Chapter 19
In This Chapter
Eating and drinking mindfully
Being smart with your smart phone
Enjoying small pleasures
Being aware of and responsive to your body
A busy woman, attending one of my (Juliet’s) eight-week mindfulness courses told me that she starts each day with a shower. As soon as she steps in the shower her mind starts to race. She overthinks interactions with staff and clients that haven’t gone to plan. She tries to plan her day, anticipating what may happen and how she should respond. The more she tries to make sense of her thoughts, the less clear things become, inducing a mild state of panic. As she steps out of the shower and dries herself, she continues to mull over the day ahead and worry. She arrives at work primed to deal with possible problems and conflicts, with a knotted feeling in her stomach.
I asked her what she remembered about her shower, the shampoo she had used, the scent of the body wash and the feeling of water on her skin – she couldn’t recall any of it! She spends her time in the shower in the past and future, and completely misses out on the present-moment experience.
Try starting your day with a minute of mindful showering because mindful showering:
Do you commute to work by car or public transport? At times the journey can be slow and frustrating. As a result, you enter work holding tension in your body. Not a great start to the day!
When discussing mindful working practices on my (Juliet’s) mindfulness at work courses, participants often struggle to think of ways that they can incorporate mindfulness into their busy working day. In large organisations, most people have networked computers. These often seem to take an age to boot up first thing in the morning, which can be another source of frustration.
Waiting for the computer to boot up can be a great excuse for a minute (or more!) of mindfulness. If you’re sitting in an office chair facing your PC, your colleagues probably won’t even notice that you’re practising mindfulness. Bonus! Starting the day with a mindful moment helps you let go of any tension or negativity you’ve brought into the building with you.
At present, no one has brought to market a ‘mindful coffee’ – or ‘mindful tea’ for that matter! Maybe it’s only a matter of time.
Whatever you like to drink at work, it can be a great excuse for bringing some mindfulness as well as hydration into your day. In the same way as taking a mindful pause when switching on your PC, you can take a mindful pause when drinking your favourite hot or cold drink – no one will notice and you’ll feel the benefits.
Why drink mindfully? Well, drinking mindfully:
A big part of mindfulness is paying present-moment attention to what you’re doing. Simply apply this principle to the first minute of drinking your drink. Observe the aroma, texture, temperature and taste. Notice what’s going on in your mouth and throat as you swallow; how your hand holds and brings the cup to your lips; and the movement of your lips and tongue as you drink. If you find this little exercise a bit tricky, try using your other hand to hold and lift the cup to your lips. Because it feels unnatural, the experience is completely different – do watch out for drips and spills, though!
Smart phones are great. You can use them to surf the net, check emails, take photos, order a pizza, watch TV or even make a phone call. This kind of technology is supposed to make life easier but can actually make it harder than it needs to be. In mindfulness classes, I (Juliet) often hear people saying they’re on sites like Facebook into the early hours and then feel tired the next morning when they get up for work. Others find it hard to sleep after getting wound up and stressed over friends’ comments posted online. I was bemoaning the dangers of Facebook to a psychotherapist friend recently and her response was, ‘Facebook is great! It brings me so much work!’
So how can your mobile phone make you more mindful? Simple – find a mindfulness app that works for you.
The Mindfulness Bell is a simple app. You just set it to go off at various intervals during the day (every 30 minutes, every hour or two hours – whatever suits). When the bell rings, you simply stop what you’re doing and pause for a minute’s mindfulness. Simple as that! Breaking up your day in this way helps train your brain to become more mindful, and can have a transformative effect on your working day.
You can select the bell or gong you like or, if you work in a quiet environment, a ‘vibrate only’ option is available. Download the Mindfulness Bell from: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.googlecode.mindbell
As you approach the middle of your working day, lunch is a wonderful opportunity for a minute or more of mindfulness. It makes no difference what your lunch is or where you eat it, you can always sneak in mindfulness.
