by Robert Leary
There is a lot to gain from taking a breath of fresh air outside in a park or reading a book rather than inundating your mind with pointless and depressing social media and news feeds. You’ve addressed the negative influences in your life, from magazines to friends, and you’re starting to feel like a new person ready to realize your dreams. I also hope you’ve learned something about your chosen occupation or career path and, though this is probably the hardest area to make changes, I hope that you’ve either reaffirmed your joy and satisfaction with your current job situation or have taken steps towards finding a new path that is specific to your skills and what makes you happy.
The final skill I’d like to introduce in this chapter is all about mindfulness. There are three forms of mindfulness I would like to discuss, though they are all closely related and are a part of each other. Mostly, I want to mention all three because they are often interchangeable, and if you do not recognize one, I’m sure you will have heard of another. They are mindfulness, meditation, and positive thinking.
Now, it’s true that you may think positive thinking is not the same as mindfulness and meditation, but in a lot of ways, I do consider positive thinking to be a form of meditation and I will explain in a bit. First, let’s define mindfulness a little more clearly.
Mindfulness
When I say the word “mindfulness,” many people often think automatically of the phrase “paying attention.” If this is what you thought of, you’re not wrong! Paying attention to what you’re doing, your environment, and how you’re feeling is an important part of practicing mindfulness. But it does go deeper than just paying attention, and for most, it is more difficult than it sounds.
Mindfulness is a practice of being present, not just for a minute or two, but throughout the day, every day, over the course of your life. The goal is to maintain mindfulness all the time, though we all accept that we are not computers or robots and there will be times when we lose focus or our minds fill up with other emotions and feelings that take us away in reaction to life events. A parallel can be drawn with a religious mindset. In the Christian mindset, followers accept that they are human and will make mistakes, while at the same time doing their best each day to maintain a sinless, righteous, and faithful existence. Just because we know we will make mistakes; doesn’t mean we don’t try. And this is why the long-term effects emotionally, spiritually, physically, and emotionally are well worth our efforts. So, let’s look at what mindfulness has to offer us and then we’ll learn how you can integrate the practice into your own life.
Think about how you feel after you successfully banish a needless or hurtful thought and replace it with a new, positive one. It makes you feel good, right? And it also gives you a sense of clarity, like a big mess has just been cleaned up from the floor of your mind. The same thing happens when we learn to practice mindfulness. Only with mindfulness, there is a bonus.
Practicing mindfulness consistently leads to a feeling of potential, of hope, and of looking forward with a fresh pair of eyes. You are moving forward with a clear mind and you are taking stock of each second that passes you by. So, when I talk about a feeling of potential and looking forward, I’m not talking about looking forward to the next day or weekend or month. I’m talking about moving forward, step by step, minute by minute, feeling and seeing everything around you and feeling each moment as it passes. There is a feeling of happiness and satisfaction that follows because you are getting rid of the thoughts that have no use for you in this moment. And your mind is thanking you.
Your heart and soul are thanking you. There is so much to sense and be grateful for here and now. Mindfulness is all about bringing in your perspective to these close quarters, small-scale way of thinking, and in the process, the whole world opens up to you.
So, how do you start practicing mindfulness? Well, the biggest task here is going to be honing the skill of focus. But there’s good news. If you’ve been able to practice the interruption technique and replace your negative thoughts and emotions with positive ones, then you’ve already done a lot to cultivate this skill. Focus comes from the mental effort of sharpening your thinking and scaling it down to a single task without letting your mind wander all over the place to things that are not helping you perform that task. As I’ve discussed before, you don’t want to fall into the trap of trying so hard that this exercise becomes a chore and a source of worry for you. Everyone who is new and first being introduced to mindfulness is going to move forward and improve at a different pace because we are unique human beings. And that’s perfectly ok. As with everything else in this book, the key is to take small steps at a time.
A good exercise in practicing mindfulness is simply to go outside and experience nature. Go to an area of a park that is generally quiet and take a seat at a bench or a picnic table. Take a few deep breaths and quiet your mind. Give yourself a minute or two to accomplish this. While you begin focusing your mind, listen to the sounds going on around you, the dogs barking, or the wind blowing through the trees. Feel the breeze on your face or the heat from the sun beating down on you. Feel your body in space. Make sure you are sitting in a comfortable position. Close your eyes as you begin. Then, as you start to appreciate and focus only on what’s around you, slowly open your eyes. Look around and take in what you see without forming thoughts around them. Again, this may not come naturally, but gradually with practice. Appreciate the beauty around you, whatever it is you see. If you don’t have a nice park to go to, you can do the same exercise in your own backyard or neighborhood. Listen to the birds or the kids playing down the street. Try to focus only on sensations without forming thoughts about them or letting your mind wander. As you make time to practice mindfulness just for a few minutes each day, you will start to notice that it is getting easier the more you practice.
