Tag: mindfulness

The Beauty of Boredom

My grandpa operates on a different level. He’s content in any situation and I’ve never seen him stressed out. Without ever specifically practicing mindfulness he’s a master. There are many life lessons I’ve learned from my time living with my grandpa that I hope to share. Today’s lesson is on boredom.

The Beauty of Boredom

He’s conquered boredom. Not conquered in that he has successfully kept himself busy enough to avoid boredom. I mean he’s conquered boredom itself. It’s not uncommon for me to come upstairs and see him just sitting in his rocking chair. Maybe he’s drinking coffee, or eating a Taquito. Usually, he’s just sitting.

He’s like a relic. A throwback to an era before we became distracted by the modern world and the allure that all the gadgets provide. I’ll ask if he wants me to turn on the TV.

“Nope. I’m alright.”

“Are you bored?” I ask.

“No, I’m just sitting.”

He doesn’t have a smartphone and doesn’t use social media. He doesn’t need to be doing anything in order to fill a void or keep negative thoughts from entering his mind. He’s content to just sit and be.

We live in a society where we’re always trying to do more, see more, live more, connect more. The net effect is we end up feeling frazzled and disconnected.

Watching my grandpa is a daily reminder to slow down and relax.

I think we’d all be happier if we spent a little time becoming friends with boredom. Instead of something to fear, boredom is a chance to unwind. It’s a chance to practice being content with ourselves, no outside stimulus needed.

If you can be content doing nothing, you can be content doing anything.

Who’s up for an experiment?

Ask yourself how you’re feeling right now in order to get a baseline.

Set the timer on your phone for five minutes. Next, set your phone down and just sit. Don’t watch TV, don’t look at your computer, don’t reach for your phone. Take five minutes and become friends with boredom.

I’m guessing most readers will feel they simply don’t have time for this experiment. There’s too much to do to purposefully welcome boredom. So they’ll rush off to their next task, the next article, the next nugget of wisdom.

We’d rather skim five articles than fully internalize one article. Maybe all you need to learn today is how to sit and do nothing. Maybe that feeling of not having time is exactly why this is an important experiment.

After the five minutes have finished ask yourself how you’re feeling. Did the five minutes of boredom help or hurt your overall well-being?

I’ve been doing this for the last several days. It’s become one of my favorite routines. No expectations, nothing that I should be doing instead. My task is to sit quietly and just be.

Ready? Go.

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Manually Overriding Your Emotional Toggle

Check in With Yourself Before You Check in With the World

Start Your New Year’s Resolutions Today

Manually Overriding Your Emotional Toggle

What if you could step back from your emotions and do a manual override? You’d essentially be able to choose to have a better attitude, to experience life through a calmer lens. How would that enhance your life?

I try my best to be mindful. Despite my desires to have more presence and patience I’m often ashamed at how easily I find myself thrown into a negative spiral.

The issue isn’t experiencing momentary feelings of negativity, the issue is remaining there.

Recently I’ve started a new visualization when I notice I’m upset. I imagine stepping back from myself and manually flipping my emotion toggle from negative to positive.

It looks like this…

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toggle

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Cute, huh?

This quick visualization does a couple of things for me. First, it reminds me that I have some control over the way I’m feeling. Our emotions happen on autopilot. But, much like a self-driving car, we can override the computer and take control. I can choose to be happy even if some outside stimulus is threatening to ransack my pleasant emotional state.

The second thing this visualization does for me is it gives me permission to let go and reset. When I try to convince myself to not let something bother me there’s always a voice somewhere in my head saying “But you were WRONGED!” and it’s almost like I’m letting myself down if I don’t remain angry.

When I continue down the path of being upset it negatively colors whatever period of time that feeling is there. If I have a bad interaction with someone on Twitter I can find myself being irritated at completely unrelated things. It’s not until that feeling dissipates that I can go back and analyze what went wrong.

Stepping back from myself and manually flipping the toggle back to positive has been a surprisingly effective shortcut.

When you start to feel yourself experiencing negative emotions try this exercise. Imagine stepping outside of yourself and manually flipping your emotional toggle from negative to positive.

This isn’t meant to convince you to be fake or not acknowledge that bad things are happening. Rather it’s the acknowledgment that bad and good things are continually happening all around us. Where we choose to keep our focus largely determines how we’ll experience the day. Give yourself permission to let go and reset your emotional toggle whenever the need arises.

