10 Tips For Mindfulness Practices

In this highly stressful time, mindfulness should become a critical part of your day. Below are the top 10 tips to help sustain mindfulness.

1. Create Daily routines. Your old routines have drastically changed, and you may get thrown off. Your activity, nutrition, and mindfulness could all suffer. This alone can create stress. So, if you have not already done so, set a special schedule for your quarantine. While you shelter in place, plan for times when you can be active, practice yoga, meditate, and shop for high quality meals. This will provide a mentally stabilizing structure for you to follow.
2. In our normal lives, it can be difficult to develop mindfulness habits such as meditation. Work schedules and family obligations can make that tough to fit in. So now is a really good time to try morning meditations of at least 15 minutes. Doing so will help you understand the benefit of daily meditation, and it is especially important in these uncertain times.
3. Keep in mind that if you are stressed about your job, the economy, your health, etc., those feelings can sneak up on you. You may not realize that these feelings are perfectly normal and coming from the completely unusual situation we find ourselves in today. Recognizing that you may have these feelings allows you to better deal with them when they do occur.
4. Your daily schedule is normally driven by activities that are likely shut down through the month of April. School schedules, work schedules, and social activity schedules create the ordinary time pressures that you no longer have. Because of this, it can be disorienting if you stay up very late, eat very poorly, have irregular meals, and treat this time like a vacation. Go ahead and plan your meals, go to bed at the same times, and set times for interacting with others in your day.
5. Stay connected through social media. This is such a huge advantage we have today, in that if we want to see our family and cousins and kids, we only need to push a button. We get to laugh with them, chat with them, and find out how they’re doing. This is a great tool to help keep us from feeling too isolated.
6. Take any opportunity to get outside. Of course, be careful and practice social distancing, but being outside in nature, in the sunshine, is calming for your heart and mind.
7. So much of our news is awful, and can lead to high stress levels for everyone. It is important to note the daily dose of bad news, but put it into as much of a positive context as you can. For example, you might consider that, yes the global pandemic is horrible, but you are doing the little bit you can to contain the spread. You are being a support to friends and family, as much as you are able. Creating positive context around sustained bad news can help prevent internal stress from building up.
8. If you shelter in a space with others for a long period of time, you may not be accustomed to this close level of interaction. Make sure to set times for you to be alone, as well as time to be close to those individuals. This balance provides the you-time you need to allow you to unwind when you need to.
9. Self-limit your exposure to bad news. We all want to be up to date on the latest happenings, and media feed this by producing a 24/7 news cycle of urgent headlines. Give yourself a break from the news frenzy. A constant barrage of bad news actually weakens your emotional immune system, making it more likely that stress can get to you.
10. Focus on gratitude and positivity. Find and then share at least one instance of good news per day.