raise, family members to call—and even that’s barely scratching the surface.

    We’ve all been there. I certainly have.

    Before I found mindfulness, I struggled with concentration for years. When I moved away from home to make a living as a freelance writer and travel the world, it only got worse.

    Suddenly I was the other side of the globe, with no family and often no friends.

    I should have been looking forward to the next exciting meal, going out and meeting interesting new people, or just appreciating the sights and sounds of an unfamiliar city. Instead, without the structure that I was accustomed to at home, I was stuck in a perpetual state of work-related anxiety.

    As the stress continued to build, I got the uncomfortable feeling that I was squandering the opportunity of a lifetime. I was never fully committed to either work or play, and as I result I wasn’t able to appreciate either.

    I knew I had to do something.

    So I tried to throw myself into meditation. But I could never keep it up. I’d do two or three days in a row, then I’d skip one, then two, then a week, and suddenly I’d give up.

    Then I read about mindfulness. I found that I didn’t need to take a big chunk out of my time out to practice it.

    I could be mindful at any time and just fit it into my normal day-to-day activities. A moment here, a moment there, and surprisingly quickly it became a habit. I was calmer, more focused, and my mental health was improving.

    And what happened next was a shock.

    One morning a few months later I sat down to meditate. I set my alarm for twenty minutes, focused on my breath, and followed through till my alarm buzzed. But it was different. It was a lot easier than I remembered.

    It felt normal—natural even. So I did the same the next day, and the next, till I’d gone a month meditating every single day. Small daily mindfulness practices had ended up being a perfect stepping stone to longer meditation sessions.

    A few months later a friend of mine was struggling with his work, much in the same way I had. I wanted to see how I could help, so I wrote him an email listing each and every way that I had tried to bring mindfulness into my life. The ideas below are an extension of our conversation.

    I hope they make as big a difference to your life as they have done mine.

    How to Use These Practices to Cultivate Laser-Sharp Focus

    Think of each situation as a trigger to bring you back to the present moment. You definitely don’t have to start with all of them; in fact, I’d start by choosing three or four to practice. Then try adding one a week until you can incorporate all of them into your life.

    1. Waking up.

    As soon as you wake up, before you get out of bed, take three deep breaths. This will have the double benefit of quietening your mind and giving your brain an oxygen boost to get you out of bed.

    2. Getting out of bed.

    Not all of us have time for yoga. But we all have time to stretch. When you first stand, take a deep breath in and stretch your hands as high as you can toward the ceiling, fingers pointing straight up. Then as you breathe out, relax, lean forward, and try to touch your toes. Make sure to focus on your breathing and the sensations of the stretch.

    3. Making your bed.

    Making your bed first thing in the morning is a great opportunity to practice mindfulness. Try to be completely engaged in the activity, putting all your attention into the folding of the sheets.

    4. Showering.

    As you take a shower, spend a minute or two just feeling the water on your skin; notice the temperature, the pressure, and the sounds as it falls.

    5. Getting dressed.

    Most of us rush to get our clothes on, but when you get dressed in the morning, take a second to pay attention to the way they feel on your skin, the texture of the material, and the warmth that they provide.

    6. Boiling the kettle.

    Instead of running around the house and trying to do everything before the kettle boils, sit quietly and listen intently to the water bubble or the kettle whistle.

    7. Drinking tea or coffee.

    When you drink tea of coffee, sip slowly and be mindful of the taste, temperature, and subtle effect it has on your body.

    8. Brushing your teeth.

    We all (hopefully) do this. So it’s a great place to start focusing on the present moment.

    9. Listen to music.

    Listening to some relaxing music before you leave the house in the morning is a great way to center yourself. Completely immerse yourself in the song. Be aware of the volume, cadence, tempo, the uniqueness of the sounds.

    10. Writing a to-do list by hand.

    Whether you do this first thing in the morning or last thing at night, creating a to-do list can quell anxieties and bring your attention to exactly what you have to do throughout the day. Using an old-fashioned pen and paper will help you be more mindful then will typing it in your phone or computer.

    11. Running.

    Leave your music at home and just pay attention to the sounds of whatever is around you as you run. You might want to focus on the rhythm of your feet as they hit the ground.

    12. Touching your hair.

    Next time you catch yourself running your hands through your hair, pay attention how it feels in your hands. Is it soft, spikey, curly, wavy?

    13. Stopping at a red light.

    A lot of us get angry, nervous or tense when we drive. Every time you stop at a red light, take a deep breath and try to relax any tension you might be holding in your jaw, neck or shoulders.

    14. When waiting.

    Whenever you find yourself waiting, whether it be for a meeting, at a bus stop, or an appointment, try to relax all the muscles in your face—your jaw, your brows, your eyelids.

    15. Walking.

    As you’re walking down the street, pay attention to how your legs and feet feel against the ground. Check your breathing. It’s common to breathe shallow when you’re in public, so make sure you’re still breathing through your diaphragm.

    16. Hugging or handshakes.

    No one likes a cold hug. Make sure the first person you hug or shake hands with today feels like you gave it your complete attention instead of feeling like your mind was somewhere else.

    17. Exercising.

    At the gym, be completely focused on whatever exercise you are doing. You can let your mind wander when you’re taking a break, but throughout the exercise itself, be focused entirely on the practice.

    18. Eating lunch.

    At lunchtime, take a bite out of your food and chew it slowly. Be mindful of the texture; is it crunchy or soft? Taste; is it spicy, bitter, sweet, or sour? Temperature; is it hot, cold, or just lukewarm?

    19. Talking to someone.

    Try to be completely present in conversation, making eye contact and listening to what they say without thinking about what you want to add next or where you’re going to be later.

    20. At your desk.

    If you work at a desk and catch yourself slouching, take a deep breath, sit up straight, and relax the muscles in your face, your neck, and finally your shoulders.

    21. Set a phone alarm.

    A lot of people see technology as a hindrance to mindfulness, and that’s true to an extent. But we can use things like phone alarms to remind us to spend a few seconds bringing our awareness back to our breath throughout the day.

    22. Follow an insect.

    Yep. You may feel like a child, but that’s a good thing—children live in the present. If you see an insect, forget everything else around you and watch how it moves for a few seconds. Be aware that it’s a living being just like you.

    23. Getting home at night.

    When you walk through the door to your house or apartment, pause and think about how grateful you are to be home. Whether it’s cold outside, and you’ve just walked into warmth, or you’re returning home to someone you love – there’s always something to appreciate.

    24. Taking off your shoes.

    We all like to take our shoes off after a long day. Pay attention to how your feet feel on the ground, try to move your toes around and feel each one individually.

    25. Cooking.

    Cooking offers a variety of ways to be mindful. You can hone your attention in on your own movements, the sounds in the kitchen, the taste of the food you are preparing, or the aromas of the different spices as they cook.

    26. Watching T.V.

    A lot of us work anxiously all day, and when we get some leisure time end up too distracted to truly enjoy it. If you’re watching T.V try to be fully present to what you’re watching, as opposed to half-heartedly talking to a loved one or browsing through your phone.

    27. Vacuuming.

    Counter-intuitive, I know—this isn’t for everyone. But focusing on the noise of the vacuum can be effective because it often drowns out any other sensory distractions.

    28. At dinner.

    Think about the ingredients that have gone into your meal—where have they come from? If it’s fish, for example, imagine the fisherman catching it at sea, bringing it to the docks, and selling it to local farmers markets.

    29. At least five minutes of Do Nothing Time (DNT).

    No checking your phone. No reading a newspaper. Don’t even try to meditate. Just sit there, and if any feelings come up—discomfort, restlessness, or even guilt that you’re not doing anything—just embrace them. Most of the time we’re so wrapped up in doing something ‘productive’ that it’s difficult to just sit still and do nothing.

    30. Lying in bed.

    Before you go to sleep, take a moment to think of one thing you were grateful for that day, no matter how big or small, or how difficult the day was. This will condition your mind for positivity, and help you sleep better.

    As you start to see the benefits of these daily practices, you’ll feel more focused, energized, and you can move on to longer focused meditation sessions. Start taking a few moments out of your day to practice mindfulness now, and you’ll enjoy the rewards for years to come.

    Do you have any experience with some of these practices? Let us know in the comments!

  • 19 Techniques to Calm a Highly Sensitive Nervous System

    19 Techniques to Calm a Highly Sensitive Nervous System

    “You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass.” ~Timber Hawkeye

    The sun is setting, and the cold wind is gently blowing in my face. I’m sitting on a rock that’s about ten feet tall, overlooking the Peruvian city of Cuzco. I can hear dogs barking, groups of teenagers laughing, the low hum of traffic, and the music blaring from cars in the distance. As it goes dark, the lights of thousands of houses begin to flicker on like fireflies.

    I should be enjoying this picturesque scene, but I’m not. My mind is racing too fast for me to make sense of anything that I’m thinking.

    The only thing I’m able to fixate on is the intense ball of worry that sits in the top of my chest. Every thought introduces a new problem and a restless attempt to solve it. But the thoughts themselves aren’t that important. They’re really just a manifestation of a physical tension that I’ve been holding onto for far too long.

    This was my life with relentless anxiety.

    For years I didn’t understand why I would get anxious, nor did I have the capacity to relax my body when the physical symptoms came to visit. Was I just born with a sensitive nervous system? Had life experiences conditioned me to be that way? Was it both? Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Anxiety was there, and it was making itself heard, loud and clear.

    Fortunately, I learned, slowly but surely, in both my work with others and my own personal experience, that anxiety could be tamed and reversed. But it was only after I was able to bring greater awareness to my body and progressively convince my nervous system that I was safe and it was okay to be calm that I was able to make any lasting change.

    Calming your body and mind doesn’t happen overnight. It takes practice, but it’s a real possibility.

    Here are nineteen ways to calm a highly sensitive nervous system.

    1. Focus on the calmest part of your body.

    Instead of sitting directly with uncomfortable feelings, sensations, and tensions, we can place our attention on wherever in our body we find a sense of calm. By doing that, we can familiarize ourselves with relaxation and sit with it until it deepens. For example, your legs may be twitching, but perhaps you feel stillness at the back of your neck. Draw your attention there.

    2. Set boundaries and manage your energy wisely.

    If you’re dealing with anxiety, then you’re burning more energy than you usually would. And when your energy is low, it’s more difficult to regulate your feelings. That’s why it’s important to manage your energy wisely and not be afraid to set boundaries and say no to things that you don’t feel are in your best interest.

    3. Self-soothe through affirmations.

    Affirmations are only useful if they’re having a helpful impact on your state of being. Repeating positive phrases that you don’t truly believe in can actually have the opposite effect. So instead, choose an affirmation that feels true to you, such as “I am strong enough to survive this panic.” And try experimenting with how you talk to yourself—the tone of voice, pace, care behind the words—instead of just focusing on the words you are saying. A slow, calm, and reassuring internal voice can be a great tool to calm the body.

    4. Journal from the perspective of your stress.

    Sometimes your anxious thoughts just need to be respected and expressed coherently by getting them out of your head and down on a piece of paper. Writing from the perspective of stress, exploring what’s fueling it and what it wants us to know, also helps us take a step back from our worries.

    5. Journal from the perspective of your calm.

    When you’ve written down your stressful thoughts, you can dialogue (and reason) with it from the perspective of a calmer and wiser voice.

    6. Try Taoist Inner Smile Meditation.

    This meditation is one where you feel a smiling energy in your body. Most people find this easiest to do by visualizing a smile or bringing a slight smile to their face. The effect of the inner smile meditation is cumulative, and it can be an effective way to signal to your brain that you’re not under any threat.

    7. Finish the sentence “My nervous system wants to…”

    This is another journal exercise that helps connect your thoughts to your feelings so you can take a step back from your thoughts. You may discover that your nervous system wants you to take a break, rest, or get some fresh air.

    8. Create compassionate imagery.

    Like the inner smile meditation, compassionate imagery is a way to tell your brain that you’re safe and it’s okay to relax. You might want to visualize a person or a place, either real or fictitious, where you’d feel the most calm, safe, and connected.

    9. Increase bodily awareness.

    Anxiety can feel like it comes out of nowhere, but that’s rarely the case. By increasing bodily awareness, either through meditation, yoga, or just regularly checking in with how you’re feeling, you can catch the early signs of tension in your body before they get too difficult to manage.

