5 Ways To Be Mindful Throughout Your Day

Mindfulness is a popular practice that’s scientifically proven to reduce stress and help manage symptoms of anxiety. When you practice being mindful, you’re taking in the world around you without judgment. Emotions and thoughts are free to occupy space in your mind without the burden of being analyzed.

If your day is filled with deadlines, meetings, and responsibilities and you want to slow down and find some balance, check out these mini-mindfulness techniques you can start practicing today:

1. Set Your Daily Intention

What is your reason for getting up in the morning?

Do you have a goal you need to reach?

A plan to execute?

A feeling to overcome?

Whatever your personal path is, bring it to your attention by setting an intention.

Intention-setting means to state why you’re doing something, so you have a clear indication of what you need to do throughout the day.

f you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through social media, ask yourself, “What is my current intention?” If you can’t define it, then you’re likely just wasting time. Setting your daily intention will help you stay on track and block potential distractions.

2. Soak in Your Surroundings 

When you begin to feel out-of-balance, pay attention to what’s going on around you. Experts suggest naming one thing you can see, feel, smell, and hear. This immediately takes your mind off of the stressor and redirects it to the present moment.

Another way to soak in your surroundings is to do a full-body scan. Think about where you’re holding your tension and release it. Most of us subconsciously clench our jaws or create a fist when we’re feeling anxious.

By immediately acknowledging that discomfort and relieving that pain, you’re well on your way to overcoming your stressor.

3. Eliminate Self-Judgement

One of the most important aspects of meditation and mindfulness is to allow thoughts to pass without seeking to control them. When we try to control what’s beyond our control, the ego starts to fester. Anxiety levels rise because we feel this impending doom. Being out-of-control is scary and our body desperately tries to find a way to cope.

Instead of attributing meaning to your thoughts, stop trying to control them. Let your thoughts pass by like a leaf in the wind. It may feel uncomfortable initially. But, the more you stop judging the thoughts, the easier it’ll be to accept them.

4. Find Time to Deep Breathe

Breathing is an automatic act that we do nearly every second of the day. However, do you stop and pay attention to your breaths? Studies show that deep breathing is actually better for the mind and body when compared to shallow breaths. It’s safe to conclude that a majority of us don’t implement deep breathing as often as we should.

Take long, deep breaths during your busy day and see how your disposition changes. You’ll immediately feel less anxious and begin to focus on your breath. This helps you remain in the moment without worrying about the future.

5. Eat Mindfully

Mindfulness transcends into every aspect of life. This is especially important when it comes to what we’re fueling our bodies with. Do you find yourself inhaling food, either because it tastes so good or you just have to finish it? If so, try chewing your food for 20 seconds before swallowing it.

Really savor the flavors and textures as you chew. This’ll help you get fuller, faster. You won’t be subjected to mindlessly eating an entire bag of chips in one sitting. Rather, you’ll have a healthy portion that fuels your body as opposed to harming it.

Implementing mindfulness techniques into your daily routine will help you gain control over your anxiety and eliminate feelings of stress.

5 Free Mindfulness Apps

Mindfulness apps are gaining in popularity because of their proven ability to give us a sense of relaxation, awareness, and stress reduction.

Studies have shown that we experience positive physical and mental outcomes when we consistently use a mindfulness app that provides guided mindful meditation activities for 10 to 20 minutes a day.

Here are five to choose from:

1.Calm

The Calm app is excellent for beginners who want guided meditation sessions. The meditations range in duration from 3 to 25 minutes so that you can easily fit the meditations into your busy day.

The Calm app offers 7 and 21-day guided programs for both beginners and more advanced practitioners. It has over 30 nature sounds and visual scenes that you can choose for use during yoga, meditation or sleep.

You should know that while there are components of the app that are free, other areas of this app that will require a paid subscription.

2. Headspace

The Headspace meditation app teaches users the practice of being calm, breathing deeply and more fully, and focusing more intently. The app offers a basic package that educates you in the practice of meditation.

Headspace teaches you tricks to calm your mind, manage your stress levels, and add a touch of mindfulness to your day. The app also gives you push notifications that encourage you to practice awareness and deep breathing.

The app contains courses with themes that may aid you in developing healthy habits.

3. Aura: Mindfulness & Happiness

Aura: Mindfulness & Happiness App promises to help you sleep better, reduce stress, and relieve anxiety through three-minute meditations that are personalized by artificial intelligence.

