Chapter 12

Reducing Stress, Anger and Fatigue

In This Chapter

Understanding how stress works

Reducing stress and anger mindfully

Exploring how to boost energy levels

Difficulties are part and parcel of life – you can’t stop them, unfortunately. What you can stop is the way you meet and relate to challenges. Perhaps you habitually go into denial, or maybe you throw yourself in head first and end up overly tired. If you can face the difficulty in the right way, you can take the heat out of the problem and even use the energy generated by the issue to manage your emotions and activities.

Mindfulness offers you the opportunity to become more intimate with your own habitual patterns of operation. If you haven’t really noticed how you currently meet challenges, you’re bound to have a hard time assessing whether your approach is useful. Whether the way you react is helpful or not depends on what effect your reaction has. If you have no clear idea of the effects, you’re not benefiting from experience – you’re just replaying a record again and again. As this chapter shows, by becoming even slightly more mindful, your awareness grows and something can shift – and the smallest shift can make the biggest difference. As astronaut Neil Armstrong said (sort of): one small step for you; one giant leap for your wellbeing!

Using Mindfulness to Reduce Stress

Research shows that mindfulness reduces stress, in the short and long term, even well after people have completed training in mindfulness. This is because many people choose to continue to practise some form of mindfulness as part of their daily routine years later, because they found it so helpful. In this section I explore the various ways stress creeps up on you, and how mindfulness can help you say goodbye to unmanageable levels of stress.

Understanding your stress

Stress is a natural and everyday occurrence. Whenever you have a challenge to meet, doing so triggers the physiological reaction of stress. Stress isn’t an illness, but a state of body and mind. However, if your stress level is very high, or goes on for too long, then you can suffer from both physical and mental ill health.

Stress isn’t always a bad thing: when you or someone near you faces a physical danger, stress is helpful. For example, if you see a child running out in the street, the stress response provides you with the energy and focus you need to run and stop her. However, if you’re lying in bed, worrying about your tax bill, stress isn’t helpful: the result is that you don’t sleep. If this stress goes on for too long, your health is likely to suffer.

Stress researcher Richard Lazarus found that stress begins with you interpreting the situation as dangerous or difficult and rapidly deciding what resources you have to cope with the challenge. If you interpret an event as dangerous or difficult and you feel you don’t have the resources to cope, you experience a stress reaction. This is why one person loves going on a rollercoaster, whereas for another the experience is a living nightmare.

When you interpret a situation as challenging, your body’s primitive nervous system is hard-wired to automatically begin a chain of reactions in your body. This includes stress hormones being released into the bloodstream, your pupils enlarging, perception of pain diminishing, attention becoming focused, blood moving from the skin and digestive organs into the muscles, breath and heart rate rising, blood pressure increasing, and more sugars being released into your system, providing you with an immediate source of energy.

In this state of body and mind, called the fight–flight–freeze response, you see almost everything as a potential threat. You’re in an attack mode and see things from a survival, short-term point of view, instead of seeing the long-term impact of your words and actions. You fight the situation, run away or simple freeze, unable to take action.

Imagine that your boss tells you how poor your last presentation was, and that you’re not working hard enough. If you interpret this as a personal attack, your blood pressure rises, your pupils dilate, you sweat and feel anxious. Your body behaves as if you’re about to be attacked by a life-threatening bear, and you’re ready to fight, flee, or freeze. However, if you interpret the situation as ‘the boss is in a bad mood’ or ‘she says the same to everyone – it’s no big deal’, you’re less likely to trigger so great a stress reaction. The interpretation is far more important than the ‘reality’ of the situation, from a stress point of view.

Research shows that everyone has an optimum level of stress. Think of stress levels like the pressure of a pencil on a piece of paper. If you push too hard (high levels of stress), you tear the paper or snap the pencil. If you press too lightly (too little stress), nothing you draw can be seen, which is dissatisfying. The optimum balance is between the two. Then a beautiful drawing can emerge. Too little stress leads to a lack of motivation, and too much leads to over-stimulation and ill health. Mindfulness can help you cope with higher levels of pressure before your stress reaction becomes too highly activated.