Meditation
A discussion on mindfulness follows naturally into a discussion of meditation because they are closely related. To me, they are part of each other while indicating different practices.
Meditation, for many people, translates to practicing mindfulness throughout each and every day. To others, meditation means a dedicated space of time each day or week that is used for formal meditation practice from a specific school of thought or philosophy. For example, Zen Buddhism. I will mention a few different styles of meditation but will be discussing Zen in particular because it is the form with which I am most familiar.
The same exercises you’ve practiced in nature can be applied to a practice of meditation. Since most people associate meditation with the image of sitting in a quiet room with your eyes closed, let’s look at how you can start practicing meditation in your own home by following a few simple steps.
Depending on your physical ability, find a comfortable position where you can sit with your back relatively straight. Your arms should be relaxed at your sides, and your neck should not be strained. A simple Google search will go through the more formal sitting structure if you are interested in this, but for right now, we will take a casual approach to the physical technique and focus more on what’s going on inside your mind.
When we discussed mindfulness, we talked about sensing the world around you and concentrating only on what is happening to you in the moment. Meditation is similar, except that, in the discipline of Zen meditation, the goal is not to restrict one’s thoughts, but instead to resist sticking to individual thoughts as they enter and exit your mind. The core emphasis is still to focus on the present, but the philosophy of Zen is to not restrict the mind but to instead free the mind and let it remain fluid while returning consistently to the present experience.
To illustrate this, have you ever caught yourself or a friend has caught you zoning out, staring blankly in front of you, while your mind drifts and starts to have a dialogue with itself regarding something you said yesterday or something embarrassing you might have done years ago? The thought process has taken you completely out of the present, and now you are lost in a replay of moments that hav
e already happened, things that cannot be changed. But still, you dwell on those moments as mistakes and worry about what people think about you, while in reality, they probably don’t even remember those insignificant events. Sound familiar? We all do it. The ultimate goal in meditation is to avoid those sticky thoughts that try their best to take us out of the present and into the past or the future—spaces that either cannot be changed or that we cannot predict. The brain likes to know things and form patterns in an effort to predict and make sense of our lives. But we can get wrapped up in this to the point that we miss life as it is happening in the present.
Zen is all about acknowledging the wandering nature of the mind but also accepting the core principle of impermanence—everything changes, even the thoughts in your mind. Dwelling on a single thought or feeling or emotion is useless and irrelevant in an impermanent world and will only hold you at a standstill.
This may not make perfect sense yet, and if you need to start with the absolute basics, go back to that phrase we brought up in the beginning of this chapter—
Just “pay attention.” Look around, feel yourself in space, listen, appreciate. That’s really all you need to focus on to get started. As with all of these positive habits, you will soon form a new addiction to the positivity that mindfulness offers. After this point, meditation will follow naturally.
As I mentioned, meditation can take many forms and you should not feel like there is one right way to meditate. Many practice mindfulness and meditation through movement to music called dance meditation. Other people, including Zen Buddhist monks, practice “walking meditation.” Movement often helps regulate and soothe the mind as we introduce patterns of movement that flow just like the free-flowing of our thoughts. Whatever your style and preference, just remember why you’re practicing in the first place, and there is no “doing it wrong.”
Positive Thinking
Positive thinking links right in with the thought technique where we were interrupting negative thoughts and introducing positive ones. But with positive thinking, the idea is to cultivate the positive thoughts first, instead of waiting and using them as a reaction to negative thoughts. This is another practice that will look different from person to person. It also should not be an overwhelming concept that discourages you from trying it.
Simply put, positive thinking means you practice waking up and thinking about each day as a fresh, new, unpredictable day rather than dreading what you think you know is already going to happen. Nobody knows the future, and even if your routine seems pretty set in stone, when you form the habit of dreading something each day in connection to work (which is something I hope you’ve already addressed!), then you close yourself off to experiencing surprising things or things that would give you joy. You may recognize what I’m talking about with an example. Think of Mr. Scrooge from the classic Christmas tale, “A Christmas Carol.” It’s Christmas eve and there are children laughing and playing in the snow, people shopping and sharing Christmas cards and talking joyfully with strangers. But then there is Mr. Scrooge trudging through the snow toward his office, already determining that Christmas is a terrible time and there is no happiness to be found in it—only loss of money. Because he’s already determined that he will not be enjoying Christmas, he is unable to open his heart to the joy going on all around him.
