Mindfulness is still considered something weird.
Something that belongs to the yoga moms and the monks in Thailand. At least that’s what I experience when I pitch my experiences to a lot of people around me.
Maybe that’s because they expect mindful people to be 1000-year-old monks that preach their ideology.
It’s not the case.
Everybody can become mindful and should at least try once in their life if you ask me.
So get you started I’ve got a set of 5 strategies that don’t require years of experience.
Start breathing more consciously
Breathing is the key to solving lots of issues you currently have.
Before I started doing breathing exercises and applying meditation techniques I didn’t sleep well. It took me hours to fall asleep and sometimes it wouldn’t even last until 4 a.m. in the morning to wake up at 7 a.m. again.
Because when we’re breathing, we’re doing this unconsciously — let’s remove it from autopilot and start doing it ourselves again.
Try this little exercise to get you going:
Find a comfortable spot to sit with crossed legs.
Close your eyes and start breathing in very slowly.
Keep your breath for a couple of seconds before slowly breathing out again.
Keep doing this for a couple of minutes and you’ll notice your heart will beat a bit slower and you’ll feel much calmer.
It’s a great exercise to get started with meditation because that’s what you’ve just done.
Get outside the house and clear your mind
You don’t need to get on a plane to Bali or Mexico to clear your mind.
Just get outside the house and go for a short (or longer) walk to clear your mind of all chaos that you experience in your daily life.
Getting some exercise done can really stimulate our brains to become more creative and you’ll notice your mind be a lot more at peace after going outside.
Try this exercise when you’re outside:
Walk slowly, don’t rush it.
Take a look at all of the small things you can observe in nature.
Perhaps you could write down some of the observations you’ve done.
Try to clear your thoughts.
If you’re doing this every time you get outside instead of rushing from point A to B, you’ll be much more mindful. Guaranteed.
Quit toxic productivity
Productivity has gotten a little toxic lately.
We have gotten into a society that wants to push careers over mental health.
Do we really want to turn ourselves into productivity machines that have no way of relaxing? Multitasking is a result of wanting to do more than we’re capable of.
It’s basically impossible to do more than we have time for. Then you’re overloading yourself and it will break you eventually.
Here are some tips to help you get more work done, without overloading yourself:
Read books to stimulate your brain instead of social media.
Healthy social media usage
Does “healthy social media usage” even exist?
It’s one of the most toxic things out there, I’ve mentioned it in one of my latest articles as well.
Social media has really affected our ability to stay focused and our attention span is drastically decreasing. That’s why I mentioned reading books in the previous paragraph because reading longer pieces of text will allow you to train that again.
Try these tips to improve your “social media health”:
Remove your notifications; this is something that improved my mental stability so much. Every time I got a WhatsApp notification I got a little meltdown. It felt like it was forcing me to answer straight away — get rid of it.
Get rid of the “short-form content” apps like TikTok and Snapchat, they’re toxic.
Stop giving a f*ck about what’s happening in the world.
Have real connections.
Doing this will increase happiness. Trust me.
Realize that some things aren’t within your control
I’ve been getting into stoicism more and more over the last couple of months and it really has given me some valuable insights.
One of the core principles of Stoicism is that you can’t control everything.
Therefore, you shouldn’t care about them as well. Or at least don’t worry about them.
That sounds easier than it is.
Because the world is having more and more issues that can cause a lot of worries within your personal life, alongside the volume of issues, also the graspability decreases.
By the Stoic approach, you shouldn’t worry about them.
Try these Stoic exercises:
Don’t worry about the things you can’t control.
Accept the fact that you can’t do everything at 100%.
Show gratitude.
Developing resilience is the only way to survive in a chaotic society.
And by applying these practices, you will eventually learn to build a Stoic lifestyle without drastically changing up your life.