Chapter 8

Living Mindfully Day-to-Day

One great advantage of mindfulness is just how easily you can incorporate it into your everyday life, helping to improve your work life and relationships as well as boost your daily wellbeing.

In this chapter, I explain how to bring mindfulness exercises to your regular daily activities. The benefits include a better work life, including even your commute, and also improved intimate and nonintimate relationships.

Engaging in Daily Mindfulness Meditations

Mindfulness essentially cultivates an awareness of the present moment, which you can apply to most things that you do on a daily basis. As your mindfulness practice deepens, you find that doing these daily activities allows you to engage more with everyday life. This experience deepens your enjoyment and connection of your life.

Drinking tea mindfully

You can even drink a cup of tea mindfully. This practice gives you a little break and time to check in with yourself.

Usually, when you drink a cup of tea, you are not present. Your thoughts take you away to all that is going on in the mind (for example, Planning and worrying).

If you feel that your levels of anxiety are too much to cope with a full-length sitting or body scan meditation (see Chapter 5), this exercise can be of great benefit to you.

Most people drink tea on a daily basis for a break at home or at work, so you can easily fit it into your schedule. The idea is that you fully focus on the task in hand, so try to take the time to drink the tea alone or somewhere you won't be disturbed.

The tea-drinking mindful exercise is meant to offer a break and isn't a chance to keep going with work or multitasking, so ensure that you give yourself a real tea break! Ideally, use herbal or decaffeinated tea or decaffeinated coffee, but you can also apply mindfulness to other drinks, such as a hot water and lemon or even adapt it for a cold drink.

To practise the tea-drinking meditation, follow these steps:

1. Place your tea bag in your cup or mug and add your hot water.

   Listen to the sounds of the water as you pour it into the cup and watch any rising steam. Notice any smells that are released from the tea bag as the hot water fills up the cup.

2. Sit down somewhere comfortable to drink your tea.

   Find a situation with a nice view, if possible.

3. Hold the cup of tea in your hands.

   Feel the warmth of the cup. Notice the weight of the cup and any special designs on it. Feel your breath as you wait for the tea to cool down.

4. Bring the cup slowly to your lips and take a sip.

   Be aware of how the touch of the handle feels on your fingers or on your palms if you hold it with both hands. Smell the scent of that tea as you touch of the edge of the cup with your lips

   Become aware of the flavours and the warmth of the tea on your tongue and the back of your throat. Notice the tea inside you, travelling down toward your stomach.

5. Note when your mind wanders off.

   If your mind wanders, just gently guide it back to focusing on your tea-drinking. Be kind to yourself as you do so, allowing yourself a little smile.

6. Take a moment after you finish your tea.

   Be grateful that you made the time to practise this exercise, no matter how you felt the experience went for you.

Making time for mindfulness in a busy lifestyle

Getting into a new routine (such as daily mindfulness practice) is always difficult, but it's not impossible. You adapt to new routines all the time. Getting up for school or work, exercising, eating and watching a favourite series on TV are all routines that you had to learn at some stage.

Formal meditation

Remembering to fit into your daily life the longer formal meditations – those for which you have to make time – can be challenging in the hurly-burly of jobs and responsibilities. Here are two suggestions to help you:

Ask yourself the following question to help you get into your new daily mindfulness routine for formal practice: What time of day is best for you to practise?

Think about your answer and choose whichever time is easiest for you. Set aside at least 20 minutes a day for formal practice if you can. If you can't manage this amount, try breaking it up into two sets of ten minutes a day.

The important thing is to incorporate formal mindfulness into manageable amounts of time. For example, you may feel disappointed if you plan to practise for hours but can't attain that level of commitment with a family to look after. Be realistic with expectations and remember to be kind to yourself!

Don't practise formal mindfulness immediately after a heavy meal. Leave at least half an hour to an hour after you've eaten.

Informal meditation

In contrast to formal meditations, informal mindfulness doesn't need such a large time commitment. Instead you incorporate it into your existing daily routine.

Informal mindfulness involves daily activities that you can do mindfully, such as the drinking tea exercise in the preceding section. Chapter 11 has more great examples. Remember to focus fully on the activity, note why you're doing it and place your attention on the task as much as you can.

An example daily informal mindfulness exercise is preparing breakfast. If you're doing this while holding a mobile phone to your ear and watching the television at the same time, you aren't performing the task mindfully! On the other hand, if you focus on the smells and textures of the food – gently guiding your attention back to the task in hand when your mind wanders – and let go of any self-criticism as much as you can, that's mindful.

