Contributed By Jeanne Strauss LCSW
Therapist & Life Coach
Using Mindfulness To Balance Your Life
Do you ever feel locked into old unhealthy patterns: habitual ways of relating to others, eating all the wrong foods even when you plan to eat healthy, or hitting the snooze button instead of getting up early to exercise? Our habits affect our physical and mental health in many ways.
Mindfulness is a way to unlock our habits. It takes us off of autopilot and gives us choice points to initiate positive change. Join us Sunday May 19th from 3-5 to learn several simple mindfulness practices that you can use immediately to reduce your stress and anxiety, improve your sleep, build positive habits and enhance your mood, energy, attention, memory and motivation.
WHAT IS MINDFULNESS?
Mindfulness, put simply, is cultivating non-judgmental awareness of the present moment. It quiets the never-ending commentary about our life that is present in our mind. Mindfulness can be a formal meditation practice or it can be one-minute exercises throughout your day to help you act and speak from a more conscious place instead of relying on your usual ways of coping, responding, or reacting.
Being mindless allows our emotions to escalate out of control in response to the endless internal mind noise that is influenced or triggered by the continuous external stimulus we encounter. Mindfulness allows us to slow that mind chatter and tune into what we really want and feel in a moment. Then we have the opportunity to respond in new ways and create positive habits.
Without mindfulness our thoughts are very busy about the past, whether that is 5 minutes ago or 5 years ago. In that continuous thought loop there are never any new thoughts, it’s always just a repetition of thoughts we had yesterday and the day before and years ago. Our mind also gets very busy with our to-do list and worries about the future. Its not easy to train our minds to eliminate the unproductive worry but just as with building a new muscle, practice allows us to have the strength and skill to focus our mind and eliminate the noise.