    10. Slow down to six breaths a minute.

    Studies have shown that six breaths a minute seems to be the number at which we get the most benefits in terms of relaxation. As most of us breathe a lot quicker than this, any attempt to reduce the rate at which we breathe—with a focus on extending the exhalation—is a useful practice.

    11. Play around with your body language.

    How we position our bodies and physically move through the world has a big impact on our emotional state. Bringing more awareness to how you’re holding your body from moment to moment—how you sit, stand, communicate, etc.—can help you to address habits of tension.

    12. Establish a mindful movement practice.

    It can be hard to remember to be aware of our bodies, which is why a daily or weekly embodiment practice is useful. You might want to try yoga, qigong, or tai chi, the Feldenkrais method or the Alexander Technique, or any other practice. Just try to find something you enjoy and that works for you.

    13. Dance.

    Dancing is a great way to reduce stress and increase your bodily awareness. If you don’t like the idea of a formal practice, then this might be for you. And the good thing is you don’t need to get any special training or even leave your house—you can just blast your favorite song and get moving.

    14. Visualize a future calm self.

    Our minds are largely predictive machines, so when we expect to be anxious, that’s what will happen. We can begin to disrupt this cycle by visualizing a future state of calm, which sets a more useful expectation.

    15. Imagine your mind in slow motion.

    This is just another trick to break out of unhelpful patterns. An anxious mind will move rapidly, whereas a mind that is intentionally moving slowly will start to move us out of a state of anxiety.

    16. Laugh (even if it’s forced).

    Laughter is another great way to take our body out of a state of stress. In fact, the reason we laugh might be an evolutionary signal that everything is okay and that a perceived threat has been averted. It doesn’t matter if it feels forced; your brain will still get the message, and you might even find that you end up really laughing anyway.

    17. Try chanting or singing meditation.

    Both chanting and singing slow your breathing down and stimulate the vagus nerve, which is another quick way to transition from a state or fight-or-flight to rest-and-digest.

    18. Hum.

    Some people don’t like to chant or sing, but luckily humming does pretty much the same thing.

    19. Visualize healthy and rewarding social situations.

    A lot of bodily tension comes from an unconscious perceived threat in the world—particularly the social world. By visualizing healthy relationships and positive social situations, either real or imagined, we are convincing the social part of our brain that we’re connected and safe.

    —

    If my experience with anxiety and my work as a therapist have taught me anything, it’s that there is no best way to manage our nervous systems. There is only the way that works for you. By permitting yourself to experiment and play around with different techniques, you’ll be better positioned to uncover the most effective way to calm your highly sensitized nervous system.

    Let us know in the comments which techniques have worked for you and if there are any that we might have missed!

  • If You Think Contentment Will Make You Lazy and Unproductive

    If You Think Contentment Will Make You Lazy and Unproductive

    “To be content doesn’t mean you don’t desire more, it means you’re thankful for what you have and patient for what’s to come.” ~Tony Gaskins

    There’s a thought I want to share with you that used to keep me up at night.

    It’s a toxic idea that caused me stress and burnout and actually got in the way of my productivity and creativity (and more importantly, my happiness).

    Nevertheless, I hung onto it, and eventually came to see that it wasn’t just me. It was actually prevalent in many developed societies.

    The thought went something like this: If I accept who I am, where I am, and what I have, then I will become unproductive and lazy.

    Unconsciously, it boiled down to the following misconception: acceptance = contentment = laziness.

    A few years ago, I may not have admitted to you that I believed this, but I certainty acted as if it were true. I was by no means lazy; I was self-motivating and self-employed, working day in and day out. But at the end of the day, no matter how much I had “achieved,” no matter how many things were crossed off the to-do list, I would still find myself sitting at home with two thoughts.

    1. I didn’t do enough today.

    2. I need to do more tomorrow.

    These thoughts never allowed me to truly relax, and this caused a cycle of anxiety and tension. At some point, like many of us, I came across the idea and practice of self-acceptance. But no matter how much I tried to tell myself that everything was okay, I simply couldn’t feel that this was true. I couldn’t shake the thoughts about not having done enough, not being enough, not being content with the moment.

    Unsurprisingly, this was terrible for my mental health.

    Finally, I was talking about this with a friend of mine, and they casually asked me the following question.

    “What would having done enough actually look like to you?”

    And then it dawned on me. I had absolutely no idea. In truth, there was no such thing as enough—it was a constantly moving target. “Having done enough” was just a vague notion I used to fuel this myth of anxious productivity that I’d bought into.

    I didn’t need to be anxious to be productive, I didn’t need to be productive to be content, and being content would not make me lazy.

    I even started to realize that the opposite was true. When I accepted whatever was happening, I would be more content, and when I was more content, I would have more energy and confidence, which translated to more productivity.

    Humans are creatures of habit, and it was ritual and routine—not fear and anxiety—that would determine what I achieved. The worry that had driven my life for years was a complete falsehood!

    I’ve learned it’s possible to be both content and productive—no anxiety required. Here’s how.

    5 Ways to Be Content and Productive

    1. Start small.

    If you’re stuck in the habit of feeling you never do enough, don’t try and challenge it all at once. Try letting go of your attachment to a couple of ideas and see where it gets you. For example, maybe you feel that relaxation is something you only deserve on days where you’ve completed your to-do list. You could reframe this so relaxation is something on your to-do list that is a priority rather than a bonus.

    2. Run an experiment.

    If you’re convinced that feeling content with some aspect of your life could be detrimental, why don’t you try it out?

    Why don’t you try a week where you don’t stress yourself out about eating clean, going to the gym, or working on some non-essential project. Record what you do anyway, then compare the difference in outcome between weeks where you are allowed to feel content regardless of whether you meet all your expectations, and weeks where you anxiously push yourself. You may find that you do more than you expected you would without the internal pressure.

    After a while you may also find that your sense of contentment doesn’t hinge upon your day-to-day achievements—but if it does, then maybe you need to look at reward-based motivations, rather than punishment-based motivations.

    3. Focus on the process and not the outcome.

    This is time-tested wisdom, but it’s not always easy to follow. Think about it as a value you have, rather than something you do or a skill you acquire. To value the process over the outcome is to place your attention on what you are doing rather than why you are doing it.

    Fixating on the end result or outcome makes it easy to get trapped in cycles of future-oriented rumination. This is not only unpleasant, but also takes up energy that you could devote to the task at hand. On the other hand, if you focus entirely on the immediate task—the what and not the why—then you are more likely to fall into the flow-state, and less likely to fall victim to worries and mental chatter.

     4. Less desire, more trust.

    There are two ways we can look at the idea of hope. One is the hope you have when you want or desire something. Like when you hope for a promotion or a bigger car. The other is a more general and vague sense of trust that you have. Like, I have hope that things will turn out okay.

    If you can reduce the first type of hope, the desire for something else, while increasing the second type of hope, trust that everything will be okay, then self-acceptance will become a habit, not just an ideal.

     5. Approach goals indirectly.

    Economist John Kay calls this process obliquity. Sometimes when we strive aggressively to achieve a goal, we can trip over our own feet. This is why some goals, such as happiness, are best achieved by taking an indirect route.

    For example, instead of saying, “This year I want to meet my soul mate,” you could say, “This year I’m going to meet more people and be curious about what they all have to say.” Instead of saying, “This year I want to be happier,” you could say, “This year I’m going to put aside thirty minutes a day for things I enjoy—like writing songs—and give 100% of my attention to those things for thirty minutes.”

    If you feel that you need to do more, but that feeling is never going away, maybe it’s time to try experimenting with the feeling that you can try and do less?

    How have you struggled with feelings of self-acceptance and the belief that you’ve never done enough? Let us know in the comments, we’d love to hear from you.

  • 5 Affirmations for Resilience in the Face of Uncertainty

    5 Affirmations for Resilience in the Face of Uncertainty

    EDITOR’S NOTE: You can find a number of helpful coronavirus resources and all related Tiny Buddha articles here.

    “Embrace uncertainty. Some of the most beautiful chapters in our lives won’t have a title until much later.” ~Bob Goff

    Let me tell you something important. It’s a rule of life, a law of nature if you will. This law is not only a psychological truth, but it’s also biological, chemical, cultural, maybe even metaphysical.

    What I’m about to say is not comfortable, but it’s necessary. People who truly understand this principle are resilient and adaptive. Those of us who choose to reject or ignore it become rigid and fearful—and you deserve to be resilient.

    The principle is this: uncertainty is inevitable.

    You know this already, I’m sure. But you might not have accepted it.

    I have learned this fact the hard way. No matter how stable and in control I may have felt throughout my life, I have never once been certain of the next moment.

    See, we all have vague ideas about the future, but they are never certain predictions. I’ve never predicted the moment I would contract an illness, nor the moment a loved one would pass on, nor even the next thought that would pop into my head.

    I have lived through mental health issues and chronic pain issues, and by embracing the uncertainty I’ve become more resilient and loving. I didn’t predict that. I’ve also had to continue facing challenging emotions I thought I’d long since left behind. I didn’t predict that.

    Somewhere along the way, despite a story that I could no longer keep working with my persistent pain, I managed to continue to work and get a master’s degree in neuroscience. Didn’t manage to predict that either.

    Wind back the clock five years or so and the uncertainty used to stress me out, and at times it was crippling. Not so much anymore, fortunately. Now the only thing I truly expect is that my expectations are inaccurate.

    I guess you might call it developing resilience, but resilience is somewhat of a buzz word, and it wasn’t as interesting as that. It was simply that in time I slowly, clumsily, came to a healthier understanding of the way my mind worked.

    At the core of this understanding was a new perspective; I saw that uncertainty in itself didn’t cause me stress, it was my response to it. My need for control. My incessant attempt to box reality into the stories in my mind.

    Take, for example a football player who has a story that he is an athlete. Nothing more, nothing less. If he breaks a leg and can no longer play, he hasn’t just broken a bone, he’s shattered his identity.

    Right now, millions of us have had our identities challenged by changes to our lifestyle. Without an adaptive story that can respond to the moment, we face the same stresses and anxieties that I had for many years.

    So how do we challenge our anxieties about the future? We create new stories that help us develop resilience and ride the wave of uncertainty.

    These stories will come in the form of affirmations. You can repeat them every day—and act of them—until they become beliefs that you carry into all areas of your life.

    It’s important to note that these affirmations I’m about to share with you are tools to experiment with. Treat them like a set of clothes that you might use for different activities. Don’t be scared to let go of old ideas when they no longer serve you.

    An anxious monkey mind will try to wear a swimsuit to bed and a tuxedo to shower. A resilient mind is willing to get dressed for the occasion, every day of the week.

    Remember that any fears or anxieties you have around the coronavirus are entirely justified, particularly if you or your loved ones are sick, stressed, or dealing with significant life changes.

    Your intention to become more resilient in the face of uncertainty is noble, because you’re not only helping yourself stay calm, you’re helping those around you. You may not win any awards or receive accolades, but you can (and should) still be proud of yourself.

    Here are 5 Affirmations to Find Resilience in the Face of Uncertainty

    1. I am approaching each day with childlike curiosity.

    Because children are more of a clean slate than adults, they don’t have as many rigid ideas about how the world should be. This means they are ideally positioned to deal with uncertainty. They take each moment as it comes, staying open to whatever the days ahead might bring. And instead of dwelling on the worst that could happen, they make the best of what happens.

    We can embody this childlike curiosity and use it to our advantage. When we approach both comfort and discomfort with an open-minded voice in our head that says, “That’s interesting, what’s going to happen next?” we don’t get stuck in chasing the stories of our unmet preferences about what should be happening.

    2. I have confidence/faith in something greater than my momentary fears.

    We fear uncertainty because our brains think that certainty keeps us safe. What we often fail to recognize is that we’ve been responding to the uncertainty of the next moment our entire lives. Most of the time we just haven’t noticed it.

    You didn’t wake yourself up this morning, nor did tell your heart to beat all day yesterday, and if a car suddenly speeds toward you, you don’t tell your body to jump out of the way. There’s a biological, cultural, and social intelligence that helps us meet all challenges (and that includes the intelligence to read this article!). It’s going to keep helping us move through life and respond to challenges whether we resist it or not.

    3. Stillness is my therapy.

    Silence is an acquired taste. At first, all this stillness can be overwhelming. But over time our minds resonate with the environment, so the more we slow down the calmer we become, and the more we appreciate the slowing down.

    A busy mind has thousands of unnecessary thoughts a day, and this drains vital energy that our brains could be using for other things. A tired mind is more likely to fall victim to cognitive distortions—things we think that aren’t actually true. Intuitively we know this because when we’re exhausted, we tend to lose our temper, show less compassion, and think and say things we don’t really mean.

