Are You Mindful or Is Your Mind full of Distractions?
From a poster at a Veterans Administration Clinic.
Do you pay attention to your choices? Are you too busy?
Items on a Mindfulness Awareness poster...
Move your body with energy and flexibility.
Attend to your physical surroundings.
Be aware of your emotions.
Develop your personal and work life.
Nourish and fuel with good food and drink.
Recharge and refresh with sleep.
Enjoy family, friends and coworkers.
Grow your spirit and soul by connecting to others.
Use the power of the mind for relaxing and healing.
Observe the present moment as it is.
The aim of mindfulness is not quieting the mind, or attempting to achieve a state of eternal calm. The goal is simple: we’re aiming to pay attention to the present moment—without judgment. Easier said than done of course. Let your judgments roll on by. When we notice judgments arise, we may note them, and then let them pass.
Return often to observing the present moment as it really is. Our minds often get carried away in thought. That’s why mindfulness is the practice of returning, again and again, to the present moment.
Be kind to your wandering mind. Don’t judge yourself for whatever thoughts crop up, just practice recognizing when your mind has wandered off, and gently bring it back. That’s the practice. It’s often been said that it’s very simple, but it’s not necessarily easy. The work is to just keep doing it.
Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, through a gentle, nurturing viewpoint.
Mindfulness involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them—without believing, for instance, that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment. When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune into what we’re sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future. “Lovingkindness” is the watchword.
Multitasking is a way of life for most of us. We eat lunch while we work, take calls at the gym, reply to messages while logged on to Zoom. (I’ll bet that many of you reading this right now, are doing something else at the same time.). The tools of our lives, from car dashboard screens to buzzing phones, fracture our attention while promising that we can do it all, all the time—except we can’t.
You can’t multitask. Our brains are wired to do just one cognitively demanding thing at a time. We tell ourselves we’re multitasking, when what we’re actually doing is task-switching, rapidly shifting from one thing to the next. As we toggle our minds, we stumble as we try to recall where we were and what we were doing. Juggling tasks makes us less creative and more prone to errors; the quality of our work suffers.
We benefit when we achieve the practice of mono-tasking—doing one thing at a time. The first step is weaning ourselves from distraction. One thing at a time. Turn off that little red dot—turn off your notifications.
Walking, especially in nature, can help revitalize ourselves. Let your mind wander before returning to a current task. Mind-wandering is doing something.
06/04/23