Here I break down the forms of stress into the following categories and offer some mindful ways to ease them:

• Physical stress: This is when your body is under too much pressure. You may be sitting in one position for long periods, or lifting very heavy weights or exercising your body excessively. Reduce this by simply trying to take more time off and by practising the body scan (Chapter 6) to learn to be kinder to your body.
• Mental stress: This arises if you have too much work to do in too short a space of time. Time pressure can cause stress. Thinking too much and worrying are sources of mental stress. Reduce this stress by practising mini meditations regularly (Chapters 7 and 8) and perhaps mindful walking (Chapter 6).
• Emotional stress: This is often due to relationship issues. Perhaps you’ve had a communication breakdown with someone or feel very depressed, anxious, or lonely. Practising compassion meditations (Chapter 6) or forgiveness meditation (Chapter 4) can really help here.
• Spiritual stress: Your life lacks a sense of meaning or purpose. You may feel disconnected from other people or nature. The compassion meditations (Chapter 6) and meditating in nature can help. Reading mindfulness books, spending more time with friends or getting some life coaching may help too.

Noticing the early signs of stress

How do you know when you’re beginning to get stressed about something? What are your early warning signs? Does your eye start twitching, or do you begin to get a headache? Perhaps you lose patience easily, or begin worrying. By becoming more aware of your early reactions to stress, you can begin to take appropriate action before the stress spirals out of control.

When the pressure gets too much for me, my shoulders tense up and I find it harder to smile, I’m less likely to chat to friends, and generally begin to take life far too seriously! I remember being like this the last time I had a really tough deadline to meet and had far too much work to get done in the allocated time.

Regular mindfulness meditation and doing your daily activities with a mindful awareness makes you more aware of your own thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and behaviour. You’re more likely to be aware when stress levels begin to rise, and you can then take appropriate action.

Take a few moments to reflect on the last time you were stressed. Did you notice what was happening to your body? Which parts became tense? Was it your tummy or jaw? How did your behaviour change? Did you call up your drinking buddies or some other particular friend? What sorts of emotions did you feel? Anxiety or sadness? What thoughts were going through your mind? Negative thoughts about yourself or others? Look out for these changes when facing your next challenge. Then you can use mindfulness to reduce your stress to more acceptable levels.

Assessing your stress

You may find that a stress diary is a useful way of assessing your level of stress from day to day. Stress diaries make you more mindful of the areas in your life that cause you stress in the short term, as well as your own reaction to the stress. This knowledge makes you more aware of the onset of stress and your response to it, allowing you to make more helpful choices to lower your stress levels if they’re too high, or at least to view your stress in a more useful way.

Designate a notebook as your stress diary, and try the following. Write down:

• How stressed you feel on a scale of one to ten, with ten being extremely stressed
• What caused the stress
• The thoughts going through your mind, your emotions, and bodily sensations like headache or tense shoulders
• How you’re responding to the stress – in other words, your actions

Moving from reacting to responding to stress

When experiencing stress, I call the things that you do automatically, without even thinking about it, stress reactions. If you’re lucky, some of your reactions may be helpful and therefore dissipate the stress. More often than not though, reactions to stress are unhealthy and lead to further stress. A response is more mindful, includes some time for reflection, is aware rather than automatic, and tends to be more helpful.

Your reactions to stress are partly based on what you assimilated in childhood, are partly genetic, and partly based on your own experiences with stress. If whoever brought you up reacted in a certain way to stress, you have a greater chance of behaving in a similar way. Your own experience of ways of dealing with stress also comes into the equation. Perhaps you’ve always drunk several cups of coffee when you’re feeling stressed, and find the caffeine helps you to get your work done. Although you may feel that this is effective, caffeine is a stimulant, and the more you drink the more stressed you’ll probably become. Changing these small habits can make a big difference.

Reacting automatically implies a lack of choice. Through practising mindfulness, you begin to have a greater choice of ways to respond, and can thereby achieve a more satisfactory outcome.

Make a list of the unhelpful and helpful ways in which you deal with stress:

• Unhelpful reactions may include drinking too much alcohol or caffeine, negative thinking, zoning out, working even harder, or eating too much or too little food.
• Helpful responses may include going for a walk, exercising, meeting up with friends, meditating, or listening to music.

As you make your list, don’t been too hard on yourself. Instead, laugh or at least smile at your shortcomings. Hey, no one’s perfect!