Each of these scientific exercises is personalized and tailored specifically to your needs, with the objective of making you happy. You can use this app to track your moods, observe your mood patterns, and practice daily reflections.

4. Stop, Breathe & Think: Meditation & Mindfulness

The Stop, Breathe & Think: Meditation & Mindfulness app offers a wide variety of tools for your mental, physical and emotional wellness.

The app can help you manage stress and anxiety effectively by teaching you how to breathe more mindfully. This will help you to be calmer, which will contribute to your overall capacity to focus.

As with other apps, you can use Stop, Breathe & Think to track your moods, your progress in managing your emotions, and your overall sleep experience.

5. Simple Habit Meditation

The Simple Habit Meditation app is advertised as the best app for busy people. In just five minutes per day, you can learn to reduce stress, relax faster, breathe better, and improve your capacity to focus. There are more than 50 free sessions from which to choose.

These are just five of the amazing mindfulness meditation apps that are available and that offer free features.

Keep in mind that each one of these also offers premium content that may require a subscription to access. But don’t allow this to deter you from reaping the benefits of the free features! :-)

4 Ways To Boost Your Brain Power Today

Our brains are amazing machines. Containing around 86 billion nerve cells which connect to other nerve cells, our brains are masters at creating an amazing coordinated network that shares and receives information at astounding speeds and with great precision.

They can adapt and change for better - or worse - no matter how old you are. This flexibility helps shape our personalities through the advancing or the decline of our brain power which can happen in 2 ways; neural connections are constructed thereby creating new pathways and boosting cognitive abilities, or they’re disjoined resulting in a decrease in brain power.

While the aging process does weaken neural pathways resulting in a diminished memory along with other cognitive skills, there are things we can do at any age to enhance neural connections and promote the creation of new pathways while strengthening existing ones.

The American Heart Association/American Stroke Association have come up with a list of 7 steps that keep our brains healthy and working at their maximum potential.

1. exercise regularly

2. eat a balanced diet

3. keep your weight in check

4. control cholesterol levels

5. moderate blood sugar levels

6. maintain healthy blood pressure

7. refrain from smoking

Add to these 4 more brain-boosting activities you can do today to improve your brain power even further.

1. Give your brain a good workout

Just like you exercise to stay physically healthy, your brain needs a good workout too. The great part is that there are so many activities to choose from, such memory games, crossword puzzles, Sudoku, chess, and many more. Even something as simple as trying a new recipe or taking a different route to work can create new neural pathways.

2. Learn a new language

Young or old, learning a new language can provide the brain with a healthy boost. It also can hone its elasticity and enhancing cognitive abilities. One study shows that those who speak more than one language are able to deal with large amounts of information faster because their neural network has a faster reaction time.

3. Pick up a musical instrument

Learning to play a musical instrument at any age can protect the brain from regression. The sounds of an instrument not only wards off cognitive decline, but improves listening skills, while the hand-eye coordination required when playing improves spatial reasoning and memory skills. The benefits of music are so vast that even learning a physical task while listening to music enhances the area of the brain responsible for movement control and processing sound

 4. Meditate through mindfulness

Practicing mindfulness allows your brain to focus on the here and now, rather than just being on autopilot and cruising through life. Medical studies show that this technique, when practiced regularly even for a few minutes each day, can affect up to 8 major areas of the brain.

Plus, it helps reduce stress and anxiety which can speed up cognitive decline by killing off existing neurons and stopping new ones from being created. Mindfulness can help you see things from a brighter, more positive viewpoint, helping your brain create new neural pathways.

Finally, try each of these activities and see what works best for you. Try to incorporate all, or a few, of these tips into your schedule and turn them into habits so you can give your brain the boost it needs to stay healthy and alert.

4 Things That Are Killing Your Ability to Focus

Focusing can be hard work when your brain is working against you. It’s extremely common to find yourself more distracted on some days than others; you can’t seem to stop browsing Facebook rather than doing your work.

But what is it, exactly, that’s causing this issue? What is it that’s keeping you in constant distraction?

In this article, I’m going to share the four things that are killing your ability to focus, be it work, being present in the moment, or even your daily activities.

1) Lack of Sleep

Believe it or not, the amount of sleep you’ve had can lead to your inability to focus. Sleep is crucial to rest your body and mind, allowing you to take on all that the next day has in store for you so that you can feel rejuvenated and energized.