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Start Your New Year’s Resolutions Today

How to Recharge Your Life Battery Through Stoicism

The Good Day/Bad Day Teeter-Totter

Check in With Yourself Before You Check in With the World

I’ve been doing an experiment of sorts lately where I check to see how I’m doing before I start scrolling through my phone. It’s a tip I heard from a Matthew McConaughey interview. In it, he said one of his life advice tips is to check in with yourself before you check in with the world. Spend ten or fifteen minutes in your own head before you start interacting with the online world.

Some people don’t need to do this. Their phone seems to have no negative impact on their morning. For me, there’s a marked difference in my overall sense of well-being when I take some time to drink my coffee and just sit before I start scrolling through endless tweets with bleary eyes.

Now that I’m attempting to become more mindful in general I’ve noticed that I can almost watch the gas tank of my mental well-being start to plummet if I start the day checking social media.

Along with ice baths, breathing, exercise, and a host of other simple remedies I’m starting to lift the fog as to what materials it takes to build myself a happier day.

Checking in with myself before I check in with the world is just another brick.

I’ve noticed that my good days or bad days aren’t dependent on what goes on outside my body and mind. Outside stimulus, in most cases, has virtually zero effect on whether or not I’ll have a pleasant day.

Maybe this brick isn’t useful for you. But give it a try. If you usually check your phone first thing in the morning try spending the first few minutes without it. Check-in with yourself first and see what that does to your overall mood.

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The Daily Struggle for Happiness

Staying Mentally and Physically Fit During Social Isolation

Why Your Phone is Making You Kind of Sad

It’s Only Heavy if You Pick it Up

We’re now a few weeks into the American-wing of the Coronavirus. New York is already feeling the effects of overcrowded hospitals and healthcare workers on the front lines are reporting how dire the situation really is. We seem helpless to stop the overcrowding from reaching every major city. To say our collective hearts and minds are heavy is an enormous understatement.

Over three million people applied for unemployment in the first week of the Coronavirus lockdown—a record that dwarfs any other week in American history—and the stock market fell over 30% in like two days. Many people lost their jobs, their retirement, and a loved one in the span of a week.

Suffice to say, anxiety over the future seems to be at an all-time high. Continue reading “It’s Only Heavy if You Pick it Up”

Being There- How to Enjoy the Now

It’s Monday morning. We didn’t sleep great last night and I’m especially foggy today. As I made my second cup of coffee I stared out the window at the traffic lights whizzing by in the dark. The moon was bright and I could still see stars. This was not the sort of time of day people are supposed to be up.

I felt the coming stress of the day creep in. It’s my day to watch June while Mrs. Burrito Bowl works. Whether I have the energy or not, I’m daddy today. Being there for her is a must. I have to take care of her needs regardless of my mood, energy, or stress levels. Continue reading “Being There- How to Enjoy the Now”

The Day After You Die

Today I want to talk about mindfulness and the fact that one day we’re all going to die. The point of the post isn’t to make people depressed, but rather to get you to stop and take a minute to appreciate the now.

Life is one long road trip. We get so focused on the road ahead that we never take a minute to look at the scenery. We’ll be at our destination before we know it. I’m afraid a lot of us will get there only to realize we never took the time to look out the window.

Continue reading “The Day After You Die”

7 Things I Learned From My Month of No Social Media

Sometime in early January I made the hermit-like decision to not use social media for a month.  Several minutes after making this decision I realized nobody would know when I published a new blog post if I didn’t use social media a little, for blog-related reasons.

Through dumb luck and a google search, I figured out how to automatically post links to my articles on Facebook and Twitter through the blog itself.  If you’ve been blogging for more than twenty minutes, you probably also know of this trick.  I am a humble people.  Moving on.

In what i’m pretty sure is a world record, I was able to successfully keep off of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter from January 7th-February 7th and I have learned a great many things. Continue reading “7 Things I Learned From My Month of No Social Media”

The Best Bite of Ice Cream

Which is the Best Bite of Ice Cream?

Depending on the flavor you get, the bites can vary slightly, but they’ll all share characteristics.  You might have one bite that is a better ratio of cookie dough to chocolate, and you might have a bite that’s all ice cream with no extra flavor at all.

Is the best bite a random bite somewhere in the middle of all that sugary chaos?  Is it the very first bite of a brand new, untouched carton?

The law of diminishing returns would say it’s the first bite because each subsequent bite brings less and less satisfaction.  This might be true if you were to eat the entire carton at once.  More evidence in favor of the first bite is the euphoric feeling you get knowing you have the entire carton left.  You’re not even close to running out.

The first bite is good, but it’s not the best.   Continue reading “The Best Bite of Ice Cream”