Improved Lives

I would say that you can’t go through your whole life ‘half awake’, but that’s the scary part: it is so, so easy to go through you’re whole life in just that state. In fact that’s probably exactly how the majority of us do go through life, just half awake.

We go to work 9-5, come home, watch TV, go to bed, rinse and repeat. This is what being half-awake is.

In contrast, being fully awake is to have a high degree of mindfulness, and mindfulness comes from meditation. Mindfulness is simply being aware of your thoughts and your actions. Mindfulness is being in the moment. Mindfulness is so, so important because it helps us in such basic, fundamental ways. Research shows:

Mindfulness may be important in disengaging individuals from automatic thoughts, habits, and unhealthy behavior patterns and thus could play a key role in fostering informed and self-endorsed behavioral regulation, which has long been associated with well-being enhancement. Further, by adding clarity and vividness to experience, mindfulness may also contribute to well-being and happiness in a direct way.

The second bolded part is self-explanatory, it means that stopping to smell the flowers contributes to our well-being and happiness, and research supports this:

A recent experiment found that individuals whose attention was focused on the sensory experience of eating chocolate reported more pleasure than individuals engaged in a distraction task while eating chocolate.

But I think the first bolded section is the most significant part, because what these researchers are getting at is that having a high level of mindfulness helps us to break out of our set routines and helps us to regulate and establish new, more beneficial routines.

So for example if you want to be more productive or if you want to be more positive, having a high level of mindfulness will make it easier to achieve these goals.

Benefits to Motivation

I also suspect that mindfulness would do a great deal to bolster motivation. A big problem with staying motivated is that it is so easy to unconsciously slip back in to old routines and out of new and better routines.

Having a high degree of mindfulness will help you to be more aware of yourself slipping back in to old routines and when you can see yourself slipping you have a chance to correct it.

Now mindfulness is a tricky thing to measure, but there is a good test you can take to measure it over in the test section. If you take the test, be sure to come back here and check out the next section, which is how to increase mindfulness.

There is only one really good way to increase mindfulness, and that is meditation

Meditation is by far the best way to increase mindfulness. It’s also easy and it has a lot of additional benefits. One of the additional benefits of meditation I really enjoy is the relaxation response, which includes changes in metabolism, heart rate, respiration, blood pressure and brain chemistry that all lead to a feeling of reduced stress and relaxation, both immediately during and after you meditate and in the long term as well. There are a whole bunch of other benefits to meditation but we’ll save those for another day.

To meditate you want to do the following:

• Find a quiet spot – Find a spot where it’s quiet and you wont be disturbed.
• Get Comfortable – You can sit cross-legged, in a chair or even lay down. There is no right position, you should simply find a position that’s comfortable for you.
• Keep your back straight – Make sure your back is straight, as this will help with breathing.
• Keep your eyes just barely open – You want your eyes to be just on the verge of being closed.
• Breath deeply and slowly – Your breath should come from your abdomen, not your chest.
  

  If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe correctly. - Dr. Andrew Weil

• Relax your body – Just let every muscle melt and relax, let it all go.
• Focus your attention – There are two different methods of focus that work for me. One is to focus on my breathing and the other, which I find a lot more beneficial, is to focus on nothing. The goal here is to un-focus, so that there is nothing in your mind, not even focus. This state of nothingness is your ultimate goal with meditation. Focusing on something is useful but it’s important to remember that it’s just a stepping stone.

A final bit of advice is to not stress distractions to your focus. Random thoughts ARE going to pop into your head, just acknowledge them and let them pass and start focusing again. Also, there is no time limit and there’s no minimum. More meditation is going to give you more benefits more quickly, but some meditation is a lot better than no meditation.

Remember, meditation is not a race, it’s not a competition, it’s just a method to relax, unwind, and reorient yourself. Just clear your mind and enjoy the silence.

I’ll leave you with a quote that I think sums up the power of mindfulness and meditation quite nicely:

The richest banquet, the most exotic travel, the most interesting, attractive lover, the finest home—all of these experiences can seem somehow unrewarding and empty if we don’t really attend to them fully—if our minds are elsewhere, preoccupied with disturbing thoughts. By the same token, the simplest of life’s pleasures—eating a piece of fresh-baked bread, seeing a work of art, spending moments with a loved one—can be amply rich if we bring our full attention to them. The remedy to dissatisfaction is inside us, in our minds, not in groping for new and different outer sources of satisfaction. – Tara Bennett Goleman

Happy meditating everyone.

Further Reading:
- The Benefits of Being Present: Mindfulness and Its Role in Psychological Well-Being (pdf) by Kirk Warren Brown and Richard M. Ryan
- Health applications and clinical studies of meditation at Wikipedia has some good information. Be sure to check out the footnotes for a lot of well researched further reading on meditation.