In this time of social media, where attention is the currency for multiple companies, we are the most distracted generation ever. Practicing mindfulness has become a necessity for use to be less anxious.
It is difficult to focus on our own work and be productive in just one work. When we try to work on a single thing, we quickly get bored and switch to some other thing.
This also creates anxiety in us, because distractions create shiny object syndrome, and we are always running behind new things when we are bored with older ones.
Are you also facing this same challenge that many people are facing nowadays which is not being able to focus on one work and become anxious with multiple things?
In this blog we will be mainly focusing on how to practice mindfulness to become more focused, and mindful towards your surroundings, which in turn will make you more patient and less anxious.
There are multiple different ways of practicing mindfulness, but if you want to practice mindfulness in your daily working life, then one of the best ways of doing it is integrative mindfulness.
If you can give some extra time every day, then another approach could help you develop mindfulness slowly but build up that strong focus which goes for a long time.
It is important that you focus on all the details of practicing mindfulness if you want to achieve the full result of practicing mindfulness and being less anxious and being productive in your daily life.
So, stick with me in this blog to know all these two ways of practicing mindfulness. If you feel anxious and unable to focus on your daily work regularly.
Let’s get started.
Integrative Mindfulness For Professionals
If you are a busy professional who works daily and has very little time to work on himself or herself and practice mindfulness, then integrative technique could be the one which can help you to be more mindful and focused even in your busy schedule.
The best part about mindfulness with integrative technique is that you don’t need to sit down and meditate to be mindful or focused.
Instead, you can pick up some of the tasks that you do daily and be more mindful of only that task.
Follow these points to integrate mindfulness in your daily life:
- Choose any three tasks that you know that you will do daily.
- When you do that task, make sure that you become very much mindful of the task that you’re doing.
How are you going to do that?
First of all, let’s take an example of having breakfast in the morning.
Let me ask you these questions.
- What did you eat yesterday morning?
- What are the things included in it?
- How did it taste?
- What was the smell?
Most of you can’t answer these questions because you were not mindful of it.
It was a boring daily task for you.
So, what you need to do in this integrative technique is, when you are having breakfast, you need to focus on all the details of your food.
- The smell of the breakfast that you are eating.
- When you put it in your mouth, how many times do you chew the food?
- How is it dissolved from a solid-state to a liquid state in your mouth?
- How’s it going from your throat and then your stomach and how does it feel?
- How will you describe the test of that food?
Though these questions might be simple and might seem easy to do, they are not.
Because we are so habituated to do the most mundane tasks in an automated mode that we do not even know what we are doing.
And that is very normal because our brain can’t process each and everything. If it does, then it will literally overwhelm us as it takes a lot of energy.
So, from today onwards, if you want to integrate mindfulness in your daily life, choose only three tasks that you know you will do daily and be very much mindful of it.
But let me warn you before you start!
Don’t expect that you will be able to do it from the first day only. You will most probably forget to be mindful and again start scrolling on your social media when eating breakfast.
But don’t worry if you are not able to do it on the first go because it is very much normal and it happened to me as well and I still feel it difficult to focus on each and every detail on a daily basis.
But after a few days of training, you will be able to do it more smoothly. I have been doing it for more than four months, and I’ve been feeling more focused on most of my tasks and feeling less distracted which makes me less anxious.
Mindfulness With Meditation
If you are OK to give some time to meditation to become more mindful, then you can choose the more time taking but impactful mindfulness technique.
The meditation for mindfulness is pretty easy and it takes really less time, and you can increase the time of your meditation as you go and as you become more and more comfortable with the time for your meditation.
Just like any other kind of meditation, you sit down with your spines erect and breathing stably.
If your breathings are not stable, make sure that you take a deep breath in through your nostril and take out breath through your mouth slowly. And repeat it three times and if needed you can do it more to make yourself more comfortable.
When you feel comfortable and feel a stable breathing, you can close your eyes and imagine a candle.
Imagine you are in a dark room and in front of you, there is a lighting candle.
Focus on the fire of the candle for 30 seconds.
To make sure that your consciousness is not diverted to somewhere else, you can think about the heat, the shape of the fire, how much light it is creating in that dark room.
Feeling difficult to imagine a candle?
Then what you can do is you can open your eyes, put an actual candle in front of you and light it so that you can watch it and focus on it.
This meditation will help you become more mindful, more focused, and become less anxious about your daily life. Overall, it will make you more productive in your work.
Conclusion
So, there you have the mindfulness practices that made me more focused on my life and less anxious about every shiny thing.
Remember that mindfulness takes time. For you to be distracted is more natural than being focused on something, because that is how our brain works. It looks for stimulations.
Mindfulness will make your frontal cortex more powerful than your ancient brain, which will make you more focused, more thoughtful, and less emotional in your daily life, overall improving your intelligence, consciousness.
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See you soon, Arup.