Incorporating mindful eating into everyday life

Eating is something everyone does every day to stay alive, but eating habits are different: Some people stick to three square meals a day, and others like to snack. Whatever your eating habits, you can bring mindfulness to them.

Think about your daily eating habits. Ask yourself the following questions:

If you answer yes to any of these questions, you have an opportunity to change your eating habits to be more mindful.

Here are some suggestions to help you to incorporate mindful eating into your daily life:

It helps to put your utensils down while chewing between bites.

Try these suggestions and incorporate the mindful eating exercise from Chapter 5 into each one of them. You can bring mindful eating to any food, whether it's a snack or a big meal. Just adjust the mindful eating exercise accordingly.

Cultivating a joyful commute

Commuting, especially in a busy city, can cause unnecessary stress and anxiety. The city is crowded with a lot of people all trying to get to the same area, tensions can rise and stress can build among large groups of people in one place.

Mindfulness can help.

Everyone's in the same commuting situation as you, but they may handle it very differently.

Maintaining Positive Relationships

Relationships and the way you interact with other people can have an effect on your health. Cultivating quality relationships makes you feel happier and more secure and gives you a greater sense of purpose.

Being with friends and family

A lot of people want to make more time to spend with family but never get around to it. Family time is very important, and spending time with friends and family can make you feel supported, able to share your feelings and receive emotional support, which you can also give in return. Such relationships also boost your feelings of self-worth, belonging and being connected.

If your anxiety prevents you from enjoying social activities, practising mindfulness can help you manage your feelings and emotions in social situations. You can then be open to socially connecting with more people and making friends. Quality is better than quantity, so make friends with a few people you feel you can trust and enjoy spending time with. You should be able to feel like you can confide in these people and that you can see them regularly.

If you feel anxious in the presence of a certain friend, you may decide not to spend too much time with that person. Instead, spend time with friends or family members who empower you, especially when going through a bout of anxiety.

Sustaining positive relationships with colleagues

Colleagues are people you see every day and have to work with, sometimes very closely. No one in the office or your place of work has to be your best friend if you don't want them to be. But you see these people on a regular basis, so maintaining good relationships with them is important for your own mental well-being and comfort at work.

Here are two suggestions to help you with your relationships with work colleagues

Dealing with Difficult Relationships

No doubt you've had at least one difficult relationship in your lifetime. It's very common and nothing to be embarrassed about. The following list covers some techniques to help you handle relationship difficulties a bit more mindfully:

Handling problems with a significant other

Anxiety can be challenging in partnerships because it arouses suspicion, evokes neediness and causes jealousy. Mindfulness helps to improve intimate relationships, however, giving you a chance to react constructively rather than automatically. It allows you to take a step back from any unhelpful thoughts and be able to stay in the present moment more so that you spend less time worrying about the future of your relationship or what may go wrong.

For example, just because your partner gets home late a few times a week, it doesn't mean that an affair is the cause. Even if this has happened to you in the past, mindfulness can make you aware of your brain's negativity bias and realise that thoughts aren't necessarily facts.

Here are some mindful ways to communicate with your partner:

As mindfulness helps you become more aware of your thoughts, bodily sensations and emotions, you can start to recognise patterns in yourself and be aware of what's arising for you. You can evoke empathy and start to be kinder to yourself. This awareness has a knock-on effect and helps you show more empathy towards your partner as well.

Just as you are becoming more aware of how judgmental you can be toward yourself, try to be the same with your partner so that you are less likely to blame or criticize.

Intimate relationships need a lot of hard work and mindful communication. Talk over issues calmly with your partner to try to work through them. Sometimes, however, intimate partnerships don't work out. You don't need to be ashamed or think that you've failed. If you've tried mindful communication and talked over issues and things still aren't working out, you may decide to agree to go your separate ways. But see this step as a last resort and not a way to avoid any anxiety about partnerships.

Managing a daily workload mindfully

Mindfulness is the opposite of multitasking. Mindfulness is about focusing on one task at a time with present-moment awareness. It can help with the quality of your work because multitasking doesn't allow you to focus fully on each task you're doing.

To manage a daily workload mindfully, break it down so that it doesn't feel overwhelming. For example, if the first thing you do when you get into the office is to check and answer emails, set yourself a time limit — perhaps a couple of hours in the morning or afternoon. Otherwise, you can end up checking your emails all day as they arrive, which brings your focus away from other tasks you need to do that day.

Here are some more suggestions to help you manage your work mindfully:

Still have fun with your work if possible. If you enjoy some of the tasks, make sure that you keep doing them as well.