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Mindful Every Day: Simple Strategies for a Calmer Life
My daily routine for more mindfulness and less stress
I sometimes wonder if stress was encoded in my DNA from the moment of my conception.
Add in the scary man who stalked my neighborhood when I was a child and the landlord who caught me alone and pushed his lips onto mine, and you know why I ended up with a dysregulated nervous system prone to stress.
All my life, I’ve been startled by the tiniest noise and jumped sky-high when a butterfly moved through my peripheral vision.
However, my hair-trigger responses to regular and unusual occurrences began to soften once I learned mindfulness.
According to the American Psychological Association, multiple studies have found that mindfulness reduces stress. Can you argue with that? Can you argue with that?
But it’s not enough to sit on my sofa and watch my breath for twenty minutes each morning—at least not for hypervigilant me. I must integrate mindfulness into my daily routine to reap its full spectrum of soothing benefits.
Here are my steps to create a more mindful, serene, and quietly enjoyable day.
Everyday Mindfulness
Please consider my mindfulness suggestions as opportunities rather than must-dos. Choose only those actions that seem doable for you. Start small with one or two and add more once those are in place.
Don’t treat yourself like a drill sergeant. Criticizing yourself only increases stress. It takes time to reverse decades of overthinking or spaciness—the two places the mind tends to go without conscious mindfulness.
Go easy on yourself.
First things first
We all experience a rise in the stress hormone cortisol in the morning. That bio-chemical shift helps us get out of bed. Naturally, your thoughts may accelerate, and you might feel the urge to get up and go the minute you open your eyes.
But it’s wiser to start slow.
Stress specialist David Posen, MD, explains the reasoning for this:
“But flooding your still-sleepy brain with stress…