Become more aware of the choices you make following a stressful event, and begin choosing small helpful strategies such as going for a walk. Make use of mindfulness skills to help you make wiser choices. Remember to give yourself a nice big pat on the back when you make a positive choice, even if you’d normally think of it as too small or insignificant an event to reward yourself for. Every little helps!

Here’s the two-step mindfulness process for responding rather than reacting when you feel your stress levels rising:

1. Notice your current reactions. What are your body, mind, and emotions doing? Are they showing the signs of stress? Acknowledge the fact that you’re suffering from stress. Observe how you’re reacting to the stress. Your body may be tense in certain places. Perhaps you’re suffering from indigestion or have had a cold for weeks. Your behaviour may be different to usual. You may be snapping with anger for the smallest thing. You may not be making time to meet up with friends. Your emotions may be fluctuating. You may feel tired or out of control. Your thoughts may be predominantly negative. You may have trouble concentrating. At this stage, you just need to become aware of what’s happening, without judging the situation as bad or wrong – just be aware, without the judgement if you can. By becoming aware of what’s happening within you, the experience is already transforming. This is because you’re observing the stress, rather than being the stress. As the observer of an experience, you’re no longer tangled up in the emotions themselves. You can’t be what you observe.
2. Choose a mindful response. Now, from an awareness of the level of stress you’re experiencing and how you’re currently coping with that stress, you can make a wise, mindful choice as to the best way to cope. You know yourself better than anyone else does – you need to decide how best to cope with the stress. As you become aware of your own inner reactions, you make space for creative action to arise, rather than the habitual, well-worn paths you’ve chosen many times before.

   Here are some suggestions for a mindful response to your stress:

   • Take as many mindful breaths as you have time for. Even one nice big deep breath has positive physiological benefits, and everyone can do that.
   • Do a three-minute mini meditation (refer to Chapter 7) or practise a formal mindfulness meditation for a more extended period.
   • Go for a walk, perhaps in the park, or do some yoga, tai chi. or stretching exercises.
   • Avoid excessive alcohol, caffeine, drugs, and sugary or fatty foods. And if you do indulge by mistake, see whether you can forgive rather than berate yourself. You’re human after all.
   • Talk to someone or socialise. Even sending a little text message is better than nothing.
   • Watch a hilarious comedy. Or just laugh for no reason. See Chapter 11 on mindful laughter.
   • Observe the stress rise up in your body and mind and then fall away. Consider yourself as the witness of stress – whole, complete, and free just as you are. Pretend that the stress is separate from you, which it is in some ways.
   • Do some vigorous but mindful exercise such as running, swimming, or cycling.
   • See stress positively. Think about how stress energises you, releases oxytocin (a hormone that encourages connection with others) and gets you moving. A recent major study found that if you can shift your mindset about stress, the stress goes from being destructive to healthy. Seeing stress in a positive way was even shown to increase people’s life expectancy by many years!

Breathing out your stress

Your breath is a particularly helpful ally in coping with stress. Many relaxation programmes are well aware of the power of the breath in regulating stress, and recommend deep breathing to manage it.

Usually, in mindfulness, you simply need to be aware of your breath and don’t have to change your breathing rate. However, here are some different techniques you can use to help relieve stress:

• Diaphragmatic or belly breathing. You can do this lying down, sitting up with your back straight, or in whatever position suits you. Take a natural breath and allow your belly to fill up with air. Allow the breath to release as you normally do. Repeat for as long as you feel necessary. Feel each breath coming in and going out of your body. (See Chapter 6 for more about diaphragmatic or belly breathing.)
• Counting your breaths. Adopt a comfortable posture and close your eyes if you want to. Feel your breath coming in and out. Each time you breathe out, count. Begin with one, and work your way up to ten. When you reach ten, start again from one. If at any point you lose count, begin again at one. You may find it difficult to get past the number two or three before your mind goes off into worries or dreams – no problem. All that matters is that as soon as you notice that your mind’s drifted off, you start again at one, without criticising yourself if you can.
• Breathing and smiling. Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile. And sometimes your smile is the source of your joy. So if you feel stressed, lift up the corners of your mouth as you feel your breathing. For more on breathing and smiling, see Chapter 11.
• Deep mindful breathing. Take a deep breath and allow your belly to fill up with air. Hold your breath for a few seconds and then slowly release the breath. Repeat for as long as you feel comfortable. As you breathe out, allow yourself to let go of all tension and stress as best you can. If you can’t, you don’t need to worry – just try again later.
• Mindful breathing with other activities. Mindful breathing while engaging in day-to-day activities provides a calming and nourishing antidote to stress. If you’re doing a simple or repetitive activity, become aware of your breathing as you do it. For example, as you walk, feel your breath and notice how your breathing rate changes. If you’re waiting for your computer to start up, or you’re in a queue, or hanging up the clothes on the washing line, simply allow some of your awareness to go to the feeling of your breath.