    When we are able to spend more time resting in silence, balancing our nervous system so we’re not stuck in fight-or-flight mode, that’s when we can most effectively respond to life’s challenges.

    4. My goals are always flexible.

    Goal setting is a huge industry. It’s also an attitude that we teach our kids from a very young age. This isn’t without good reason; goal setting works because it gives us structure and direction, which helps to keep our minds focused and motivated by future rewards.

    However, the point of goals is to help guide you toward something that is desirable in relation to your environment and circumstances. If either you or your environment or circumstances change, the goal should be able to change too!

    Right now, the global situation has shifted dramatically, so don’t torture yourself by trying to meet the same goals you had before this pandemic broke out.

    This might mean setting new goals that make sense within our current reality, based on what you reasonably accomplish given your limitations and mental state. Or it might mean setting no goals at all and simply living in the moment in this surreal pause from life as we knew it.

    5. I am not my thoughts.

    You’re probably tired of hearing this one, but it remains true and relevant, nonetheless. If you’ve noticed an increase in your anxious thoughts in response to changes in your work situation or the obsessive media coverage, it’s an invitation to keep recognizing that these thoughts are a response to the environment. Thousands of thoughts come up every day, but if we can reduce the energy and attention we give them, they won’t stick around for as long.

    How have you managed to deal with the uncertainty over COVID-19? Let us know in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!

  • How Empaths Can Stop Sacrificing Their Needs for Other People

    How Empaths Can Stop Sacrificing Their Needs for Other People

    “Sometimes you don’t realize you’re actually drowning when you’re trying to be everyone else’s anchor.” ~Unknown

    Have you ever felt trapped?

    No, actually, have you ever felt absolutely paralyzed? Like you’re fearful of making any choices at all? It feels like any step you take could end in utter catastrophe.

    Five years ago, that was me.

    I was living in a small, run-down house in Peru, in a city that I didn’t want to be in, far away from family and friends, and I was in a relationship that wasn’t working.

    At the time I worried that any decision I made would determine not only my fate, but also my ex-partner’s fate, and that of our housemates, who happened to be family members.

    My monkey mind was telling me that if I left, it would mean everyone would have to go back to their respective cities and it would be the end of the house, a business, and the world (they did and it wasn’t).

    As an empath, I lived on the assumption that it was important for me to make sure everyone else was okay. I let myself get trapped in a thick forest of stories about other people’s emotions and well-being.

    It was torture, and ultimately, at the end of the day, I was wrong. There was no way I could know the future. I needed to do what I believed was best for me. My obsessive man-management was not my job to take on. On some level, I was simply trying to be the hero.

    My intentions, for the most part, came from the right place. But I had taken on a role that wasn’t mine in the first place, and truthfully the perceived burden made me frustrated, resentful, and all in all, a less enjoyable person to be around.

    If you are an empath and you’ve found yourself stuck in a situation where you are sacrificing your needs and mental health for other people, then it’s time to stop doing so. When you are free from the weight of trying to save others from potential pain and discomfort you will have the energy to be present for them.

    Here are five ways that you can stop sacrificing your needs for other people.

    1. Recognize that you don’t know what’s going on in their head.

    A lot of the time when we try to help others, we paint detailed images in our mind about the past, present, and future. This may include what they’re thinking, what they once thought, what they’re feeling, how they once felt, how they acted in the past, and how they will act in the future. The problem with all of these mental images is, we can never truly know!

    I thought, for example, that if I left the situation, my roommate was going to be mad at me. When I finally left so did he, and in reality he was very happy to move on. My imaginary story about how he would act was completely off the mark.

    2. See where it’s making you secretly resent people.

    Try and notice when you are starting to resent people because of your obsession with helping them. If you feel agitated, frustrated, or annoyed by the burden of managing their feelings and needs, this is usually a clear indication that you, as an empath, need to take a step back.

    When we build these ideas and storylines about the way things are, they inevitably clash with reality. Why? Because the map is not the territory.

    If we can be mature enough to drop our attachment to stories about ourselves and others, then our frustrations over how a situation is playing out can be seen for what they are—just ideas.

    My feeling of being trapped was entirely self-imposed, but when I was smack bang in the middle of it, the story was that it was everyone else’s fault—as if they were reaching inside my mind and making me prioritize (what I perceived to be) their best interests over my own.

    3. In the case of an emergency, put on your own safety mask first.

    You can’t help anyone if you can’t help yourself. When you notice that your health is starting to suffer as a result of your attempt to help other people, you need to take some guilt-free time for yourself. When your batteries are recharged, then maybe you can try and lend a helping hand again, but until then, focus on self-care. You have a limited amount of energy; use it wisely.

    4. Realize that it’s not your job.

    Empathetic people tend to look around at the difficulties in the world and think, “If I don’t help them, who will?” I know I’ve done this, time and time again.

    We do this because we project our feelings onto someone else’s situation, making it seem worse than it is. We think, “If I were in their shoes, I’d feel…” But they’re not us, and we can’t possibly know what they feel and what they need unless they tell us. And even then, we’re not responsible for managing their feelings or meeting their needs.

    It’s hard to realize, but it’s not your job to save the world, and oftentimes people don’t actually need saving.

    I thought that my leaving the relationship would ruin everyone’s life, but truthfully I was only fearful that it would ruin mine. My ideas about the world made me see everyone else as vulnerable, but they were going to be just fine.

    5. Trust other people to solve their own problems.

    At times throughout my life, I have had an unnecessary need to control situations. When I was in a fearful mind-state, this habit tended to amplify.

    We don’t realize that we can control a lot less than we think, and that’s okay. You can never control what another person does, or thinks, or how their life ends up. To do so will only make you tired, and them frustrated. Give them some space to breathe and let them take the wheel. Trust that they can handle themselves. Things will work themselves out.

    Since I left that situation I’ve learned that it’s not my job to be the hero. Most of my attempts at controlling other people, and trying to make sure they don’t suffer, have stemmed from my fears. People tend to be stronger than we think, and our mental projections about the world are always less reliable than we take them to be.

    Remember, in the case of an emergency, put your own safety mask on first.

    Have you ever felt that as an empath your mental health has suffered?

  • How to Keep Going When Doubts and Fears are Holding You Back

    How to Keep Going When Doubts and Fears are Holding You Back

    “If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” ~Vincent Van Gogh

    I don’t think there is anything more liberating.

    At least nothing I’ve experienced at this point in my life.

    I’m sure it’s happened to some of you. Probably more times than you can count.

    The freedom I’m alluding to here is the moment when you do something that a part of your mind didn’t believe was possible.

    Interestingly, the word ecstasy comes from the Greek ekastis, meaning “to step outside of oneself.”

    And when you are able to rise above your doubts and fears, it can be absolutely ecstatic.

    But the process of getting there is not without mixed feelings. You may have a kind of Stockholm syndrome with the parts of your mind that are holding you captive. These doubts and fears are yours; they have been whispering in your ear, dictating your actions; and they’re hard to let go of.

    Last year I went through a period of being heavily influenced by my own doubts and fears. I was juggling some health issues and had recently started a Masters degree, all the while working full-time.

    I was soon exhausted and began to fear that I had taken on too much. This was compounded by a number of setbacks I had at work. The launch of a product that I had been working on for six months fell flat when sales were drastically less than I expected.

    Maybe it would be fair to say that they weren’t just setbacks. Actually, I’m going to call them failures. Because although when I take a step back, I can be diplomatic enough to call them setbacks, at the time, when I was completely involved in the outcome, they felt like nothing less than absolute defeats.

    But I didn’t quit on the project. I kept going forward, whether by my own hard-fought persistence, faith in something greater than myself, or even just a conditioned habit. Probably a bit of a mix of all three.

    And now, this year, things are starting to pay off. But the fruits of my labor are somewhat bitter-sweet, as I realize just how indoctrinated I was by my own doubts and fears.

    So I’ve done some reflecting, and I’ve identified the mental shifts that have helped me keep going and step outside of myself in times of need.

    Here are four ways to keep going when your doubts and fears are holding you back.

    Recognize that everyone has doubts and fears.

    When we are gripped by doubt and fears, they can feel strong, overwhelming, and completely unique to us. We feel we have to believe them because we don’t realize everyone feels these things—even incredibly successful people—and we can actually choose not to give in to them.

    For example, I recently told a friend that I often feel tired when things in my business don’t work out the way I expect. I was momentarily humbled when he replied, “You know that happens to everyone, right?”

    The human brain is wired to invest energy in things that are novel. When we recognize that our fears and doubts are common, we learn to give them less attention when they arise, which slowly drains their magnetic pull. And over time we get better and better at feeling the fear and doing it anyway, whatever it may be.

    What stands in the way, becomes the way.

    This phrase comes from the Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. It’s a powerful reminder to that we can always work with what’s in front of us, and even use it to our advantage.

    Our brains have the tendency to see the world in terms of objects. We roughly sort these objects into “tools” and “obstacles.” If you look at obstacles as part of the path going forward, they transform into tools. However, if you only see potential tools as obstacles, you’ll quickly become overwhelmed by everything in your life that may stand in your way.

    Over the last few years, I’ve dealt with a chronic back injury, which has meant that I have to take frequent breaks from sitting down in order to manage the pain.

    Initially, I was frustrated that I couldn’t simply work for eight hours straight, without interruption. Fortunately, I’ve come to see the way I work as, well, just that—the way I work. It may be unconventional, but it’s still a tool that gets me to where I need to go, and not an obstacle that stands in my way. In fact, the breaks allow me a mental rest and help me to be just as productive as if I was able to work all day, maybe even more so.

    Come back from the future.

    Perspective is everything. We often feel doubt and fear when we’re fixated on our current situation. The longer we focus on our concerns, the more intense they appear.

    Our thoughts and feelings often change over time, and we can use that to our advantage. One way to do that is by realizing things have often turned out better than we once feared they would. We can take this a step further by coming back from an imaginary future and looking at the present moment through the same lens.

    I do this in my own life by visualising my future self looking back at any worrying situation. Sometimes I like to write down the question “What would the ninety-year-old me think about this situation?”

    For example, three months ago I decided to invest in a course to improve my marketing skills. The price didn’t break the bank, but it did create some anxiety about when money would come in and pay it off. When I asked the question of my future self, I immediately felt relieved, because I realized the anxiety was caused by a story about one month of income, and a lifetime of potential earnings was quick to put the concern into perspective.

    Collect wins somewhere else.

    Whether or not they recognize it or admit it, everybody has thousands of small successes and failures in their life. However, our minds can hone in on the failures and cause fear and doubts to run rampant. If you’ve begun to neglect the part of yourself that is successful, it’s incredibly useful to remind yourself that this part still exists.

    You can do this by intentionally doing something you know you’re good at and know will elicit positive feedback. For example, if you’re a talented artist, but you’re not feeling so confident at work, create something that you know will make you feel proud.

    This works because winning causes a dopamine spike in the brain, which leads to an increase in motivation and risk-taking behavior. The positive feedback loop can start from something as trivial as a board game, and creates the perfect antidote to fear and doubts: momentum and confidence.

    When the product I created fell flat, I spent a couple of weeks meditating for longer periods of time and pushing myself in the gym. This helped remind me that even though something I had invested time and energy in had failed—and I was very disappointed—I was still psychologically and physically strong, and my strength was the only tool I needed to try and try again.

    —

    These four ideas are relatively simple, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t incredibly effective. If you can put them into practice whenever you’re feeling held back by doubts or fears, you’ll begin to have more insights into what you are truly capable of—and you’ll begin to actually reach your potential.

    Doing something you previously didn’t believe possible is truly liberating, and the more you embrace these shifts in perspective, the better you’ll be able to tackle these worries in the future!

  • 5 Psychological Strategies to Ease the Stress of Perfectionism

    5 Psychological Strategies to Ease the Stress of Perfectionism

    “Striving for excellence motivates you, striving for perfection is demoralizing.” ~Harriet Braiker

    The last three months I’ve been trying an experiment. It’s something that I’ve never done before, and in a certain way, it’s been a huge challenge. However, in other ways, it’s been an enormous stress relief, and I would say a largely successful effort.

    What I’ve done seems to go against conventional wisdom, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a wise choice.

    So what exactly is this challenge? Well, I have actively gone out of my way to be average.

    Yep, sounds a little weird, doesn’t it? But hear me out.

