6 Ways to Practice Mindfulness Every Day

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Mindfulness has become a popular term in recent years. There is advice everywhere about how to eat mindfully, work mindfully, walk mindfully and even breathe mindfully. It seems every self-help book or self-improvement blog has a section about “living mindfully.” Is mindfulness really that important? Can it really help people so much?

Mindfulness has been linked to a wide variety of benefits, including physical benefits such as better sleep and emotional benefits such as lower stress levels. For all its benefits, however, there is not necessarily a lot of advice on how to be mindful in daily life. Most advice seems to center around meditation and making time to sit quietly alone. What are the options, though, for those who cannot guarantee that they will be left alone for a certain amount of time such as those with young children? What about those who either do not like to meditate or have not yet found a form of meditation that works for them?

Thankfully, daily life offers many opportunities for people to work on being mindful. Here are six ways to practice mindfulness every day, regardless of how much is packed into your schedule.

Just Eat

There are not many self-help tips that tell you to eat. Most self-improvement tips about food involve avoiding certain foods. When it comes to practicing mindfulness, what you eat is not nearly as important as how you eat. You can practice mindfulness just as well with a hot fudge sundae as you can with a kale salad.

One easy way to practice mindfulness is to focus solely on your food when you eat. Turn off the TV, put down the smartphone and pay attention to what you are eating. Notice all the different flavors. Think about the texture on your tongue. Eat slowly, and enjoy each bite. Stay in that moment with your food instead of being distracted by the talking heads on the news, the comments on your Instagram photo or anything else. The odds are that you like what you are eating. You would not have made it otherwise, right? So enjoy the food. The rest of the world can wait.

Break the Routine

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Did you brush your teeth this morning? Did you lock the door when you left for work? If you are like most people, those sorts of questions are answered usually by a scoffed “of course!” followed immediately by a minor panic when you cannot remember if you did those things or not. You assume you did, because they are part of your routine. But you cannot recall actually doing them.

People tend to be creatures of habit. You likely take the same route or same couple routes to work every day. You get up at about the same time every day during the week and go through more or less the same routine every morning. To practice mindfulness, break your routine. When you are somewhere new or doing something unusual, you are far more in tune with the present moment. The human brain is always craving something new. When you feed that need, you are more tuned in to what is happening in this moment, rather than daydreaming your way through the morning commute because you could drive that road with your eyes closed.

Focus on Your Body

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Everyone has to do the laundry, clean the dishes, put away the food from dinner and handle a dozen other small chores throughout each day. Turn those unpleasant but necessary tasks into a chance to practice mindfulness. As you scrape the extra crumbs off the plates or scrub away the lingering traces of sauce, feel the movements of your body. Feel the rough scratch of the sponge against your palms. Pay attention to how your skin feels when the hot water hits it or how the tips of your fingers feel sticky-slick from the soap. When you fold the laundry, pay attention to how the cloth feels under your hands. Smell the lingering scent of the detergent. Notice each movement of your fingers and arms as you tuck sleeves, straighten collars and press down on jeans to get them to lay flat. Use the movements of your body as an anchor that keeps you in the present moment.

Be Present With People

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You can practice mindfulness with other people just as well as you can in solitude. In some ways, practicing mindfulness when others are around might even be easier because there is something, or in this case someone, to focus on. Your attention is automatically drawn to the person who is talking, moving or in some way interacting with you. Despite this instinctive interest in nearby members of the human race, it is easy to get into the habit of tuning people out or multitasking during interactions with people. Break that habit and be present when you are spending time with people. When you speak with someone face to face, look them in the eye. Notice their hair color, eye color or the little quirks of their speech. Turn away from the screen, and do not text when they are talking. Be fully present with the other person. If you are on the phone with someone, sit down and listen solely to their voice. Do not wash the dishes or check your email when you are talking with someone else. Be mindful of the moment, and be present with the other person.

Single-Tasking

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Raise your hand if you multitask in your daily life! If you did not put your hand up, you are fooling yourself. Everyone multitasks during the day. You check your email while you are crunching numbers at work. You fold the laundry while the water boils. You eat lunch while you write your report. You watch TV while you clean the dishes.

Most people multitask in an effort to get as much done in as small an amount of time as possible. Ironically, multitasking actually makes you less productive because your attention is never fully given to one thing. Practice being mindful by giving your full attention to one project at a time. Write that report for your boss, then finish filling out the spreadsheet for tomorrow’s meeting. Check your email, then talk to your coworker. Do one thing at a time and you will find that you are not only practicing being mindful, but you are also getting more done than usual.

Six Minute Stillness

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One of the most common complaints about meditation is that most people feel they do not have time to do it. They have busy schedules, and there is no room in that schedule for sitting on the floor doing nothing. It may be true that most people do not have a convenient hour in the morning to sit on the floor and prepare for the day with a morning meditation. Plenty of people lack the time or willingness to focus on meditation in the evening as well. Most people, however, have six free minutes in their schedule somewhere. This may be first thing in the morning when you are waiting for your roommate, sibling or spouse to get out of the bathroom so you can have your turn. It could be right after work when you are changing clothes. It could be in the evening. It could be during your lunch break. Somewhere, thought, you have six spare minutes. During those six minutes, simply be still. Focus on your breathing, the feel of your body sitting in your chair or a mantra. Use those six minutes to simply be present, still and mindful of your body and surroundings.