Try to make a few moments of each meal a journey of discovery into the present-moment enjoyment of food.
Lunchtime, or any other time of the day in fact, is a great opportunity to train your brain to notice sounds and the impact that they have on you. Sounds are all around you at work – in the room, elsewhere in the building, outside and even from time to time in your body.
In A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland describes her quest to find just that. She visited Skye in the Inner Hebrides, the Sinai desert, forests and mountains. She bobbed about in a flotation tank, stayed in monasteries and sat in libraries. She discovered that, even in these quiet places, she was still surrounded by sounds.
Although some sounds can be frustrating at times, they provide great everyday opportunities for mindfulness. I (Juliet) once started a workshop with a mindful pause, at the end of which one delegate commented, ‘You know I’ve been coming to meetings in this room for the last six years and I’ve never noticed that the clock on the wall ticks!’ You’ll be amazed at what you notice when you really focus your attention on what’s around you.
Humans tend to have an inbuilt negativity bias. As a result, we’re much quicker to spot potential problems than opportunities. We tend to focus on the negative rather than the positive.
On a recent eight-week mindfulness at work course for NHS staff, I (Juliet) asked participants to think of some good things that had happened to them at work in the previous week. I was met with a wall of silence. One woman told me that she felt like a brain plugged into her computer. I asked the participants if their actions or expertise had been able to help any of their patients. Some great examples then emerged. I asked them if these experiences gave any of them a sense of personal achievement or mastery, and they started to realise that many of their encounters with patients did indeed make a real difference and made them feel good about their work. Until that point they had rarely allowed themselves to stop and appreciate those precious moments.
As we discussed other aspects of their work, the participants started to recognise that, although their current work environment was tough and they were dealing with constant change, there were many things to feel good about. They just hadn’t noticed them. As home practice, I asked them to try to notice things that made them feel good at work and home. I suggested that they should pause to mindfully appreciate them and derive as much benefit from these moments as possible.
Why did I ask them to do this activity? When you feel negative, or blame yourself for something, you tend to activate your body’s fight or flight response. As a result, you may find it increasingly difficult to step back and see the bigger picture. When you do something you really enjoy and that makes you feel good, you activate your body’s rest and relaxation response, which decreases or switches off your threat response. You can then regain your equilibrium.
Next week one participant told me that for years her kids came down each morning and asked for a hug, which she found mildly irritating as she was in a rush to get them fed and ready for school. The next week she paused to appreciate that hug moment. She said ‘it felt sooo good, and it did not delay my morning in any way’.
Thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations (physiology) are tightly linked and have a huge impact on one another. If your body is feeling tense, it is going to have an impact on your behaviour and the decisions you make. If you feel unhappy, you may find it difficult to think positive thoughts. If the hour is late and you’re feeling tired, you may not be doing your best work. In fact you may be working in the zone of delusion (see Chapter 5) – working harder and harder to get things done but achieving little.
If you’re struggling to get things done, just stop and practice a little mindfulness. It may feel counter-intuitive at first, but it really works!
You may feel disconnected from your body at times. Many people treat their body as an enemy – getting annoyed because it won’t always do what they want it to do. This situation may be even worse if, like many people, you don’t like the way your body looks.
Work can feel so all-consuming and important that you neglect or forget your body. Quite a number of people on my (Juliet) mindfulness at work courses have told me that they often put off going to the toilet because their work seems more important. They later end up sprinting to the toilet, legs crossed and desperately hoping that a cubicle is free.
If your body feels okay, it’s one less thing for your mind to subconsciously worry about. If your body feels good, you’ll find it easier to focus and concentrate and you may also feel more positive.
Plenty of opportunities for mindful movement present themselves each day. Many people find the act of focusing on their body in the present moment an effective way of remaining focused. Below are a few tips to help you spend a mindful moment focused on body movement.
Hopefully this chapter has given you plenty of ideas about how you can practise mindfulness in a minute throughout your day. Try a few and see what works best for you. A little mindfulness can go a long way!