As you practise, you may become great friends with your own breath. You look forward to being with the breath and noticing its calming, rhythmic flow.

Using your mind to manage stress

Stressors don’t cause stress on their own. First, you need to interpret the stress as a problem that may have a negative impact on you. Then the stress reaction occurs. This simple but fundamental process can be seen in Figure 12-1 below. Remembering that you’re the observer of your stress rather than the stress itself helps you to become free, and stress becomes less of a problem.

Use the following tips to lower your level of stress by becoming aware of how you interpret challenges:

• Write down the thoughts that are causing you stress. For example, if you’ve just suffered a relationship breakdown, just keep writing whatever comes into your head. Nobody else but you needs to see what you write, so be totally honest. The process of writing helps to slow your mind down, and enables you to tackle the stressful thoughts one at a time. Having written them, remember that thoughts are just thoughts – not necessarily facts. Your stress is caused not so much by the thoughts, but because you believe them to be true. Seeing thoughts as just sounds and images that pop in and out of consciousness reduces their impact significantly.
• See the big picture. What effect does seeing things from a different angle have on the situation? How would you feel if you were in someone else’s shoes? This may be the person who seems to be causing the stress, or someone else – you choose! Or, imagine you’re zooming up into the sky, away from your life. See your own town, your region, your country. Keep imagining that you’re zooming out of the planet to the solar system and beyond! Is your stress still such a big issue?
• Consider what’s the worst that could happen. Sometimes you may imagine the situation to be worse than it actually is. By considering the worst, you may realise things aren’t that bad.
• Break down the problem. If you have a big problem and can’t face up to the issues, try splitting the problem into small steps. Then take things one step at a time. For example, if you’ve lost your job and are short of cash, the first step to getting a new job may be to rewrite your CV (résumé). You can even break that down to phoning a friend to help you write one, or getting a book from your local library on writing CVs.
• See problems in a different way. If you see difficulties in life as challenges, your mind may automatically begin to start searching for helpful solutions. If all you see are problems, you’re more likely to feel drained and stressed by their weight on your shoulders. See challenges as opportunities to discover new things about yourself and your resilience, rather than problems to be avoided or coped with. Think of this challenge as something that’s come into your life to teach you a wiser, kinder way of living.
• Discuss the cause of the stress with someone. The process of talking about your issue is likely to help you to see aspects you never even thought of. And even if you don’t, the very act of talking about the issues you’re facing helps to dissipate their potency.
• Let go of perfectionism. Perfectionism is a common reason for high levels of stress. Understand that being perfect is impossible to achieve. Adjust your standards by lowering them a little. You can try aiming for 80 per cent perfection and see whether that helps. Notice how the imperfection of a tree with its wonky branches and lack of symmetry is also its beauty. In the same way, see the beauty of your imperfections. This is the ancient Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi.
• Appreciate what’s going well. Think of all the things that are going well for you at the moment and write them down. They don’t need to be big things – anything you’re even slightly grateful for will suffice. Doing so encourages you to feel less stress. You’re still breathing? You have a roof over your head? You have a friend? Anything is fine.

Cooling Down Your Anger

Anger can be healthy if the emotion is controlled and used sparingly. For example, if you’re being treated unfairly, you may need to act angrily to ensure that you’re treated justly and with respect. However, being out of control when you’re angry can cause tremendous harm both to yourself and to your relationships with others. Cooling down anger isn’t an easy process and requires a clear decision, effort, and support from others. Mindfulness can help, as this section shows.

Understanding anger

Anger is a normal human emotion. If you’re mistreated, feeling angry is perfectly natural. The problem is knowing what to do with the emotion that arises if you hurt yourself or others with the anger.

Anger arises when you feel something should happen but it doesn’t, for example if you receive poor customer support for something you’ve bought, or you see how much crime has gone up in your city and feel angry because the government should be taking more action.

