Waking Up Together: a mindfulness blog

Early in life, it’s simple. Our days are filled with playing, eating, and sleeping.  As we grow older, new tasks to do appear. With only twenty-four hours, we cut back on the play, eat, and sleep to make room for these tasks - but we still make time for playing, eating, and sleeping. We know, on an intuitive level, that playing, eating, and sleeping are vital to our well-being.

At some point, like the proverbial boiled frog, our To Do list overflows, and the tasks become a higher priority than playing, eating, and sleeping. While the drivers for this flip are many, the outcome is the same: playing, eating, and sleeping are relegated to the “Later List.” A funny thing about this list - like the horizon, we never arrive in Later land. Our field of vision becomes a narrow slit, focused on the ever-demanding tasks of the To Do list.  Any activities that divert from these tasks receive the pre-requisite knee jerk of “I don’t have time for that!”  Welcome to the “Too Busy” trap - where playing, eating, sleeping or any activity that promotes health, creativity, and re-energizing are nowhere to be found.

Are we doomed as adults to be slaves to the unrelenting To Do list? Perhaps not. Our path to reclaiming balance can be found in the Zen proverb, “You should sit in meditation (or play, eat sleep) for twenty minutes every day - unless you're too busy; then you should sit (play, eat, sleep) for an hour.”  In other words, when our lives have become out of balance, we need to make balance a priority - balance between the modes of being and doing.  As children, being was the only mode we knew - we fully embraced each unfolding moment.  As we grew older, we first experimented then honed our talents and skills, but we retained the capacity to shift from doing mode back into being.

The older we grow, however, we are swept away by our culture's high value of doing.  Rather than viewed as equal partners, being becomes relegated to a lower rung on the “success” ladder.  Even when we attempt to embrace enjoyable activities, we are challenged to shed the doing mode. While playing, eating, and sleeping, the drum beat of To Do list is never too far from our attention. The toll of this go, go, go can be seen on our bodies: studies reveal over half of our visits to our primary care doctors are stress-related. “All work and no play make Jack” and Jill not only dull but literally sick!

Back to our Zen proverb - a return to balance requires intentionality.  The practice of mindfulness, no matter how brief, places us in being mode.  Create a space in your day to step off the To Do list and slip into being mode. Perhaps instead of eating lunch at your desk, take your food outside and enjoy a beautiful day.  Instead of walking and reading emails, raise your gaze and greet the eyes of the person approaching. Even a task such as doing dishes can become a moment of being by feeling the warm water, smelling the suds, and observing the sheen of the bubbles.  Within each moment is the opportunity to shift from doing to being. And reclaim balance. Or in the melodic words of Frank Sinatra, “Do Be Do Be Do.”

Tags: balance, stress

What is your current relationship with stress? Do you hide from it, or try to run away? Or do you make a deal that if you work hard enough, it should go away.  If your current relationship is not working, how about renegotiation? 

First, let’s understand what stress is. From the original definition by Dr. Hans Selye, stress is “The non-specific response of an organism to any pressure or demand.”  Notice how stress is not judged as good or bad, but simply a generalized response. Our first clue to this new relationship: non-judgment.

And what is this generalized response? When we perceive a threat, hormones are released into our body. In response, these hormones trigger an elevation in heart rate, increase rate of breathing, blood shifts from the central core out to muscles of arms and legs and senses become more acute. The second clue to our new relationship: stress is about our body preparing. 

And what are we preparing for?  The stress reaction allows us to take action.  The “Fight or Flight” reaction mobilizes our resources toward this end.  Now to the third clue towards our new relationship. After we take action, our body naturally returns to a state of rest and recovery. 

Now let’s put all the clues together: our stress reaction is neither good nor bad and is about short-term action followed by recovery.  Our body evolved not to be in a chronic stress state, but to shift between action and rest.  The stress reaction can be extremely beneficial when we need to call upon all our resources for a burst of action; be it giving a presentation, rounding the bases for home plate or dodging an errant bicyclist. And then our bodies require rest and recharge. 