Lacking sleep impairs your short-term memory and attention, making it difficult to focus enough to get your tasks done.

The ideal amount of sleep for most adults is seven to nine hours of sleep every night. If you find that you’re often tired at work, distracted easily, and maybe even a little bit irritable, try going to bed earlier at night.

If you go to sleep at approximately the same time every night and strive to wake up at the same time every day, your body will adapt naturally, developing better sleeping habits. 

2) Your Phone

Many people think that their phone isn’t a distraction for them, but the fact of the matter is that it is. As long as your phone is on and within reach, it’s a distraction for you. We’ve all had “phantom vibration” moments when we think our phone has gone off and checked it repeatedly, but it never did.

The constant attention our phones demand pulls us away from our tasks. The notifications we receive all day keeps distracting us from our work, one buzz at a time, and it’s often hard to get back into the right mindset and focus on the task at hand.

A good way to start overcoming this is by practicing silencing your phone while you’re trying to complete a task, allowing you to stay focused until the completion of your task. Then, once you're done, you can take a small break to catch up on the notifications you may have missed.

3) Dehydration

Water is so important for your body to function optimally. You should be drinking eight, eight-ounce glasses of water each day; a number to which most people never come close. Getting the proper amount of water is essential for proper brain function and keep you focused throughout the day.

4) Social Media

Social media can be a huge distraction!

This distraction can be easy to eliminate; simply don’t open the app or the webpage while trying to complete a task. I also recommend turning off the push notifications. This will keep the temptation of browsing social media far away from you so it can’t easily distract you.

Focusing is important but can often be difficult. By eliminating these distractions from our lives, we’ll stand a better chance of focusing throughout our day.

4 Mindful Ways To End Your Day

The idea of mindfulness is to improve your health and wellness by reminding yourself to always live in the moment.

Because mindful practices relax the mind and the body, the following 4 mindful ways to end your day can help you to relax your mind and body for a better night’s sleep and a more calm and productive tomorrow.

1.  Yoga

There are some yoga poses that are perfect for just before bed. If you have a favorite online guided yoga channel, they probably have a special video of yoga for just before bed. You can also ask your yoga instructor (if you have one) whether they have any recommendations.

Most yoga workouts designed for right before bed focus on light stretching and restorative poses. These can help you to work out any muscle tension or kinks that you may have from the day and focusing on relaxing your body can help to calm your mind. These benefits make yoga a great way to end the day for a better night’s sleep.

2.  Body Scans And Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Some more great mindfulness activities for just before bed are body scans and progressive muscle relaxation.

“Progressive muscle relaxation” involves taking a moment to check in with your body by paying attention to how it feels, one muscle group at a time. This involves lying down and then clenching or flexing your toes for ten seconds or so and then releasing.

Focus on how the area feels and then move up to flex your ankle and your calves. This can be very relaxing but it can also help you to identify areas that might need a good stretch or a light massage.

“Body scanning” is similar to Progressive muscle relaxation but it doesn’t include flexing your muscles, it’s just about feeling how they feel. It can still be calming and might be good to do before or after a progressive muscle relaxation if you haven’t fallen asleep yet.

3.   Breathing Exercises

Breathing exercises and other forms of meditation are also great mindfulness practices to end the day. There are some simple breathing exercises that can help to relax you, like taking a deep inhale while slowly counting to five and then exhaling while slowly counting to five.

If you want to look for other exercises or want a little help with your breathing exercises, consider looking online or through your app store for guided meditations.

A simpler and just as powerful mindfulness practice to end the day is simply monitoring your breath. Some people like breathing exercises but taking natural breaths and paying attention to how the breath makes you feel as it enters and leaves your body can also be calming.

4.   Practice Gratitude And Setting Your Intentions

A final mindfulness activity involves gratitude and a little light planning. Mindfulness is about living in the moment. Sometimes the moment isn’t so pleasant but there’s always something to be grateful for and science shows that being grateful has a number of physical, mental, and emotional health benefits.

A related activity is to do a little light planning. Don’t get bogged down by details, as this can make you more stressed. Instead, try “setting an intention” for the following day. Your intention can be something vague but should be something positive, like “Tomorrow I’m going to communicate my feelings better.”

As you practice your mindfulness activities before bed, remember that it’s okay if you fall asleep while practicing. You don’t need to try to keep yourself awake until you finish your body scan or anything like that.