I don’t really have outbursts of anger. The last time I had to act in an angry way was during a visit to India a few years ago. A shoe polisher insisted that she wanted to polish my shoes, so we agreed a price and she polished them. Then she tried to charge me ten times more. I refused. She then wouldn’t give my shoes back. So I decided to act as if I was angry to get my shoes back! It worked. I had to raise my voice, and I attracted a little crowd. I then gave the shoe polisher the agreed price, which she promptly threw back at me. I was a bit disappointed with her but felt sorry for her too. She was poor, and perhaps I should have given her more money. But this is a simple example of how acting angry can help you get your shoes back!

Acting angry and being angry are different. When you act angry, you don’t experience a lack of control or a loss of reason. You can switch straight back to smiling when you need to.

Different situations make different people angry. Like all emotions, anger depends on the interpretation of the situation, rather than the situation itself. If someone at a checkout gives you the wrong amount of change and you see this as a mistake, you probably forgive her straight away and think nothing of the oversight. However, if you think that she did this to you on purpose, you’re more likely to become annoyed, frustrated or angry. So, it’s your interpretation that causes the anger, not the situation itself.

Anger arises from a thought or series of thoughts. Anger doesn’t just come up on its own. You may not be aware of the thought causing the anger you feel, but a thought must have arisen for the emotion to surface. For example, if you think ‘That cashier is out to rip me off’, you feel anger surging through your body almost instantly afterwards.

You experience certain physical sensations when angry, such as tensing your shoulders, tightening your stomach, a headache, clenching your hands or jaw, poor concentration, feeling sweaty, increasing your breathing rate, restlessness, and a fast heart rate.

Coping when the fire rises up

You arrive home and your partner hasn’t cooked any food. You were working late, and you begin to feel anger rising up in you. What do you do? You know that logically you’re far better off talking calmly about the issue and resolving the conflict rather than spoiling the evening with an argument. Here’s how:

1. Become aware of the physical sensation of anger in your body. Notice the sensations in your stomach, chest, and face. Become aware of your rapid heart and breathing rate. Observe whether your fists or jaw are clenched. Witness the tension in the rest of your body.
2. Breathe. Breathe into the physical sensations of your body. Close your eyes if you want to. You may find counting out ten breaths helpful. Imagine the breath entering your nose into your belly, and as you breathe out, imagine the breath going out of your fingers and toes, if you find this useful.
3. Continue to stay with the sensations as best you can. Bring a sense of kindness and gentleness to your feelings of anger. Look at the discomfort in the way you would look at scenery – taking your time and being with the landscape of your inner self. Try to see the anger as an opportunity to understand about the feeling, how the burning rises up in your being, and how the breath may or may not have a cooling effect on the flame within you.
4. Notice your thoughts. Thoughts like ‘It’s not fair’ or ‘I’m not having this’ feed the fire of anger. Notice what effect you have by letting go of these thoughts, for your own health and wellbeing more than anything else. If you can’t let go of the thoughts, which is common, just continue to watch the way thoughts and feelings feed into each other, creating and recreating the experience of anger as well as other feelings like guilt, frustration, and sadness. If you have lots of energy pumping through your body, try walking around the room and feeling the contact between your feet and the ground. Alternatively, instead of walking, you can try slow, mindful stretching, feeling the body as you extend your various muscle groups.
5. Step back. Take a step back from your internal experiences. Notice that you’re the observer of your thoughts and emotions and not the thoughts and emotions themselves. Just as images are projected onto a screen, but the screen itself is unaffected, so thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise in awareness, but you, as awareness, are untouched.
6. Communicate. As soon as the main force of your anger has dissipated, you may need to communicate your feelings with the other person. Begin with ‘I’ statements instead of ‘you’ accusations. If you blame the other person for your feelings, you’re more likely to make her act defensively. If you say ‘I felt angry when you didn’t cook dinner’ rather than ‘You made me angry when you didn’t cook dinner,’ you’re taking responsibility for your feelings. As you continue to communicate, stay aware and awake to your own feelings, and let go of any aggression if you can – less aggression and more honesty are more likely to lead to a harmonious and productive conversation and result.