    Over the past year, I’ve become more aware than ever of how much unconscious stress I put on myself to be above average. I’ve always known I have a type-A personality, but I didn’t know to what extent this was doing me harm. A large part of this realization came from journaling my dreams and discussing them with a psychotherapist, and another part came about through a mindfulness practice.

    So for six months, whenever I felt like relaxing, and the little voice in my head would pop up and tell me I could be doing more in this moment, I would ignore it. I would decide to watch that extra episode on Netflix. I would choose to sleep in the extra fifteen minutes. I would leave the little bit of extra work until tomorrow.

    What came out of this was unexpected. The more I ignored the voice, the more loud and aggressive it became.

    Coming into contact with this part of myself ultimately did three things.

    Firstly, it showed me that I had an issue with perfectionism that I wasn’t entirely aware of. Secondly, it showed me just how tricky and persuasive the little voice of perfectionism could be. And finally, and most importantly, it taught me how overcoming that perfectionist tendency could lead to less stress, more productivity, and greater well-being.

    So, the moment of truth. How do you know you’re a perfectionist?

    • You often feel weighed down by fear of your goals not succeeding
    • You’re constantly looking for the ‘right’ moment to do something
    • You have a persistent sense of dissatisfaction with what you’ve achieved
    • You obsess over small mistakes that have little impact on the big picture
    • You neglect self-care in favor of achievements

    I came up with five psychological strategies to overcome this perfectionism. This has allowed me to take steps toward accepting the average parts of myself, and it’s helped me let go of a shocking amount of hidden stress.

    I’ve decided to share these steps with you here so you can begin to accept who and where you are, and enjoy the journey a little more.

    1. Rethink what it means to be average.

    In our society, we often consider anything less than greatness to be failure. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s just the reality of our skewed notions of achievement that have failed to account for larger and more interconnected societies in which it’s increasingly difficult to stand out.

    When we hear the terms “average” or “mediocre” we consider them dirty words, although they’re supposed to denote the middle of the pack. If you are average at something, that shouldn’t have any correlation whatsoever to your self-worth. Most people are average at most things for most of their lives. Does that mean that most people should feel bad about themselves?

    Accepting the ways in which you are average doesn’t mean you can’t strive to achieve greatness in some areas of your life. All it means is that the desire to excel doesn’t need to be driven by the feeling that you are incomplete. It can be out of the love of competing with your past self, the need to serve your community, or even just the enjoyment of a challenge in the present moment.

    2. Challenge the all-or-nothing fallacy.

    Perfectionism is a direct result of the all-or-nothing fallacy, also known as black-and-white thinking. When we believe that our value is completely tied to our achievements, for example, we cannot help but obsessively strive to do everything the right way, because any mistake would undermine our entire self-worth.

    We can also see this when we look for the one perfect moment to get started on something, when we put all our efforts into one project and neglect our health, and most toxically, when we try to evaluate our life against the over-generalized boxes of success or failure.

    When you see this type of thinking emerge in your psyche, challenge it, and replace it with more nuanced explanations.

    For example, I used to believe that I was either being productive or lazy. When I was being productive I wasn’t being lazy, and when I wasn’t being productive I was being lazy. I’ve started to challenge that idea with the more nuanced explanation that breaks are sometimes lazy and sometimes productive; they serve many purposes. They can be reinvigorating, rewarding, and sometimes need no justification.

    3. Become friends with what you don’t know.

    Another key trait of perfectionism that I saw in myself is a strong desire to control outcomes. We have this tendency partly because we have a heightened fear of things not going the way we want or expect.

    In part, this is because perfectionism creates stress, and when we are stressed we start to become more susceptible to cognitive biases. For example, we may believe that if things don’t go the way we anticipate, everything will fall apart, we will lose out on opportunities, or we will be criticized by others.

    One way we can counteract this attitude is by becoming more comfortable with the unknown. You can only ever influence a certain amount of any situation you’re in, whether that’s work, money, or relationships.

    I have become more comfortable with the unknown by journaling about my fears over time. By seeking out counterexamples of when your fears haven’t been true (and they often aren’t), you can see how worries about the future are exaggerated by the brain, and you can start to gain more control over your emotions.

    It may also help to practice setting a wide range of goals, with varied levels of difficulty. Meeting the easier goals should fulfill your need to be in control and achieve, and working toward the more difficult goals will simply be a challenge to be creative, go above and beyond, and enjoy the uncertainty of things that are out of your control.

    4. Become friends with what you don’t love.

    Likewise, perfectionism is largely tied to the relationship you have with what you don’t accept about yourself.

    You probably know that acceptance is at the root of love. It’s therefore not surprising that people often advise you to love yourself when you’re dealing with internal conflict. Well, it sounds simple, but it’s never that easy, unfortunately. So I’m going to propose something more manageable: become friends with what you don’t love.

    If there are parts of yourself or your experience that you can’t accept or bring yourself to love, just befriend them. Ask what purpose the things you don’t like serve; become familiar with them the way you would a friend.

    Ease into the changing relationship you have with these harder-to-accept parts of yourself, and over time you’ll see a shift in your perspective that calms your anxiety around them.

    For example, I used to have an antagonistic relationship with my anxiety. The fact that I wasn’t always cool, calm, and collected, was something I found hard to accept, and it created internal conflict and (obviously) more anxiety. When I was able to see that anxiety was just a part of my brain was trying to help me, I was able to accept it. And over time I even started to appreciate this quirky part of myself.

    5. Reassess how you measure your success.

    If your perfectionism is driven by the belief that you’re not successful enough, then it’s not necessarily you that needs to change. It could be that the way you’re measuring success needs to be reassessed.

    For example, it’s common that we compare ourselves to others, and while we’re often told to focus on ourselves, making social comparisons in specific situations—such as workplace evaluations or in competitive sports—does have some (albeit limited) utility. If we didn’t make these comparisons, it would be difficult to see how we were improving and in what roles we could most help the group.

    When you start to generalize this idea to the rest of your life, however, that’s when it becomes a problem. If you start to tell yourself that so-and-so’s life is better than yours or that he or she is more successful than you, that’s almost always a generalization. What makes a life better? What does success mean? Are we talking about financial achievements? Free time? Deep relationships? Take a closer look at how success could be more effectively defined in your life.

    My own definition of success used to be based on how well I compared to people in my life in standardized measures (money, relationships, novel experiences etc.) Now I see success as how well I’m able to find meaning in the present moment, stay motivated for the future, and spend my time working on something that helps me, the people I love, and the rest of the world.

    All of the elements of my definition may not be relevant to anyone else, but because they are more fluid and flexible, and can grow with my personality, they prevent me from falling into the habit of perfectionism.

    To bring this all full circle, consider this: You can be average in one area and successful in another. This doesn’t mean you don’t have value, are not worthy or love or respect, and don’t deserve some down time every once in a while.

    Being average is normal, and it’s not an indicator of worth. You have inherent value just as you are. And if you should want to obsess about a project or be a little bit of a perfectionist every now and then, that’s fine. But be driven by the love of the creative process itself, not the anxiety that you can never do enough.

    What experience have you had with perfectionism? Have you used any of these strategies to find more peace of mind? Let us know in the comments—we’d love to hear from you!

  • How to Be Less Anxious About Things You Can’t Change

    How to Be Less Anxious About Things You Can’t Change

    “One of the happiest moments is when you find the courage to let go of what you can’t change.” ~Unknown

    Over the last few years, I’ve had to deal with a frustrating problem.

    It’s something that’s not uncommon, but it can be debilitating, and it has affected me every day. Some days have been incredibly tough, and they’ve tested my tolerance and my patience.

    The problem is chronic back pain.

    Every day I get up, knowing that throughout the day I’m going to have a discomfort that could oscillate between a mild annoyance and an intense burning. At some point, it’s going to distract me. Either while I work, while I eat, while I meditate, while I exercise, and sometimes while I sleep.

    You’d think by now I would’ve gotten used to it, that it would’ve become the unwelcomed friend that I’d learned to live with. Unfortunately, that’s only the case sometimes.

    But I am (slowly but surely) learning firsthand the value of something incredibly profound that the meditation teacher Shinzen Young once said:

    “Suffering = Pain x Resistance.”

    When it comes to the suffering we experience when dealing with physical pain, it’s not always easy to know exactly what is pain and what is resistance to that pain.

    In my own situation, every now and then, when the pain is very uncomfortable, I’ll start to ruminate. My mind will begin to make up stories about how severe the pain is, how much worse it’s going to get, what I could’ve done to prevent it, and anything else to resist the experience.

    But there are certain things you can’t know and certain things you can’t change. I’m doing the best I can to try and prevent the pain—I’ve seen a number of specialists, all with varying opinions.

    My focus now is, how can I reduce the resistance and alleviate the suffering?

    This is broadly related to another important existential issue and something that I want to explore with you in a little bit of detail.

    We all have to deal with situations that we have no control over; illness, death, and loss are inevitable. I’m going to share with you how I’ve faced this, in the context of my back pain, but it’s highly likely that you’re going through something comparable in your life right now. It might be something less obvious, like a part of your job that you’re not entirely comfortable with, or it may be a lot more serious, like the terminal illness of someone you love.

    Either way, we’re facing the same question: How can I be less anxious about the things I can’t change?

    Here are four things I’ve done to manage this anxiety.

    1. Keep track of the stories my mind is telling me about any situation.

    One thing that you realize by paying attention to your pain is that the mind is a master storyteller. The natural response to any uncomfortable situation is to create a mental novella equipped with a list of assumptions, a worldview, and a timeline about the past and future.

    Your job, however, is to tease out fact from fiction. If I have pain when I’m working, my mind might start to tell me the story of how I’m going to be late to the project I’m working on, or that I’ll never figure out how to overcome the pain, or any number of things that one, aren’t either true or knowable and two, aren’t the least bit relevant to the situation at hand.

    If you write down a list of the ideas you have about the thing you can’t change, you’ll start to see recurring themes and you can see the movie that’s playing in your mind without getting absorbed in it.

    2. Meditate on the pain and resistance and figure out which is which.

    Remember the Shinzen Young quote I shared earlier: “Suffering = Pain x Resistance.” Well, understanding when resistance to the situation is making up the bulk of your suffering is an incredibly useful skill to learn.

    You can do this in meditation by inquiring into your thoughts and feelings. I may ask myself “If I could accept this pain completely, just for a few moments, what would the pain feel like?”

    If the pain decreases significantly, it’s clear that the experience was dominated by resistance. If, however, there is little change, then it’s the physical pain itself that is the problem. More often than not I’ve found that resistance is worse than the pain itself!

    3. Highlight the positive aspects of the thing I can’t change.

    This is pretty much good old-fashioned re-framing. Focus your attention on what’s positive about the thing you can’t change, and very importantly, celebrate the little wins.

    For example, I try to tell myself, “My back hurts today, but at least it’s not stopping me from going to the gym.” And if I have a day where the pain is less serious than other days, I’ll make a mental note of it, and try to express it in some form, e.g.: “My day was good. I got a lot of work down and it was relatively pain-free.”

    4. Practice the art of letting go.

    This practice is something that comes hand in hand with noticing resistance. We don’t often think of letting go as a skill, but it is. In the same way we can become adept at holding onto something, we can learn how to do the opposite.

    There are two aspects of letting go that you can practice. Firstly, the depth of letting go; that is, how completely can you consciously let go of something that is bothering you.

    If I have a pain in my back and I exhale deeply, telling myself it’s okay, but five seconds later I’m thinking about how frustrated I am about the pain—well, I have a lot of practice to do.

    The second aspect is how appropriately you can do so in the moment, i.e.: how good your timing is.

    For example, if you spend all day worrying, but then you get home and right before falling asleep you let go, then your timing needs some work. If, however, you catch your mind telling you a story in the moment, and you can objectively see that it’s just a story, you’re on the right track! Meditation is one way to help you see things as they come up in real time.

    Learning to become less anxious about things you can’t change is an incredibly valuable life-long skill. It’s unfortunate that typically we have to come to learn this through real challenges and discomfort, but making the best of tough times is one of the beautiful things about being a human being!

    When have you learned to be less anxious about things you can’t control? Let us know in the comments; we’d love to hear from you!

  • What It Means to Live Life with Open Palms and How This Sets Us Free

    What It Means to Live Life with Open Palms and How This Sets Us Free

    “Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything—anger, anxiety, or possessions—we cannot be free.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    Roughly one year ago, I was having the time of my life.