Unfortunately, this burst of action state has been mistaken for a new baseline. We become rewarded for this action state and forget that it requires a complimentary period of rest and relaxation. We place undue expectations that we SHOULD be capable of that level of action at all times.  This all action and no rest leads to depression, anxiety, and a whole host of chronic medical issues.  

Consider bringing balance to your day, including both action and rest.  Balance arises out of choice in this moment.  Choice arises out of recognition. Recognition arises out of awareness. Awareness arises out of intention.  Mindfulness practices support both intention and awareness. 

Welcome to a new relationship with stress!

Tags: new years, stress

I took an extraordinary step the other day.  Actually, I took no steps, while texting.  And oh, what a relief it was.  To have my feet firmly planted in a safe spot (as opposed to crossing a street!) and enjoy focusing on a single task.  As the attached link explains, multitasking is a myth.  Oh, how I wish it could be removed from job descriptions, “must be good at multitasking.”  We might as well add to a job description, “must be good at flapping arms and flying around the room.” 

We can only focus on one item (internal or external) at any given moment.  Multi-tasking is a misnomer.  What we actually do is rapidly shift our attention between different phenomena.  As described in the attached NPR story, this capacity to rapidly shift attention may have had an evolutionary advantage.  But our hunter-gather ancestors were not rapidly shifting between smartphone, email, television and tweet (and pot boiling on the stove and someone yelling outside the door!).  Studies on attention and interruptions reveal we require from 7-25 minutes to return to the task.  Now, how much time are we saving, and how much more productive are we with multitasking?

Now, consider being able to focus on one task. Completely. Feel breath deepen, body relax and mind become laser-like focused upon one task.  Imagine this to be your standard operating procedure.

While we may desire this opportunity, we tend to be trapped in pseudo-multitasking mode.  Even if we want to slow down and really smell the roses, our minds continue to make To-Do lists or worry or plan or scan.  Mindfulness invites us to practice and reclaim our capacity to be fully present, fully focused, fully engaged, in this moment, in this one task.  Ahhh...

Think You're Multitasking? Think Again 

Tags: multi-tasking, stress

I recently came across a quote by Dr. Hans Selye, "...it is important to keep in mind that stress is an abstraction; it has no independent existence." Selye was the researcher who coined the term stress in the 1950s, so this quote is worth exploring. When it comes to stress, commonly we focus on the events in our lives that result in struggling and suffering. Selye proposed just the opposite: stress is not outside, but driven from the inside. Stress is the relationship we create with these external events. This does not mean our experience of stress is not real. All the symptoms - across mind, body and emotions - are real as the outcome of this relationship with external stressors.

When speaking about relationships, we may or may not be able to affect the outside half of this equation. We always have the capacity to affect our contribution to this relationship. Mindfulness offers a two-fold approach to managing our contribution. First, I can observe my habitual reaction to the external event. What shows up when the stressor is present - in thoughts, sensations and emotions? A key quality of mindfulness is to be kind and gentle in how we observe ourselves and these reactions. Judging and criticizing are likely just to compound the experience of stress. Suspending judgment, as best as we can, creates space between ourselves, our perception of the stressor and the reaction. This observational stance with the stressors and our reaction already put us on the path to a shift in relationship with the external event.

Secondly, I can choose to comply with the old reaction or experiment with a new response. The beauty of experimentation: there is no way to fail! No matter the outcome, I become just that much better informed on how different behaviors produce different outcomes. With time and practice, we build out a better stress response toolkit. The more extensive our toolkit, the more diverse range of stressors I become prepared to manage. Remembering that "neurons that fire together wire together," these new responses become my new normal for how I relate to external events.

Stress - "it's all in your head" and the way out is found there as well!

Tags: mindfulness, selye, stress