Coping with anger is a challenging task, and nobody can follow these steps perfectly. The idea is to keep these steps in mind and follow them with small levels of frustration rather than outright anger. When you do, you become more adept at cooling the flames of anger.

Some other ways of managing your feelings of anger are to:

• Be mindful of the thought patterns that feed your anger. These include:
  • Over-generalising by using sentences like ‘You always ignore me’ or ‘You never respect me.’ Be specific instead.
  • Mind-reading by thinking you know what the other person is thinking, and often predicting the thoughts as negative, such as ‘I know you think I nag you too much.’ Try to avoid making assumptions like this.
  • Blaming others for your own anger with thoughts like ‘You always make me angry’ or ‘It’s all their fault.’ Instead, take responsibility for your anger.
• Take mindful physical exercise. By exercising regularly, you build up a greater resilience to stress, and this may dissipate some of your anger. By exercising mindfully (see Chapter 7), paying attention to all the physical sensations as you perform an exercise, you simultaneously build up your mindfulness muscles too, leading to greater levels of awareness and less reactive, automatic-pilot behaviour.
• Connect with your senses. Listen to the sounds around you or listen mindfully to some music. Smell some of your favourite calming scents. Eat a snack as slowly as you can, chewing and tasting with as much awareness you can muster. Have a shower or bath and connect with the sensations on your skin. Look out of your window and enjoy the sky, clouds, trees, or rain.
• Question your reaction. Ask yourself questions like: ‘Is this worth it?’ ‘Is this important in the big picture?’ ‘How else can I respond in this situation?’ ‘What is a more helpful thing to do now?’

Figure 12-2 shows how you can use mindfulness to dissipate the anger cycle.

Reducing Fatigue

If you’re full of energy, getting your daily tasks done is a doddle – you may come home from work brimming with energy, able to cook, clean, go out with your friends, socialise, and generally have a good time. If you’re lacking in the energy department, everything becomes a drag – right from getting out of bed in the morning, to getting back into bed at the end of the day. You can find some helpful tips to reduce your fatigue in this section.

Assessing your energy levels

Begin by assessing your energy levels in a typical week or month. You can do this by simply making a note in your diary or journal. You’ll find several benefits of doing this:

• You discover how your energy levels change from one day to the next.
• You see at what times of the day you have the most energy available to tackle your more challenging tasks.
• You may begin to see patterns: certain foods or certain physical activities may be boosting or draining your energy levels.

Practise some mindfulness meditation on a daily basis, just to see what effect the exercise has on your energy levels. Mindfulness isn’t a short-term fix but a long-term way of meeting life in a healthy way; any improvements in energy may take some time but be long lasting, so persevere with your practice.

Discovering energy drainers

Some activities are similar to energy leeches – they suck energy out of your system. By discovering and mindfully reflecting on what takes energy out of you, you can begin to reschedule your lifestyle, or reduce your intake of energy drainers. Energy drainers include:

• Too much stress. If you allow yourself to become overly stressed out and don’t take steps to manage the stress, you stand to burn lots of your energy. This is because the stress reaction, or fight or flight response, pushes all your energy reserves out of your digestive and immune system and into your muscles. If you keep engaging the stress reaction again and again, your energy reserves gradually become more and more depleted. Use the mindfulness tips earlier in this chapter to help combat stress.
• Too much thinking. If you take your thoughts too seriously, you give your mind undue attention. This tends to feed the mind and encourages you to think more and more. The brain uses a massive 20 per cent of all your energy – if you give thoughts too much attention, they spiral out of control, zapping your energy. Take a step back from thoughts, and don’t let thoughts become your master.
• Too much sugar. Although sugar may seem to uplift your energy in the short term, your energy levels soon plummet. Reduce your intake of refined sugar and watch out for low-fat foods that contain high levels of sugar to make them taste good. Read Mindful Eating For Dummies by Laura Dawn (Wiley) to learn how to be more mindful with food.
• Skipping breakfast. Lots of research shows the benefits of eating a healthy breakfast. In fact, people who don’t eat breakfast not only lack energy but are also more likely to put on weight due to overeating later on in the day.

Finding what uplifts you

You can take control of your energy levels by taking active, healthy steps to raise your liveliness. Keep in mind that you want the kind of energy that’s revitalises you rather than the kind that makes you overly excited! Too much of a ‘high’ eventually results in you crashing out as you burn your energy rapidly. That’s okay from time to time when you want to have fun, but not all the time.

