01/01/2022
Making Those 2022 New Years Resolutions
Mindfulness is the ultimate keystone habit. If mindfulness is practicing self-awareness of your thoughts feelings, bodily sensations, and environment, becoming more mindful will help you become more aware of what you’re eating, how you’re body is feeling, and how positive or negative your thoughts are. Becoming more mindful can inspire you to make other positive changes in your overall health, behavior, and mindset.
How to Become More Mindful
That’s all well and good, but how can you become more mindful, and then, how can you measure mindfulness to know whether or not you’re reaching your mindfulness resolution?
One way to work on your mindfulness resolution is to go a traditional route. Yoga and meditation are tried and true ways to bone up on your mindfulness. However, the downfall about this route is that it has a similar downside as resolving to exercise more. Instead of focusing on the positive effects of mindfulness, we start focusing on doing this thing we don’t want to do each day. No fun. And that’s often the reason resolutions like this go down in flames.
A More Fun Way to Become More Mindful
Instead of starting with yoga classes and meditation, there’s another way. We can focus on measuring how often we are mindful each day. This keeps things positive and it helps us focus on the positive effects of mindfulness instead of being something we have to cross off our to-do list.
Here’s how to measure and expand your mindfulness practice each day.
1. Find Your Flow
Flow is the psychological term for when your skill level matches the difficulty of the task at hand and time seems to fly by. It's when you're completely absorbed in what you're doing.
Maybe you love reading, writing, and sometimes a good yoga class. So you will track of how often you practice flow activities and how often you actually feel that “in the zone” feeling. That way you can quantify how often you’re feeling a sense of flow and work to increase that time each day.
2. Track Your Mindfulness
You can also keep a journal of your daily mindfulness. Record how you’re feeling, what you’re thinking, how your body is feeling, and what’s going on around you. Putting your mindfulness in writing can help you keep track of how your self-awareness changes over time. This can give you a way to regularly check in with yourself and reset your self-improvement goals throughout the year.
