5 Tips to Living Mindfully
Mindfulness is the practice of having a healthy headspace.
It’s an awareness of oneself and also of others. It’s also about being curious in terms of observing and watching what’s happening at every point in your life or during your day. It’s being aware of how you think, act and speak in order to improve your mental health.
The following five tips from Answers, an Idaho Falls counseling center, can help you live more mindfully every day.
1. Hold Your Thoughts Lightly
What does this mean? It essentially means to pay attention to what thoughts you have, but not necessarily believe them or take them completely seriously. You should also be willing to question your thoughts or patterns of belief if they don’t serve you well.
This allows you to sit back and watch your own mind rather than being swept along and bouncing from emotion to emotion or thought pattern to thought pattern.
2. Form a Connection to Your Senses
Being mindful is ultimately about awareness. You can formulate more awareness by being connected to your senses. There are a few ways to do that. Sometimes simply stopping whatever you’re doing and allowing yourself to become fully aware of what’s around you is enough.
Think about what you see, hear, smell and feel at any given moment. If your hands are touching something, think about what that sensation is. If you’re eating or drinking, think about what you taste and how that taste makes you feel.
3. Relate to Others
One of the first things you might notice in pursuing mindfulness is that you can’t take your frustrations out on other people. Doing so won’t calm your mind and clear your thoughts. Restraint and empathy are two major factors that apply to your relationships with other people.
It’s not always healthy to tell someone else exactly how you’re feeling or how you feel about them. Similarly, it’s important to empathize with others and understand how they see things in order to relate to them better.
4. Feel What You’re Feeling
At the same time, it’s important to feel what you’re feeling at any given time and not dismiss or control it. If you’re feeling angry, sad or afraid, it’s important not to avoid or deny those feelings.
Instead, acknowledge that you’re feeling that way. Don’t always try to chase positive emotions. Chasing isn’t living in the moment. Let yourself feel how you feel when you feel it.
5. Break Out of Ruts
It’s easy to find your life on autopilot. Routines become comfortable and familiar. However, routines also become mindless. If you’re following a mindless routine, you’re not really being mindful.
Find new ways every day to break up your old routines. Eat at a different restaurant, make something new for lunch, read something that you wouldn’t normally read, take a walk at a different time of day, or drive to somewhere new.
Being mindful is an important step for balanced mental health. As an Idaho Falls counseling center, we’re ready to help you find the answers you’re looking for.
Ready to take the first step?