    Everything seemed to be going well. My stress levels were at an all-time low. I was enjoying myself in a new city. Work was engaging. My meditations were deep and fulfilling.

    And when I looked back on things one year later, I was kind of, well, frustrated.

    Because things haven’t been going that smoothly lately. Don’t get me wrong; they haven’t been terrible. I’m in a loving relationship, and I’ve achieved a couple of significant milestones this year, but some aspects of life have been challenging.

    A couple of months ago I was talking to a meditation teacher who I occasionally consult when I’m having issues with my practice. I was honest about my situation, and my frustration with it.

    So I asked her what I was genuinely thinking; why doesn’t it feel like things are as good as they were twelve months ago?

    And what she told me stunned me. I mean, it really left me thinking.

    “You need to start living life with open palms. You tried to grasp onto the good times you had, and the experience has gone. But any challenges you have now will also go, you just need to hold onto them softly, with open palms.”

    The metaphor was so poignant. It made complete sense. I could feel myself grasping onto the idea of the old scenario and making dozens of assumptions about the new one.

    And those words stuck with me. They truly resonated. In fact, echoed might be a better description, because since then, whenever I’ve started to stress and hold onto my problems too tightly, the image of two open palms would arise and drift around the back of my mind, calling me to pay attention to it.

    There’s a reason why this metaphor is so accurate—the left cerebral hemisphere, which we use for focused attention, is also responsible for the grabbing motion our hand makes. The right hemisphere on the other hand (pun absolutely intended) is used for both open-minded thinking and open exploratory motions. So when someone tells you to hold on or to let go, they’re telling you what to do with your mind, not just your hands.

    So over the last few weeks, I’ve tried to reflect on what this means from a practical perspective, and while teachings like this take years to really digest, I’ve come up with a few ways in which you can start to live life with open palms, right now.

    Appreciate things momentarily.

    At first, I didn’t really understand why this was important. To only appreciate things for a split second seemed to be to under-appreciate or even neglect them. But I soon realized that when I was trying too hard to enjoy something, I ended up quickly telling myself a story about how good it was—and soon enough I wasn’t actually experiencing the object anymore, I was enjoying the idea of it.

    By making a conscious attempt to appreciate things momentarily, I’ve been able to achieve two things. Firstly, I get used to short-term experiences so when pleasure leaves, it’s okay because I know something else will come soon. And secondly, I’m able to focus on the direct experience and not get lost in my judgments about it.

    Remind myself about the transience of things.

    This is relevant to letting the momentary experiences go.

    Whenever I see a pleasure arise, whether it’s a nicely cooked meal, a Netflix show, a hot shower, or just sitting down after a long day, I try to remind myself that it will soon pass and something else will replace is.

    When I’m experiencing less pleasurable states, like physical discomfort, boredom, tiredness, or even pain, I similarly try to watch it come and watch it go, not getting too attached either way.

    Identify with my experience over my narrative.

    Though relatively simple, this idea is incredibly profound.

    My worry over whether or not I was better off than twelve months prior was largely rooted in the story I was telling myself. The story, once I had told it enough times, quickly became my experience.

    If however, I had just been focusing on the sensations I was having in each moment, there would have been no ruminating on the past, and a lot of the problems I was creating for myself simply would’ve ceased to exist.

    Don’t shy away from pleasure.

    One of the ways we protect ourselves from subtle feelings such as a fear of loss or feelings of not being worthy is by not allowing ourselves to fully appreciate positive experiences when we have them. It takes a certain kind of vulnerability to give ourselves over to pleasure, and oftentimes there is an unconscious shield between us and our experience that may manifest itself in slight muscular tension or distracting thoughts.

    I’ve made a conscious effort to focus on getting the most out of joyful moments when they come up and not holding back from completely enjoying them.

    Question my relationship to time.

    A lot of the suffering that comes from our experience arises because we can’t help but compare it to another moment in time. In my own case, it was because I was arbitrarily using the marker of a year to make judgments about how I should’ve been feeling.

    I felt that this year should be as good as or better than last year. Not only is it pointless to make the comparison, but it’s impossible to do so accurately. When we’re told to be present and not focus too heavily on the past or the future, it’s not only practical advice, it’s rational advice; our ideas about time are incredibly skewed and often dictated in large part by our emotional state in that moment.

    The ways by which I’ve been trying to live life with open palms are nothing groundbreaking. They’re tried and tested ideas that most of us have already had some exposure to. What is difficult, however, is our ability to remember these in any given moment, when they should be most useful.

    We can do this by anchoring ourselves to the ideas, whether through a mantra, a memorable metaphor, or simply just repeated exposure, as you’re doing right now reading this article.

    How have you tried to live life with open palms? Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

  • How to Accept Anxious Feelings So You Can Let Them Pass

    How to Accept Anxious Feelings So You Can Let Them Pass

    “Don’t try and save yourself. The self that is trying to be saved is not you.” ~Mooji

    Three months ago I had a strange experience.

    It wasn’t strange in that it had never happened before. It was strange in that it was unexpected. Unexpected in the way a hiccup comes up out of nowhere to interrupt a meal. No, actually, it was more unexpected in the way a sudden illness overtakes a period of health.

    Just for a bit of context, over the last six months, I’ve generally been the calmest I’ve felt in years—maybe even my whole life. But recently this has come with a strange side effect. When negative emotions do arise, as they inevitably do, I’m sometimes even more reactive to them than I used to be.

    So three months ago when I woke up abruptly in the middle of the night with a ball of anxiety in my chest it was, well, unexpected.

    And my mind immediately kicked into overdrive.

    “Why am I anxious?”

    “Is there something I’ve forgotten?”

    “Is there something coming up that I’m nervous about?”

    “Am I sick?”

    And then the most dangerous question of all:

    “Have I really been anxious this whole time and the calm isn’t real?”

    This question is very tricky. If I was a character in a movie, I’d been standing up out of my seat and yelling at myself on the screen, “Ignore it! Ignore it! You’re fine, go back to sleep!”

    But it’s tricky because it feels like there a grain of truth to it; on some level we can all relate to that sense of doubt. Our minds tend to come up with explanations based on our feelings, so this sensation of anxiety was (unsurprisingly) causing my mind to come up with a story based on these feelings.

    The whole ordeal lasted less than five minutes. Fortunately, in this moment of tension, I was mindful enough to see how far-fetched these thoughts were. I settled on a far more pragmatic explanation; I’d become so unused to feelings of anxiety, that when they did arise, they were a shock to the system, so my mind immediately tried to rationalize them.

    And then I went back to sleep.

    Moments like this one would come again, and what I needed to do was simple. Any five-minute mindfulness book would have had the answer.

    All I needed to do to keep the calm was to not care that these thoughts and feelings were there. I just needed to be completely disinterested, to not touch anything in my mind. Following the instructions in a moment of distress, however, is much easier said than done.

    So I remembered what I’d heard a yoga teacher say once in an uncomfortable pose where the students had their hands above their heads for a long time.

    “Just tell your mind that things are going to be like this for the rest of your life. It’ll get bored of the pain and move on.”

    I took that idea and started applying it whenever worries came up. I managed to convince myself that I didn’t need to fix anything and that feelings of anxiety were just really not that interesting. It worked out pretty well, so well in fact, that I thought I’d go into a little bit more detail of how I managed to do so and share it with you.

    Here are five ways you can begin to accept anxious feelings and live a better life.

    1. Accept that you can never know why you are experiencing anxiety.

    As problem-solving creatures, when we experience discomfort we immediately try and understand why. But not everything in our lives has a straightforward answer. There are a multitude of factors that lead to anxious feelings, from genetics to work to relationships to diet, memories, and even the weather.

    Trying to pinpoint one reason so that you can have a concise narrative in our minds is a lot less effective (and a lot more tiring) than simply accepting the fact that you don’t know why. This acceptance also allows you to focus your energy toward more practical, calm-inducing strategies such as journaling, yoga, and exercise. When we have more energy, we’re more alert, and this naturally makes us more engaged in our work and home lives, safeguarding us against anxiety and rumination.

    2. Accept that anxiety is neither good nor bad.

    Seeing your anxiety in a wider perspective is best illustrated with a Taoist story (origin unknown):

    “There is an old farmer who had worked his crops from many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.

    “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.

    “Maybe,” replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.

    “Maybe,” answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Maybe,” said the farmer.”

    To accept anxious feelings, try to treat them like the farmer in the story treated his horses. You never know what good may come from your anxiety! In fact, the calm in my life that I mentioned at the start of this article is a direct result of the meditation practice I started, and continued, because of anxiety.

    3. Accept that everyone will experience some form of anxiety.

    When we experience pain we’re hardwired to respond to it, and in that response our perspective is distorted. We become the center of the universe, because we are only feeling our pain in that moment, and not anyone else’s.

    It can be calming and reassuring to know that everyone goes through periods of worry. There are billions of people who have dealt with whatever feelings are coming up in your experience, and there will probably be billions after you. So don’t by any means underestimate your capacity to handle the situation.

    4. Let go of the idea that you shouldn’t have anxiety.

    How would you feel about anxiety if everyone in the world had it? Or if you were told that it was a necessary and useful part of life? You’d probably worry about it a lot less. The idea that you shouldn’t have any feeling stems from the need for things to be better. If you can let go of the normative belief that anxiety is wrong, then your mind will naturally become less and less interested in it.

    This goes hand in hand with the idea that anxiety holds you back in any way—you want to let that go too. Anxiety may, in fact, hold you back from an immediate action, but if we recall the Taoist story of the farmer and his horses, we can never truly know in what direction anxiety will take us.

    5. Become bored with your anxiety.

    This last one is the most difficult but the most important. Often anxiety is so painful that we become fascinated, obsessed even, with understanding and solving our worries. We want to get rid of the pain of anxiety as soon as possible.

    Sometimes this is useful, as we come up with strategies to manage our emotions, but a lot of the time it validates the power of our anxiety and adds fuel to the fire. The mind will only focus on what it values; if you can manage to become bored with your anxiety, it will loosen its grip on your life.

    —

    The steps I’ve outlined in this article are, like I explained in my own experience, much easier said than done. I hope, however, that I’ve given you a slightly different approach you can take toward dealing with any negative emotions.

  • 5 Ways to Calm Your Mind When You’re Exhausted (Without Meditation)

    5 Ways to Calm Your Mind When You’re Exhausted (Without Meditation)

    “Calm your mind. Life becomes much easier when you keep your mind at peace.” ~Unknown

    Let me start with a confession.

    If I’m honest with you, even just writing these words actually makes me feel kind of uncomfortable.

    But I’m going to say it because it’s true, and some of you reading this are going to realize that on some level you probably share the same feeling.

    I hate meditation.

    Now, let me do the obligatory defend-the-shocking-thing-I-just-said.

    I mean, to be more specific, some days I hate meditation.

    Most of the time, I love it. I really love it. It’s had the most positive influence of anything in my entire life. But so have my family, and some days… just joking. Look, normally meditation makes me feel on top of the world. I’m bursting with gratitude, and even the idea of stress can seem to be so far away.

    But on other days, I do also kind of hate it. Actually, hate is too strong, let me say I really dislike it. I’m sure some of you can relate.

    But there’s a reason we feel this way at times: exhaustion.

    About six months ago, my meditation practice had been going well. I was feeling incredibly content, just with life in general. But after a couple of weeks of travel, difficulties with work, and family commitments, I found myself tired, very tired. And my mind started racing a lot more than it had been.

    Mentally, I felt like I had lost my inner calm. Like I’d taken one step forward and two steps back.

    So I tried to do what I always do. Meditate.

    But for a couple of weeks, I was approaching the practice with completely the wrong attitude. I started trying to use meditation as my medication, and it had the opposite intended effect. It just wouldn’t work! I actually started to get completely annoyed with the whole thing.

    So I tried harder, and harder, and harder. Every day I would sit down to meditate, only to leave the session feeling even more tired than when I had started.

    It was at this point that I decided to shift my focus to other ways to calm my mind, at least until I had more energy.

    And I realized a few very important things.

    Firstly, I realized that I truly am in love with meditation. Even when I ‘hated’ it, I still wanted to practice consistently, and followed through with it.

    But I also understood that in times of stress, we can sometimes start to resent things we love. I understood that although I’ve barely missed a day of meditation in the last couple of years, I’m still a human being in a human body and I’m going to have days where I feel like I’m back where I started.