Similarly, when we wake up and dread what is going to happen that day, we become blind to the events that would offer joy and surprise and happiness. Did you know that people receive subtle signals not to engage or talk to you when you are upset or unhappy? Think of all the fun spontaneous conversations you’ve had at work when you arrive in a good mood, positive, and open to whatever the day will throw at you. Let this thought be a motivation for you to try cultivating positive thinking every day, at the beginning of the day.
Cultural Backing for the Effects of Positive Thinking
You may or may not remember the phenomenon of the “law of attraction” as it was popularized through releases like The Secret. Many believe that positive thinking actually works to attract positive events and effects in your life when you practice consistently. You’ve probably heard the saying, “if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.” This is what positive thinking and the law of attraction is all about.
It may help to journal about your experience as you practice this skill. Think of a goal for your life. Maybe it’s a goal you’ve had for years and years, or maybe it’s something you just thought about today. Write down your goal in your journal and write a little bit about what accomplishing that goal might look like for you. Perhaps you see yourself with a family and friends at a big party as you celebrate a promotion, or you’ve set aside time for a family vacation to the Bahamas. Maybe you’re visualizing yourself having lost 30 pounds in that new bathing suit you’ve had your eye on for a long time. Whatever your goal, the idea here is to write out the experience with as much detail as you can imagine. Really make it real in your mind, then write down what you see.
Next, you’ll want to write down the steps on the pathway toward your goal. Positive thinking is a powerful tool, but to make your goal a reality, you’re also going to need to put in the work. What do you need to do between now and next year that will help you reach your promotion? What plan do you have in place to follow in order to lose weight safely and in a way that you can sustain?
If you watch movie awards shows, you may be familiar with the speech many of the winners give in which they attest to visualizing and thinking about their dreams for years before they actually achieved what they wanted to achieve.
If you let yourself get depressed and convince yourself you can never accomplish something, then you definitely will not accomplish it. Practicing positive thinking will naturally carry you closer and closer to your goals, because you are motivating yourself, consciously and subconsciously, to be ready for those opportunities that you would probably miss with a negative mindset. Just like Scrooge and his blindness to joy, it is possible to wrap yourself so tightly in negativity that you don’t see an opportunity right in front of you.
Practice positive thinking and mindfulness in small steps each and every day, and soon it will become easy and natural to continue. The joy and freedom that comes with practice like this is something your mind and body and spirit will begin to crave. Just like when you exercise and your body thanks you with all those positive feelings from endorphins and a sense of accomplishment, your mind and body will thank you with positive feelings for the future and it will become hard to resist the pull of positivity.
Don’t take my word for it. If you work hard to cultivate and maintain these positive changes in your life, I’m positive you’ll hear about it from those closest to you as they witness the changes happening. It may even motivate them to learn more about mindfulness, meditation, and positive thinking in order to make these practices an important part of their lives as well.
In our final chapter, we’re going to talk about the importance of sleep in your life. As a final statement and tool for you to take away from this journey, I hope you will consider doing everything you can to make the process easier, which includes resting each night for an adequate amount of time. Getting a good night’s rest may be the difference between success and failure because it has such a huge influence on how well the brain will function over the short and long-term. So, let’s learn a little more about the importance of sleep and how it relates to the rhythms of our lives.
Chapter 9: A Good Night’s Sleep
What time do you usually go to sleep at night? This is going to be another exercise that you’ll need to write down and keep track of for a few days. I think it is always more persuasive when advocating for better life habits to have participants illustrate for themselves just how helpful these tips can be.
One of the easiest aspects of our lives to overlook when we’re focused on self-improvement is sleep. When we are young and in school, there may have been a day or two in a health class when you le
arned about the importance of sleep and how much to get. Were you told that everyone needs 8 hours of sleep each night to function properly? Probably. That’s always been the number that I’ve been familiar with. If you ask random people on the street how much sleep they think they are supposed to get, chances are their responses will mostly be “8 hours.”
But how many of us actually sleep a full 8 hours each and every night? I know I have trouble getting that much, and I’m going to guess that you do as well.
One of the most troublesome effects of overthinking in most people’s lives is the fact that when they lay down to go to sleep, the thoughts don’t stop. Many of us who suffer from overthinking or feeling overloaded with stress from work, kids, family responsibilities, etc., will lay awake at night for hours replaying or planning events from the day before or the day after. We obsess over things we did or said or experienced and analyze them over and over again, wondering if we did everything “right.” This is common, and you shouldn’t feel like it’s something you can never fix or correct, because you absolutely can.