Your brain is hardwired to pay more attention to negative experiences than positive ones. It is called negativity bias, and it kept our ancestors safe from threats. In modern life it mostly keeps us stuck in worry. The good news is that you can train your brain the other way, and the five practices below are the ones I use myself to stay mindful and happy.
The reason this matters is simple. A well known Harvard study by Killingsworth and Gilbert found that people spend close to half their waking hours thinking about something other than what they are doing, and that a wandering mind is generally an unhappy one. Mindfulness brings you back to the present moment, which is where happiness actually lives. If you want the science of why, read how mindfulness leads to happiness. This post is about what to do.
1. Bring active or seated meditation into your week
Being mindful is about paying attention to your experiences and doing your best to live in the moment. It helps you digest both the good and the bad, and let go of what no longer serves you.
A lot of people think meditation only counts when you are sitting cross-legged with your eyes shut. When I asked a monk at the monastery how many hours a day he meditated, he told me, every single minute. Active meditation is the best kind of meditation that nobody talks about.
Active meditation is doing one activity wholeheartedly while tuning out external noise and thoughts. During my pilgrimage to the Truc Lam Monastery in 2019, I spent three hours every morning gardening, and that became my daily meditation: thinking about nothing but sweeping up every leaf the gazillion trees had dropped overnight with an ultra-short broom. As a Buddhist friend said to me, cleaning the house is cleaning the mind.
Every class I write has the same goal: to teach you how to meditate and practise mindfulness more easily, then send you home with the tools to do it yourself. If you are new to it, our 7 Days of Meditation course is built for exactly that, and a sound meditation can bring a whole new dimension to your practice.
2. Take a digital detox
When I was training with the nuns at Truc Lam, I loved not having access to my phone. It let me focus on what was happening in my own world, my inner world, rather than everyone else's. Those days of pure focus on myself led to some of the most important realisations of my life.
You cannot escape technology for most of the day, but you can admit it distracts you from noticing what is around you. Set some rules. Choose one activity each day that you will be totally present for. Silence your phone and put it out of reach.
3. Teach yourself to live in the present
Everyone says live in the present, and it can sound like a cliche. So why do we actually need to?
When people live in the past, they usually live with the bad things that happened. Good times settle into memories, but bad times keep dictating how we feel and act. We cannot change the past. We can keep living with anger, regret and pain, or find peace and become a better version of ourselves with the lesson learnt. That is the choice.
You can also live in the future. I did this for a very long time, basing every decision today on some end goal. I gave up opportunities and made self-destructive moves because of what I thought was going to happen in six months. It never happened when I thought it would.
The present is the only place you have any real influence. Practise noticing what you can touch, hear, smell and taste right now.
4. Refill your jar with the things you love
Many of us cannot remember the last time we did the thing we love most. For you that might be gardening, cooking, fishing, golf, the markets or studying something for the fun of it.
Picture yourself as a glass jar. The more jelly beans in it, the happier you are. The trouble is that ordinary life keeps taking jelly beans out. Things happen that make us unhappy, and before we know it the jar is empty. If you do not actively schedule your favourite activities back in, you cannot keep refilling it.
So how full is your jelly bean jar today?
If you are not sure what would fill it, our post on finding your passion is a good place to start.
5. Shed to grow
I am a firm believer that to grow, you need to shed. Every big leap in my own development has required letting go of something: what I thought I knew, my beliefs, the people I called friends, or what I was doing with my life.
Good questions to sit with:
- Where am I trying to get to, and what am I trying to achieve?
- What is causing my unhappiness, and what is bringing negativity into my life?
- Is work consuming so much time that I have no space to work on myself?
- What is holding me back?
- Am I letting other people's problems distract me?
- Why do I think the way I do, and what thoughts and beliefs would I need to adopt to be happier?
- What would I love to do, and what stops me?
- Are there friendships I pour effort into that are not returned?
- What am I doing to create space for change in my life?
Start with one
These are practices I have personally adopted, and they have led me to realisations that shaped the life I live today. If you create space for change, you will find unexpected and wonderful things along the way, and you will discover the real you underneath the beliefs and behaviours that were never yours.
Being mindful and happy is not about perfection. It is about progress. Pick one practice from this list and commit to it for two weeks, then notice how your relationship with your thoughts begins to shift. Happiness is not a destination you arrive at. It is a way of travelling, and mindfulness is your compass.
If you would like company on the way, come and join a class at the Mirosuna studio in South Melbourne, or begin with 7 Days of Meditation. And for the science behind all of this, read how mindfulness leads to happiness.
Love,
Sally Kellett
Founder of Mirosuna