    I also came to realize that a calm mind is a focused mind, and a tired mind doesn’t have the resources to stay focused.

    It’s an unfortunate reality of the human brain that the more fatigued we are, the more our thoughts start to race. Anxiety and tiredness work on a feedback loop. So when you’re struggling with one, it’s inevitable that you’re going to have problems with the other.

    While meditation is the most effective way to calm your mind, it’s not an option when you’re incredibly tired! There is another way to do this, which is by doing things that naturally focus your mind outside of yourself and guide your brain to release calming neurochemicals.

    The following five ways to calm your mind don’t require as much mental energy as meditation. And in the short term, they have the same effect on our mood.

    1. Do something complex (but not too difficult).

    The default mode network (DMN) is the part of the brain that is associated with reflections about yourself. Thoughts like: “Why do I feel lazy today?” “Should I text John back now or later?” “I’m starting to get hungry, maybe I should get a snack.” Meditation researchers call this “mind-wandering.” It takes up a huge portion of our waking life.

    When we’re tired or anxious, our minds wander more than usual, which makes us more tired and anxious.

    There are two commonly used ways we can consistently quiet the DMN. The first is meditation; the second is engaging in a complex task. (In fact, mindfulness coloring books are effective because of task complexity as well mindfulness.)

    You can pick something you regularly do, like drawing, sports, creative writing, or a work project and just increase the difficulty slightly. With drawing, for example, you can try and draw something that is more of a challenge, or with sports or writing, you can try setting a timer and complete a task in a limited time period.

    2. Do something for someone else.

    This is another way we can get out of our own heads when exhaustion starts to set in. Obviously, you don’t want to do anything too strenuous, but even doing simple things, when focusing on others, can quiet a racing mind.

    You can make it a habit to contact someone that you feel may need it, or you can spend some time volunteering or building something that you think can help others. Focusing on the well-being of the community can also give us purpose and meaning, which can be very reinvigorating.

    3. Do something fun and creative.

    When we are trying too hard to feel better all the effort can defeat the purpose and be kind of damaging. Doing something fun can help us break the cycle. This is because dopamine has a re-energizing effect on the nervous system and by engaging in play and creativity, we recharge our depleted energy reserves.

    Sometimes for example, I like to do free-writing mind maps. Essentially you set a timer for fifteen minutes and just let all your thoughts out on paper, and create mind maps for how they relate to each other. You can do this as a mindfulness exercise or just to express any creative ideas you have. This helps you feel like your thoughts are organized and focused and not scattered and distracted.

    Trying to do anything artistic like painting, origami, or even lego (if you have kids) can also be effective. Fortunately, YouTube has millions of tutorials if you want to learn something new.

    4. Get some exercise and take a long sleep.

    Exercise may seem counter-productive when you’re tired, but when we’re mentally exhausted, it can sometimes start to mess with our sleep. This varies slightly depending on each individual, but is largely because exhaustion and anxiety impact our ability to wind down before bed, which is a critical part of good quality sleep. Unconscious worries can also wake us in the night and stop us from getting into the deep states we need.

    By exercising, eating a big and healthy meal, and taking a long sleep, you can get the restorative effects that you need. This isn’t an invitation to oversleep, but if it’s been a while since you got some deep rest, it could be exactly what you need. It’s also useful to create a pre-sleep ritual that involves calming down and not looking at any screens for two to three hours before sleeping.

    5. Do something social.

    This goes for introverts as well as extroverts. It’s a common belief that introverts are drained by social interactions, but typically this is only when interacting with people they’re not comfortable with.

    If you’re an introvert, make the effort be social with someone who you always have fun with. When we’re engaged in a social situation that is fun, and not anxiety-inducing, we naturally get out of our own heads and begin to recharge our batteries.

    Meditation is great for calming our minds, and while you should keep trying to meditate even through rough periods, it can be good to have some short-term solutions to help you get your energy back.

    Have you ever felt this way with meditation? How else have you tried to quieten your mind? Let us know in the comments!

  • 9 Beliefs You Have to Let Go If You Want to Find Inner Peace

    9 Beliefs You Have to Let Go If You Want to Find Inner Peace

    “Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.” ~Adyashanti

    I don’t know exactly when it happened.

    It was probably about eighteen months ago, maybe a couple of years. I can’t really remember, and it doesn’t really matter.

    I was up to my neck in stress, and having one of those days.

    It was one of those days where you wake up late and your neck is a little stiff. One of those days where you skip breakfast, and you immediately feel that you’re behind schedule on every little piece of work. Where you have calls that you’ve forgotten to make, and emails that you’ve forgotten to send. One of those days where you know there’s no way you’ll have time to go to the gym later, even though today’s the day you need it the most! Just one of those days.

    So I got home from work, sat in my meditation chair, and tried to calm myself down. But the stress and the frustration weren’t going anywhere. I wasn’t going to simply breathe it away.

    As I sat there, struggling to relax, I found myself more and more wound up, until a deep pressure was gripping my forehead. Suddenly, in a split second, I just let go, and the flood gates poured open.

    I let go of wanting to solve any issues in my life. I let go of trying to be calm, or trying to be stressed. I let go of trying be happy, I let go of trying to be sad. I let go of problem solving, and I let go of ideas of procrastination.

    It wasn’t the kind of letting go where your mind subtly grips onto something else. The kind of letting go when you scream “I just don’t care anymore” but you know you’re now just holding onto the idea of “not caring.”

    It wasn’t that. It was just… letting go. And I realized at that moment that all my worries were tangled up this thick web of beliefs I had about what I should have been experiencing.

    See, it sounds like a cliche, and maybe it is, but I realized that I didn’t need to get anywhere. Exactly where I wanted to be was hidden behind layers of beliefs. It was cloaked behind a thick forest of shoulds and should-nots.

    But as much as I’d heard this before, it wasn’t until I was actually able to give in that I could start to clearly see the unconscious beliefs that had been getting in the way of my inner peace.

    To some extent, everyone seeking change and peace are initially guided by ideas. But I’ve come to realize since then that the real change happens when you let go of ideas, as opposed to following new ones. After a long process of meditation and journaling, I found that the nine beliefs l describe below are what we often hold onto unconsciously.

    I also came to the understanding that training my mind to “be present” or “be calm” could only get me so far. While I had many fleeting moments of peace, they often felt as if they came on top of a background of noise and confusion.

    When I started to let go of these ideas, the inner peace became the background, and the noise became what would visit and leave.

    Here are nine unconscious beliefs about life that get in the way of our inner peace.

    1. “I need to be doing something right now.”

    This is an incredibly subtle belief that most of us don’t even realize we are holding onto. It stems from our obsession with productivity and achievement, and it manifests as a constant, itching discontent.

    Though our ego tricks us into believing we need this feeling to get things done, when we can let it go we see a lot of our anxiety dissolves and our relaxation deepens. We’re also much more likely to enjoy what we need to do without the constant internal pressure of feeling that what we’re doing in this moment is never enough.

    2. “When I get what I want I will be happy.”

    This is another cliche that I’m sure most of us are aware of. But despite acknowledging that we don’t need to get anything to be happy, it’s easy for us to get caught up in the chase.

    To overcome this, we need to be mindful of when we have the feeling that we need something before we can be happy. When we see we’re doing this we can practice letting go of that need, even if only for a brief moment. The more capable we become at doing so, the more we will naturally experience happiness in the present, and the less our minds will fixate on ideas of the future for fulfillment.

    3. “Finding inner peace is difficult.”

    This is another myth that gets in the way. Many of us feel that we are far from inner peace, and we idolize those who seem to have found it. Because of this, we unconsciously believe that it’s a long way away from where we are in our lives, and we need to go on a long journey to find it.

    Maybe we’ve read books that suggest that fundamental change in how we feel or act takes years of difficult training or some sort of pilgrimage. But often it is letting go of the belief that what we want is so far away, and understanding that when you stop striving so aggressively you will start to see the calm you’re looking for. It is this process of turning your beliefs upside down that becomes the journey in itself.

    4. “If I express my emotions honestly people will think I’m weak.”

    We’re often taught, as we grow up, to keep a lid on our emotions. This is common for responses that are considered socially inappropriate such as anger, fear, and sadness. Though in many ways we’re also taught to limit how much we show our positive emotions such as joy and excitement. This leads us, in adulthood, to believe that honest expression will be met with disapproval by others.

    The irony in this is that as everyone is dealing with the urge to be authentic, those that actually do so are often met with respect and admiration.

    5. “If people knew the real me, they wouldn’t like it.”

    This is similar to the issue we have with emotional expressions. We hide certain aspects of our personality, defining ourselves publicly by what we show and privately by what we’ve hidden. The reality is that you are a lot more than either of those stories, and people will gravitate toward the real you because they appreciate honesty.

    6. “I should be happier right now.”

    In our culture, we fixate too much on social comparisons between individuals. When we don’t feel good, we look at what we have and feel guilty for not being happy enough. Or, we look at what we don’t have and wonder why we’re not as happy as the next person. Happiness isn’t something you need to have all the time; it comes and goes, like any experience, but it’s not a prerequisite for being human.

    7. “Not being the best me isn’t good enough.”

    There’s been a huge movement in the last twenty years toward personal development. Though a lot of these ideas are healthy, they can be driven by toxic motives. Most people don’t feel they need to better themselves out of a genuine need to improve their community, but out of the feeling that they’re not good enough in the first place.

    When you can strip yourself of this idea you’ll soon realize that the chase to being your best self is infinite and anxiety-inducing. You’ll see that you can love and appreciate yourself now, as you are, without needing to be someone else before feeling okay.

    8. “I owe the world.”

    This is a tough one and is related to the feeling of needing to be your best self. Though gratitude is important, it doesn’t mean we should walk around with the feeling that we’re in debt to the universe. We see this when people pathologically try to prove their worth to others. When we let go of the deep feeling of debt and obligation, we can then really start to give people what we have to offer.

    9. “There was a time in my past that absolutely sucked.”

    Often we become so identified with bad times in our past that they get in the way of us enjoying the present. We define ourselves with these past experiences and feel we need to share them with everyone we know before they know the real us. But when we come to realize that they are far less significant than we initially thought, we stop feeling like imposters and we let old memories fall away.

    —

    Many of these beliefs still come up in my day to day life. Sometimes when I start getting close to new people, I have the feeling in the back of my mind that they don’t know me until I’ve retold them a series of clips from my life story. I understand though that these stories aren’t who we are in this moment. What other people think of us and what we think of ourselves is constantly changing.

    Other times I find myself tired, or sick, and there’s an itching feeling that I should be happier, or I should just be doing more with my time. And like many of us, I still need to work on expressing my emotions honestly, without the fear that others will see it as a weakness.

    All of this is okay. These beliefs took a lifetime of conditioning to cement themselves in our minds, so it’s only right they should take a little time and effort before they’re able to be completely let go.

    Fortunately these constructs don’t have the same kind of grip over my psyche that they once had. In time, my anxieties have started to fade away and I’ve been able to ruminate less over unnecessary questions.

    What do you think about these unconscious beliefs? Have you had any experience with them? I’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts in the comments!

  • How to Get Out of a Mental Rut by Trying Something New

    How to Get Out of a Mental Rut by Trying Something New

    “Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.” – Brian Tracy

    Have you ever come to a crossroad in your life?

    You know something needs to change, but you have more than one option—and it feels like there’s a lot of pressure on you to make the right choice.

    That was me a few months ago.

    I was stressed, overworked, and in what you would probably call a rut. Fatigued and struggling to get things done, I initially thought that all I needed was a break. But I soon realized that that wasn’t the case.

    What had happened was that being tired had driven me to get stuck in a messy cycle of negative thoughts, and every time I tried to untangle little problems, things seemed to get worse.

    Everyone around me was telling me to take a rest. But intuitively, I didn’t think a rest was what I needed. I’m generally a confident guy, but if you spend enough time in your own head, doubt will always begin to plant its seeds.

    What I needed wasn’t a break—it was a confidence boost.

    So what was my cure for the escalating stress?

    What was my grand plan to beat this anxiety?

    I thought I’d try stand-up comedy.

    Yep. I thought I would do one of the most stressful things most people can imagine. I would get up in front of a crowd and try to make them laugh. So I did.

    In the lead up to the night of my set, all the anxiety that I had been feeling was amplified.

    As I sat behind the curtain waiting to go on stage, my palms sweaty, leg tapping furiously, I tried to breathe slowly to calm myself down, but my thoughts raced so quickly I couldn’t even make them out. Why was I doing this? Should I just get up and leave right now? Who would knowingly put themselves through something like this?

