Mindfulness is more than just a buzzword – it helps to slow down our everyday lives and reduce stress. We show what’s behind the concept, how it can improve our quality of life, and five simple mindfulness workouts for every day to enjoy a lightning roulette free game.
In our daily lives, we often rush from one situation to the next, thinking at breakfast about what’s coming up at work and at work planning what needs to be done in the evening. We rarely give our full attention to the here and now. This causes stress, which has a negative impact on our health – and in extreme cases can lead to burnout, depression, anxiety or panic attacks. Mindfulness training can be a way to reduce this stress and live a more balanced, relaxed and healthy life.
WHAT IS IT?
Mindfulness is a form of meditation and originated in Buddhism. To be mindful means to experience moments consciously and to listen to your inner impulses – without judging. This is how you protect your psyche and slow down your life.
MINDFULNESS BASED STRESS REDUCTION
In the Western world, the molecular biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn is considered a pioneer of mindfulness practice: With his Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) method developed in the 1970s, he has made mindfulness meditation respectable in our country.
MBSR is an eight-week mindfulness training. It teaches you to pay attention to physical sensations and to just look at emotions. The key to mindfulness is to perceive without judging. This creates a distance between stimulus and reaction.
You can imagine it like this: If you are afraid of an exam, but only observe this feeling and do not evaluate it, you do not trigger a reaction and thus no stress. In this way, mindfulness training helps to avoid stress in certain situations. MBSR training is scientifically well researched and evaluated and can help people with a wide variety of problems.
LEARNING MINDFULNESS
Apart from the numerous courses and online applications where you can learn mindfulness and the many offers for mindfulness meditation, you can also easily complete various mindfulness exercises at home. A mindfulness planner such as the specially designed “A Good Plan” appointment calendar can also support you in this.
Most of these mindfulness exercises can be easily integrated into everyday life. In this way, you can calm down and relax every day without much effort, become aware of the here and now, and live more consciously. We will briefly introduce a few of them here.
1. mindfulness exercise: pause
Between the different parts of our busy day, simple pausing is a great way to recharge your batteries and calm down.
Take at least one minute to pause several times a day. Sit or stand comfortably and observe how your breath flows. Focus your attention on your body: you can focus on the places you are feeling or simply notice your body as a whole. Then observe how you feel, ask yourself how you feel, and see what happens. Remember not to judge, just observe. This may be difficult at first, but will become easier with time.
2. mindfulness meditation: walking consciously
You can use the time while you are walking to focus and quiet your thoughts. Walking is such an automated movement that we hardly notice it consciously. Walking meditation is about doing just that.
Focus on walking on your way to the grocery store, to the subway, while climbing the stairs or going for a walk. Notice when your feet touch the ground, which muscles tense and relax. Observe your pace: Are you slowing down or speeding up?
