A Guide to Mindfulness

Week one of our #FeedYourHealth campaign was all about mindfulness and ways you can practice mindfulness to better your mental health.

What is mindfulness?

According to Mayo Clinic, mindfulness is a type of meditation focused on being aware of your feelings and sensations while being present in the moment and avoiding judgement. When we aren’t mindful, we may hyper-focus on negative feelings and sensations and become judgmental or interpret them negatively. This can lead to increased levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and a reduction in self-confidence. Everyone has the ability to be mindful already, we just may not be aware of how to do it. Coming in multiple forms, mindfulness can be practiced through breathing, guided imagery, yoga, stretching, listening and more.

Benefits of Mindfulness

Mindfulness can help your health in many ways, both physically and mentally. Increasing your mindfulness of situations can help improve your overall well-being by allowing you to be fully engaged in activities and be less focused on success and self-esteem during those activities. Many experts believe it’s a successful way to improve overall health because it allows the person to accept all experiences, even painful ones, instead of avoiding them. In clinical trials, mindfulness has been shown to effectively reduce stress, anxiety, pain, depression, insomnia and high blood pressure and improve attention, sleep, and diabetes control.

Why it’s important to be mindful of your emotions.

Mindful Breathing

One of the easiest ways to practice mindfulness every daily is through mindful breathing. It only takes 10-15 minutes, but can help your overall demeanor almost immediately. Mindful breathing allows you to anchor yourself in the present moment so you can let go of worrying about the past or future. Anchoring yourself by focusing on your breath allows you to turn your attention back to the present moment and stop getting carried away and stressing about negative emotions. Because it takes no more than 15 minutes, you should consider practicing mindful breathing daily to increase your overall mindfulness and help reduce stress and anxiety. There are 4 easy steps to mindful breathing and plenty of podcasts and/videos to help guide you through a mindful breathing session.

Mindful Listening

Another way to practice mindfulness, especially important for people leaders, is mindful listening. Mindful listening is listening without judgment, criticism or interruption, while being aware of internal thoughts that may get in the way of communicating effectively. Mindful listening allows you to be present in the moment and limits distractions by your own thoughts and emotions when communicating. It helps us to truly hear and understand who we’re talking with, reducing judgment and allowing the speaker to feel accepted. Author of “The Zen of Listening,” Rebecca Shafir, says mindful listening helps you retain information, pause before speaking to consider the effect of your words, pay attention for longer, boost self-esteem, and reduce anxiety.