    It was too late. My name was called, I stood up, opened the curtain, and….

    It actually went really well.

    Don’t get me wrong. It was every bit as scary as I expected, but as I predicted, it shook my brain up enough to break free of the mental rut I was in.

    And while it didn’t solve everything overnight, it did set off a chain reaction of renewed attitudes and choices, which left me with more energy, vitality, and positivity than I had had for months.

    So without further ado, here are five ways pushing your comfort zone can pull you out of a mental rut.

    1. It gives you a reference experience for future challenges.

    When it’s been a long time since you really pushed yourself, a new challenge can seem incredibly daunting. Your first response is usually “How on earth am I going to do that?”

    If, on the other hand, you’ve done something difficult relatively recently, your brain will immediately look to that reference experience as an example.

    Since the night of the comedy, I’ve been fortunate to achieve quite a lot in a short amount of time. That’s because every time I face a difficult task, I try to think, “Well, could be hard, but if I could do stand-up comedy, I can definitely do this.”

    2. It makes you feel alive again.

    A mental rut will depress your emotions and that means you will feel less of the good stuff. The longer this goes on, the easier it is for your body to forget what vitality feels like.

    By having a huge rush of neurochemicals like adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin, you immediately remember just how great it can feel to be alive.

    3. It can redefine your self-image.

    After having spent some time in a mental rut, I started to lose confidence. When I thought about who I was and what I was capable of, I started to constantly reflect on what I hadn’t been able to achieve.

    However, when I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, I started to again think of myself as the person who could do difficult things.

    Our self-image is such a vague and always changing idea in our minds, but it is one that unavoidably has a big impact on our lives. By doing things that allow you to have a positive self-image, you gather the momentum to pull yourself out of tough times.

    4. It will inspire others.

    Inspiring other people around you, by pushing your comfort zone, has a number of benefits.

    For one, it will change how they perceive you and how they act toward you, and in doing so alter the perception that you have of yourself.

    But maybe even more importantly, inspiring people around you can encourage them to push their own comfort zones, and their actions will in turn inspire you. When you spend more and more time around people who are helping each other grow, you’ll all benefit from each other’s positivity, and the boundaries of what you believe is possible will expand.

    5. It reminds you that emotions will come and go.

    For the last few years, I’ve made a big effort to try and embrace one of the fundamental truths in both eastern spirituality and western psychology: that emotions will come and go; they are just experiences and do not define you.

    But I’m only human. So like everyone else I’m constantly forgetting and re-remembering of this truth. Sometimes it’s as simple as noticing the differences in your mood change between morning and evening, and sometimes it’s more profound, such as doing something you never thought possible.

    So what does this mean about you?

    If you’re going through a mental rut or even a period of depression, and you don’t think it’s simply a matter of needing a rest, try doing something that takes you out of your comfort zone.

    I’ve heard of countless experiences of someone doing something new, whether it be surfing, jumping out of a plane, or even traveling to a new place, and it’s completely changed their situation. If you decide to do so, at the very least you’ll have a wonderful new experience to refer to.

    Remember that if you’re in a mental rut, you’re not alone. Everyone goes through it at one stage or another, and reaching out to others is important.

    How have you pushed yourself out of your comfort zone, and how did it help you?

  • 5 Beliefs About Anxiety That Can Make You Even More Anxious

    5 Beliefs About Anxiety That Can Make You Even More Anxious

    “It’s okay to not be okay all the time.” ~Unknown

    I never thought of myself as an anxious person.

    But here I was again, staring at a computer screen in my office, so stressed I could barely type. I’d been throwing myself into work and I had crashed—hard.

    And this wasn’t the first time.

    Unfortunately, our mental image of who we think we are and who we actually are don’t always match up. But part of being human is that we learn to live with that, we embrace the struggle, and we grow.

    Over the last five years I’ve had a number periods of high anxiety, often triggered by work-related stress. In that time I’ve realized that my beliefs about anxiety were unhelpful, and they often worsened the experience.

    When I was able to let go of the firm grip I had on these ideas, I found that when anxiety came to visit, it didn’t stay around as long as it used to.

    Here are five beliefs about anxiety that can make you even more anxious. If you recognize them in yourself, I hope you can let them go when they arise.

    1. It’s not normal (or okay) to have anxiety. 

    When you first start to notice your anxiety, you might think it’s not normal. The feelings in your body will be so intense that when you look around at other people, who on the surface look so calm, you won’t be able to believe that what’s happening to you might happening to them.

    But I want you to know something. You are not alone.

    Though everyone’s experience will be different, there are dozens of people you’ll come into contact with daily who have probably had similar feelings.

    That guy who gave you your coffee this morning, he had a panic attack before work. The girl next to you at the bus stop, she’s trying to calm herself down right now. The boss who yelled at your coworker an hour ago, he’s anxious that his own boss is breathing down his neck.

    Anxiety is common.

    Holding onto the (false) belief that what’re you’re experiencing isn’t normal only intensifies the problem by making you feel separate from everyone else around you. It keeps you in your head where the question “Why is this happening to me?” may circle round and round without ever finding a good enough answer.

    2. I need to get over my anxiety in X weeks, months, years.

    Putting strict deadlines on when you want to completely rid yourself of anxiety is never useful. But I used to do this all the time.

    The role that anxiety is going to play in your life isn’t predictable—you just can’t know. Telling yourself that you must overcome it in a certain amount of time is just going to feed it. Once you can truly learn to accept that you don’t know when or for how long it will come to visit, you’ll notice it does so a lot less often!

    3. I can use my anxiety as a motivational tool.

    One common way we often justify our anxiety is through the cliché “I work best under pressure,” but what we’re usually doing is placing an unnecessary amount of stress on our bodies and brains.

    In the long term, this can leave us drained of the necessary energy to prevent and ward off anxious thoughts. When you experience stress, don’t focus on doing more. Just ride it out, let it pass, and try to be productive from a place of relative calm.

    4. The magic bullet cure for my anxiety is out there somewhere.

    Overcoming anxiety is a process, and holding onto the idea that you’re just one more book, course, or technique away from the ultimate cure will inevitably lead to disappointment, and typically more anxiety.

    Take it day by day and relish in the small victories, and over time you’ll make progressive but sustainable changes in the way you handle your nerves.

    5. Anxiety is all in my head.

    This is completely false, and an unhelpful way to look at anxiety. It’s an issue with your nervous system, so it’s just as much in your body as it is in your head.

    Trying to think or rationalize your way out of panic can often be a losing battle. By seeing the mind and body as connected, and both as home to your anxiety, you can develop more skillful control over your thoughts and feelings and not get caught up in a maze of worry.

    If you don’t already have a movement related practice, something like yoga, Qigong or Tai Chi can be really useful for improving your ability to calm your body.

    I’m not yet completely anxiety free, but every year I cope with it better and better.

    Make small steps every day, congratulate yourself on the little wins, and remember that you are not alone!

  • Stop Chasing Happiness: 17 Alternative Ways to Live Your Best Possible Life

    Stop Chasing Happiness: 17 Alternative Ways to Live Your Best Possible Life

    “If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.” ~Edith Wharton

    I have a question for you.

    What would you be willing to sacrifice to be happy?

    Would you be happy to let go of Netflix? Alcohol? Pizza?

    Would you be willing to take up a monastic life?

    Every single day of the year we’re being sold happiness. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in the form of a pill or a book or a holiday, the underlying idea is the same: What we have to sell you will make you happy.

    The problem with happiness is that no one really knows exactly what it is. It’s intangible, even a little mysterious, yet still we all want to be happy. But trying to be happy is like trying to get to sleep; the harder you try, the less likely it is to happen.

    So four years ago, on New Years Eve, I made the pledge to myself to stop trying to be happy.

    Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t miserable. I was just spending too much time thinking about whether or not I was happy—even though neither I, nor anyone I knew really, could give a clear answer about what this meant.

    So instead of saying to myself, This year I’m going to be happy, I said, This year I’m going to try new things. I’m going to meet new people. I’m going to go to new places. I’m going to push myself out of my comfort zone.

    And if I’m not happy, well, I’m not happy, but at least I’ve had some interesting experiences.

    The result of this was the best (and probably happiest) year of my life, at least up to that point. And I realized something obvious in hindsight, but still profound: Happiness is something that comes a lot more easily when we stop thinking about it.

    It’s more like a place you occupy than an object you obtain. Some days you’ll be there and some days you wont, but the more time you spend thinking about being happy, the less likely you are to spend time being so.

    A large part of what less than happy people have is a problem with their patterns of attention.

    In the same way the attention of an extrovert is naturally directed at social communication, the attention of an entrepreneur seeks out business opportunities, and an artist looks for creative expression, an unhappy person tends to look directly at happiness.

    This post will explore some practices that can help you to stop focusing so hard on the idea of happiness and instead embrace the experiences and thoughts that will actually make you happy.

    1. Take the word “happy” out of your vocabulary.

    We all know words are used to communicate ideas. Unfortunately, sometimes a word can get overused and it becomes confusing, stifling, or even dangerous.

    Here are some other words you should start to use in conversations with yourself and others about how you feel. Don’t be fooled into believing you need to experience all of them; you don’t.

    If you find yourself asking, Am I happy? Replace the question with: Do I have [insert word] in my life?

    • Contentment
    • Enjoyment
    • Laughter
    • Well-being
    • Peace of mind
    • Cheerfulness
    • Playfulness
    • Hopefulness
    • Blessedness

    2. Practice living in the present.

    Letting go of past regrets and future anxieties is not easy, but it’s the fastest way to live a full and enjoyable life. Think about enjoying each moment for its own unique role in the ongoing narrative of your life.

    If you want a short mantra to keep in mind: be here now.

    3. Decide what you really want to do.

    A lot of people that are searching for happiness will end up with “shiny object syndrome.” This is what happens when they bounce from goal to goal because they’re looking for something (or someone) to take away all their suffering.

    Knowing yourself and what you truly want can help you develop purpose and focus—so much so that you don’t even have time to waste pondering happiness. You may even realize that happiness is not what you really want, that you’re willing to put up with being unhappy some of the time if it means you will have a sense of achievement.

    4. Let go of unrealistic expectations about how happy you’re supposed to be.

    For most of human history people lived relatively rough lives. The idea that you’re supposed to be happy all of the time is pretty new.

    Though you should strive to live the fullest life you can, it’s actually more normal and perfectly okay to live an average life interspersed with brief periods of joy.

    5. Take small daily steps.

    If you think you know what you want and you’re determined that it will make you happy, at least decide on small daily steps that you can take to get there.

    Setting unrealistical goals that you never get to finish is far less fulfilling than setting small goals that you can finish and appreciate—and ones that let you know you’re on the right track.

    6. Make serving others a regular habit.

    One key habit of unhappy people that we often don’t talk about is that they are inherently self-centered.

    This doesn’t mean that they are bad people by any means. It just means their minds spend a disproportionate amount of time focused on the self.

    Serving others is one way to break this pattern of attention from “How am I feeling?” to “How are you feeling?” There are a lot of studies that show that giving to others is more rewarding than receiving.

    7. Separate your happiness from your achievements.

    We all need to learn to separate our happiness from our achievements. It’s okay to feel content with our lives simply because we have an inherent sense of self-worth.

    Reaching our goals can obviously bolster this feeling and give us a deep sense of accomplishment, but the absence of achievement should not mean the absence of happiness.

    8. Don’t force yourself to be positive all the time.

    There’s a lot of advice in the self-help community and spiritual circles about being positive. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the best advice. It’s better to be positive when you are actually feeling positive than it is to be positive when you’re feeling negative.

    9. Remove things that prevent happiness.

    This is actually a lot more important than finding things to make you happy.

    Are you in a toxic relationship?

    Do you dislike your job?

    Are you eating a lot of unhealthy food?

    These things all need to go before you start to seek happiness; otherwise, they can hold you back and you may never be satisfied.

    10. Be okay with okay.

    When people ask you, “How’s work? How’s the new city? How’s your relationship going?” Don’t you feel compelled to say “really good!” even when it’s not?

    We’re so conditioned to feel like we need to have the best of everything that “okay” just isn’t good enough for most of us.

    Learning to be okay with okay is a much better strategy toward allowing things to become great than is anxiously wishing that they already were.

    11. Get out of your comfort zone.

    Getting out of your comfort zone is good not only for your sense of self-worth, but it also gives your brain a huge adrenaline dump and a flush of endorphins.