Do the following with a mindful, gentle awareness:

• Engage in mindful physical exercise. Rather than draining your energy, regular exercise actually gives you a boost. This may be due to the release into your brain of a chemical called serotonin that helps you feel better and less frustrated or stressed. Health organisations recommend 30 minutes of vigorous physical exercise on a daily basis, which can include a brisk walk to the shops and back. Anything that gets your heart beating, your breathing rate up, and makes you a bit sweaty and out of breath is classified as a vigorous exercise. Read Chapter 7 for more about mindful physical exercise.
• Enjoy mindful, regular meals. Eating smaller portions on a regular basis rather than having a few big meals is healthier and helps to maintain your energy levels. Wholegrain rye bread, porridge, pasta, beans, lentils and noodles all contain energy that is released slowly into your body, helping to sustain you throughout the day. Eat mindfully too, by looking at your food, tasting as you eat, eating one mouthful at a time and not doing anything else when eating.
• Drink plenty of water. Aim to drink six to eight glasses of water a day, and more if you’re exercising. Become more aware of your feeling of thirst, or better still, drink before the feeling arises in case you’re already dehydrated. As you drink, remember how lucky you are to have water available to you, and feel the water in your mouth and how it has a cooling effect as it goes down into your stomach.
• Find your joy. Make time for activities that you enjoy. You may simply be working too hard. If you can’t change that, see what small things you can do to make your work more fun. Spend time with friends and family that are ‘mindful’ – whatever that means for you. Try smiling more and do mindful laughter exercises (see Chapter 11). Tell someone a joke. Move towards laughter. Act in a silly or childlike way from time to time. Try and see the funny side of life if you can.
• Meditate. Both informal mindfulness and a formal meditation on a daily basis help to increase your energy levels. This is because mindful awareness helps ultimately to lower the stress you experience. As you continue to practise on a daily basis, your tendency to become stressed in the first place diminishes and therefore your energy levels increase to a healthy level. As your ability to be calm and focused increases, your energy becomes calm and focused too.

Using meditations to rise and sparkle

Here’s an energising meditation, which is available as an audio track (Track 20), that you can practise whenever you want to focus on increasing your energy levels:

1. Sit or lie down in a suitable posture for yourself in this moment. You may choose to sit up straight in a chair, or lie down on your bed.
2. Adjust your intention of this meditation to simply be with whatever arises without trying to push things away or grab hold of experiences. Let your attitude be one of curiosity and kindness.
3. Feel the gentle rhythmic sensations of your own breathing. Feel the sensations of the breath from moment to moment, non-judgementally. Just allow the breathing to happen by itself. As you breathe in, imagine you’re breathing in nourishing, fresh, energising oxygen into your body. Get a sense of this nutritious oxygen permeating your whole body, feeding each cell generously. As you breathe out, imagine any toxins being released out of your system. Breathe out anything that’s troubling you, and let go of unhelpful thoughts, emotions, ideas, or sensations.
4. With each breath you take, feel more energised and uplifted. Essentially you’re a container of energy, interchanging with the energy all around. Get a sense of this as you continue to breathe. Feel the exchange of energy with your surroundings – both a give and take process; a cycle.
5. Now come back to a sense of awareness of the breath: breathing itself. Enjoy the in-breaths and out-breaths with a spirit of acceptance, caring, and empathy.
6. As you come towards the end of this meditation, notice your transition into a normal, wakeful state. Continue to be mindful of this exchange of energy taking place with your surroundings as you go about your daily activities.

A couple of other helpful meditations to provide an energy boost are:

• Body scan. You can do this practice no matter how tired you feel. You simply need to listen to the Mindfulness For Dummies Track 9 while lying down on the floor, a mat, or a bed. Even if you’re unable to concentrate for much of the time, something will shift. You may drop a stressful idea, you may drift into a restful sleep, or you may feel immediately energised by the end of the practice. (See Chapter 6 for a full description of the body scan.)
• Three-minute breathing space. This meditation (Track 17) is ideal if you don’t have much time available. If you can find the time and discipline to practise this exercise several times a day, you’ll begin to become aware of the kinds of thoughts and emotions running through your system, sapping your vital energy. (Refer to Chapter 7 for a description of the breathing space.)