Making mindfulness part of your every day life

Every ending is also a new beginning.  While this 30 day challenge is coming to an end, this is also the start of a new life. Over the past 30 days, you have received and practiced different mindfulness tools including the breathing meditation with the recording, the breathing exercise, mindful eating, mindful movement and mindfully engaging with technology.

Some tools probably resonated with you more than others and I really encourage you to keep testing them in your daily life.  Ultimately, only you can decide what works best for you.  The most important thing to remember is to remain curious and bring a playful experimental approach to these practices.

One of the things that many of my clients struggle with is finding the time to meditate, or they stop practicing the moment they feel stressed.  As counterintuitive as it might seem to pause and be still when you have a 100 million things on your to-do-list, it’s precisely when you feel you have no time or when you feel stressed that you need to meditate to create more space in your brain and de-stress.  Gandhi famously said “if you think you don’t have time to meditate, you need to meditate twice as long”.

Like creating any new habit, establishing a meditation practice requires time and initial effort. The following tips will help you make the practice part of your life.

1. Same time, same place
Picking a specific time and place each day makes it easier for us to follow a meditation routine.  If you create the habit every day that when your alarm clock rings you sit on your bed or couch to meditate, it’s much easier for it to be wired into your brain.  If you’re the planning type, you may even want to block out time in your diary. 

2. Daily mental hygiene
Meditation is mental hygiene.  Like brushing your teeth on a daily basis, meditation needs to be practiced regularly in order to change your brain and make a meaningful impact on your life.

3. Start with a time that is manageable
If the thought of cutting out 10-15 minutes of your daily schedule freaks you out, pick a time that you can commit to each day, like five minutes. Then every few weeks increase the length until you’re reaching at least 15 minutes.

4. Thoughts are not the problem
Many people think they’re not able to meditate as they have too many thoughts.  When you start meditating, you’re bound to have many thoughts.  Like building any muscle, your mental muscle also needs resistance to grow.  In the mental gym, the thoughts are the resistance.  Noticing that your mind has wandered off to a thought and bringing it back to the breath is precisely the moment when the mental muscle is trained.  So if you have many thoughts, don’t despair, see it as HIIT training for your mind.

Informal mindfulness practice

Continue bringing your full attention to whatever you’re doing while you’re doing it: when you have a shower, really be in the shower instead of rehearsing a meeting in your head and engage all your senses in the experience.  When you eat, just eat.  Really chew and taste your food.  While you exercise, just exercise – listen to your body’s signals and be mindful of the muscle groups you’re exercising. When you walk to work, really walk instead of checking your phone at the same time.  Bring awareness to your feet touching the ground. Think of other activities in your life like brushing your teeth, washing up, listening to a YouTube clip, etc. that you could do mindfully.

Doing the #betterin30 challenge? Use the hashtag to tell us how you’re getting on, and you could win a personal session with one of our experts!

Palma Michel is our Better in 30 Meditation Coach.  She is the Co-Founder of Profuse29, a company that introduces mindfulness and mindful leadership to companies like London School of Economics and The Soho House Group.  Palma is the author of ‘The Authority Guide To Mindful Leadership’ due to be published in April.