    You’ll know when you’re getting out of your comfort zone when you feel anxious before doing something, but you do it anyway, because you know it is beneficial to you in the long run. Afterward, you’ll often feel a huge relief and sense of self-worth at having done something you were scared to do.

    Depending on your own situation you might find this in traveling to new places, meeting new people, trying new activities (public speaking, scuba diving, bungee jumping etc.) or even just meditating through negative emotions.

    12. Look after your body.

    From muscular tension that can trap emotions to serotonin production and bacterial imbalances in your gut, your body is the number one vehicle that will allow you to experience joy and satisfaction, so treat it with care!

    13. Meditate daily.

    This is a no brainer. I’m sure anyone reading this article is familiar with the physical and psychological health benefits of mindfulness and meditation.

    But there is one I’d like to add:

    Meditation is long, slow, and you often you don’t see the deep benefits for a long time; in fact, when you are starting out, it can often seem like a complete leap of faith. But this is why it’s so important.

    When you sit and stare at a wall or focus on your breath or do anything that (compared to our normal lives) is so bland, it conditions you to not grab on to the colorful, shiny objects that usually point you toward a shallow sense of fulfillment.

    With a longstanding meditation practice that tendency to grasp will usually just fall away naturally. You’ll unknowingly get out of your own way.

    14. Meet new people.

    Meeting new and positive people can give you new vital energy that kickstarts your life and helps you focus on enjoying the present.

    Because we are such social creatures, having likeminded people in our lives can have such a powerful impact on the way our habits and beliefs develop. As the old saying goes, “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

    To find people with similar interests and ambitions in your city, there are plenty of sites that can help you connect. You can try MeetUp.com for starters, or just do a simple search in Facebook for groups in your area.

    Likewise, if you are interested in meditation and spirituality, retreats are a great way to know people and connect on a deep level in a short amount of time.

    15. Go out in nature.

    A lot of the time our worries and concerns are largely linked to our environment—both immediately, such as the construction noise outside our bedroom, and peripherally, such as when an advert on T.V. reminds you of a past failure.

    Nature allows you to completely unplug, allowing yourself the space to experience relaxation and acceptance.

    16. Be honest with yourself.

    Discontentment often comes from what psychologists call cognitive dissonance—incongruence between two conflicting ideas or emotions in your mind.

    You can greatly reduce this by just accepting, admitting, and experiencing the emotions that are passing through you.

    If you are angry, be angry; if you are sad, be sad; if you are joyful, be joyful. When we try to actively change or deny present emotions, they become meta-emotions: guilt about sadness, anger about fear, fear about unhappiness. Then they become toxic.

    17. Energize yourself in the morning.

    As much as we like to think we have control and autonomy when it comes to our feelings, the truth is that momentum is a huge factor.

    Morning routines have been a keystone habit of content and successful people throughout history, and for good reason; starting your day with a spiritual practice, a physical practice, and a healthy breakfast may not seem like much, but compounded over years, it can make all the difference in the world to your well-being.

    —

    We can all learn to let go of the neurotic need to chase happiness.

    Doing so will do us a world of good—and who knows, we might even have a pretty good time.

    How have you learned to stop chasing happiness? Let us know in the comments!

  • How to Turn Your Sensitivity into Your Biggest Strength

    How to Turn Your Sensitivity into Your Biggest Strength

    “Never apologize for being sensitive or emotional. Let this be a sign that you’ve got a big heart and aren’t afraid to let others see it. Showing your emotions is a sign of strength.” ~Brigitte Nicole

    We have a problem in the modern world that needs to be addressed.

    It impacts huge numbers of the population but is so ingrained in our culture that it’s easy for us to overlook how dangerous it can be.

    This problem is the denial of sensitivity.

    We often associate sensitivity with weakness, but when we learn how to manage our energy and emotions we can actually become more controlled, empathetic, and driven.

    Most people suppress their sensitivity, not realizing that it’s a very powerful source of productive energy once they can learn how to accept it and direct it toward something positive.

    For a large portion of my life I would feel emotions very intensely, whether it was while watching movies or noticing the feelings of those around me. I guess you could say I was a natural empath.

    Unfortunately, I did what most people do in Western society—I cut these feelings off at the source, intellectualizing everything and separating my head from my body.

    However, over time I eventually learned that the more I avoided feelings, particularly negative ones, the longer they would persist. It was almost impossible to let go of things. It wasn’t uncommon for unresolved issues that I hadn’t thought about in years to come up in a dream.

    Now through meditation and mindfulness practices I’ve learned to sit with my emotions and use sensitivity to feel more joy, be guided by my gut, and employ all that emotional energy in creative and constructive ways.

    Why Do We Deny Our Sensitivity?

    According to Researcher Elaine Aron, about 15-20% of the population are highly sensitive due to the nature of their nervous systems. These people generally have an inclination toward overstimulation, emotional reactivity, and empathy.

    Whether I fall under this umbrella or not never interested me that much. What interested me was that our culture often finds it culturally inappropriate to experience or express sensitivity, even though there are millions of us living somewhere on that spectrum who could get much more out of life if we just learned to use our emotions!

    How Can You Turn Your Sensitivity into a Strength?

    There are many ways to do this, and it’s partly going to be dependent on you as an individual. However, there is an overarching point to keep in mind, and that is to accept yourself and your emotions as they are, not to repress or avoid them or to feel guilt for having them.

    Repression or avoidance often leads to what are known as meta-emotions, emotions about emotions, such as being angry because you are sad, or feeling guilty because you are excited.

    You want to stay as far away from a lot of these as possible, as they can be confusing and dangerous. Just try to experience the emotion as is and accept it for what it is.

    Recently I had an experience whereby I caught myself doing just this. I found myself in a social situation feeling frustrated with someone else’s behavior. I then became judgmental of my own frustration—it didn’t fit with my self-image of being cool, calm, and collected—and this morphed into anger at myself.

    After a five-minute dance of unnecessary negative meta-emotions, I was able to catch myself and realize that it was okay to just allow myself to feel frustrated. The person I was dealing with isn’t perfect, and neither am I.

    Sitting with Your Emotions

    Most people have a whole host of conscious or unconscious avoidance behaviors that stop them from feeling both negative and positive emotions. Their sensitivity can make it seem like the experiences are too overwhelming, so they intentionally cut them off.

    This can be something as simple as turning the T.V. on after work to avoid reflecting on the problems of the day, to avoiding commitment to a lifelong partner or drinking to numb the stimulation of complex social environments.

    In fact, one way I personally used to deal with this was to read books, particularly about psychology, philosophy, or spirituality. By doing so, I was ignoring or intellectualizing any confronting emotions I had, which gave me an excuse to ‘deal’ with them without actually dealing with them.

    I’d also find myself diving head first into new projects or jobs or even sometimes travelling to new cities, because at the time they seemed like a quick fix solution to any uncomfortable feelings I was experiencing.

    To counteract this tendency, which we all share to some degree, we need to recognize an emotion when it is there, accept it for what it is, nonjudgmentally, and physically sit with it for moment before letting it go.

    Make Use of Your Passion and Creativity

    One trait that often comes with being sensitive is being passionate and creative.

    Sensitive people are often artists, and vice versa, as they are more aware of their emotions and better able to communicate them to others through their work. Sadly, traditionally schooling tends to value science and business related skills from an early age, and so as children we may be encouraged away from our creative endeavors.

    If you feel you are passionate about something you should never shy away from following it, no matter what anyone else says. You should use any strong feelings you have as a compass that tells you what you want to be doing with your time.

    Take Breaks and Reflect

    Sensitive people often tend to be very reflective. If they spend too much time in intense environments (which is most of the time in large cities) they can become overwhelmed.

    We can use this to our advantage by engaging in reflective practices such as journaling, and allowing ourselves time to let our batteries recharge.

    By taking specific time out of our day to stop and think, whether that be at home or in nature, we can become more aware of our situation and the subtle nuances that are impacting us in our day to day lives.

    Suppressing our sensitivity is never a healthy option. If we can learn to manage it with these practices we can use it to our advantage and allow it to become one of our biggest strengths.

    How have you managed your sensitivity? Have you found any ways that help you to use it to your advantage? Let us know in the comments!

  • How Short Rests Can Make You Healthier, Happier, and More Productive

    How Short Rests Can Make You Healthier, Happier, and More Productive

    “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” ~John Lubbock

    Do you ever fear taking breaks?

    Maybe you think that if you stop working, everything is going to come crashing down?

    Sometimes it feels like you’re riding a train of momentum, and if you try to stop or slow down you’re just going to come off the tracks.

    I know the feeling. Believe me, I used to feel the same.

    I wanted so badly to achieve everything I could, and would beat myself up if I didn’t. Coffee would fuel my mornings, deadlines and adrenaline my afternoons.

    At the time I wasn’t completely oblivious to the problems with my lifestyle. No matter how tired I would get, I still wasn’t sleeping well, and I’d often spend weekends thinking about work.

    I could be out at lunch on a Sunday, only half engaged in a conversation with friends because I was already mentally rehearsing Monday.

    I knew that I was always just a little bit too stressed. And to make it worse, I was confused, caught between the fear of slowing down and the fear of allowing stress to damage my health.

    The problem is, it already was. I started getting headaches at work and waking up with chronic tension in my neck and my back. At a certain point I realised it just wasn’t worth it.

    Finally I decided it was time to do something.

    So I read a few books on how to better manage my energy. Once I started learning about how important breaks were to my body, mind, and well-being, I began to start taking them seriously. And I noticed something strange—I was becoming more and more productive and I had less stress.

    So today I want to tell you something, and I really want you to listen.

    You need a rest.

    I know what your brain is telling you. How will the kids get to school? How will the bills get paid? I have three to-do lists—and that’s just this morning. How on earth am I going to find time to rest?!

    Fortunately, short rests can become a part of anyone’s lifestyle, no matter how busy they are. And the truth is that if you don’t rest, you’ll never feel like your body is recharging properly.

    You might collapse at the end of the day and fall into a deep sleep every once in a while, but that feeling of being refreshed and ready to take on the day when you wake up just won’t be there.

    So Why Is Rest Important?

    Our modern idea of success is to work longer and longer hours until we crash. Companies who praise the ‘hardest workers’ fuel this. It sets a precedent where everyone gives all their energy, but very little of their best work.

    The result is that we have a society where rest is considered to be a reward, or even worse, indulgent. But this is not the case at all; rest is a cornerstone of a healthy, happy, and productive life. In fact, rest throughout the day is as important as food, water, and sleep.

    Getting in Tune with Our Natural Rhythms

    In the mid-twentieth century physiologist Nathan Kleitman discovered that our energy levels rise and fall in ninety-minute sleep cycles. What isn’t as widely known, though, is that he also found that we have ninety-minute wake cycles.

    These are called our ultradian rhythms, and if we don’t take proper rests to manage our arousal, we end up less creative, our stress hormones stay elevated, and our dopamine levels can get out of balance—leading to mental illness.

    What happens with most people is that as their focus starts to wane, they continue to push themselves to work. In the process they start to draw from their reserves of adrenaline and cortisol to get through the fatigue and maintain enough arousal to work. While some release of these stress hormones is natural, if you don’t rest enough to allow your body to balance them you’ll end up fatigued and unproductive.

    So what you need to do is make sure you take mindful, non-work related breaks, at least every ninety minutes.

    Here are some ways to make sure you take effective rests throughout your day.

    Take decent size rests.

    Rests should be at least five to fifteen minutes long. They should also include an activity that is completely detached from work or technology.

    Some effective ways to rest are through mindfulness practices, deep breathing, yoga, light walks, or exercise. Creative activities are also a good way to clear your mind, such as sketching, free-writing, or journaling.

    Add it to your calendar.

    Treat your commitment to rest with as much respect as you would any other daily task. Put the restful activity in your schedule or to-do list and try to find an accountability partner to make sure you stick to them.

    Time your work.

    If you can time your work and follow the natural cycles of your body you’ll immediately see a huge improvement in how you feel. Try to stick to the advice above and do no more than ninety minutes of straight work without a break.

    Get to know yourself.

    We all have certain periods during the day in which we experience dips in our concentration. For a lot of us it is between 2 and 4pm. This is a great opportunity to take a slightly longer rest, such as a short nap, if the option is available.

    Remember, rest isn’t an excuse to work less, it’s a natural method to help you work better, and more importantly, feel better!