Category: Mindfulness

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Actionable Mindfulness Procrastination

Self Regulation Failure

Here I am, once again, last week I didn’t post and it’s the second time in a row that I post only once every second week, that’s half the productivity I had before. It seems I’m running out of gas and that’s a very bad sign. If we’ve learned anything together is that we must keep on going, and I am the first one that has to show this perseverance and push, so I will. And with that I can start with our post. This week I’d like to talk about how we procrastinate in the most crass way we can, by being completely lazy and oblivious to our future. A quick comment over this, because it seems to have a contradiction in it. We are lazy and don’t do what is good for our future selves, so it seems that we are living the moment, nothing more zen than that, right? Not so fast grasshopper, sometimes we only do what we feel like doing right then, but not because it’s important but because it can give us a strong immediate rush. And then, after that rush we are back where we started, seeking to fill a void we don’t know how to fill or with what, so, we go ahead and look for that rush, and end up binge watching some dull television series, while we eat junk and don’t even get out of our pajamas for the whole weekend, just wasting away. Man what a depressing sight! But, what is a person on the 21st century that has most of the needs met to do? How can I find meaning and purpose? How can I fight that pull from the mundane but colorful world of junk food, junk music, junk TV, junk cinema, junk everything?

TV Remote

This is not a trivial problem for humanity, and it has been with us for a long time. Religious texts have some saying on this although they are more versed on rewarding us later they have some wisdom in them, but you have to sieve it out, and that can be time consuming and dangerous. So I like more to the point texts, like Seneca’s “On the shortness of life” that says “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it” this when life expectancy was a mere 47 years, if you survived childhood that is. So, we see that we have that problem always, we tend to waste our lives, we seek immediate pleasures, we go from one rush to another always ending up feeling empty. You might argue that I’m quoting Seneca, stoicism personified, but what about other ideas? Well, let’s see what the other side has to say, the epicureans, but the real one, I won’t be dragged into the “mud of hedonism”. Our good old friend Epicurus, 300 years before Seneca, stated that pleasure is the greatest good, but not the pleasure given by this rushes, that one prevents us from living a life with the least pain possible, because in the intervals of this pleasurable rushes we sink in horrible pain. I will stop right here with this philosophers because this is not the point here. My intention is getting us to do what is best for us, even when this might not seem like doing it. The contradiction remains seemingly then, we want to live the moment but we can’t live only from one pleasure rush to the next, we must think of the future, but that seems not to be living the moment, so how can I do it? The way we bridge this gap is by realizing that even if the rush is lived in the moment, the time afterwards it is not, when the rush is over we seek a new one, and that is when we are not living in the moment, we want to escape the moment and get that rush once again. We forget ourselves and all around us to seek the rush, in the most extreme cases this is called an addiction and the addict can forgo everything just to get that next rush.

When we do live in the moment we are not searching for our next rush, as a matter of fact we are not searching actively for anything. We are completely self regulated. We do what is that we have to do, right there and then. It sounds impossible and yet it is not. When you live in the moment completely you are still doing your tasks and chores, as well you should, and if that task implies you thinking about the future and making plans, you’ll do them, but you are not wishing that you were somewhere else, you’re just planning what you’ll do on another time. This is a difference that is as big as night and day, as full and empty, as life and death, although not as permanent. When we fail to self regulate we find that not only are we making ourselves miserable by getting this rushes, but also by actively knowing that we are procrastinating on what we should really be doing, we always have a better option than that pursuit of the rush, and we know it, and we feel guilty when we don’t seek it.

We see now that self regulation is important, so what to do to get us to do it? We can use many of the tools we’ve discussed before, setting triggers, being more empathic, reviewing our long term goals periodically so we can more easily bring them to the front of our mind when we feel like slipping, coping with change, embracing it and not fighting it, etc. We can go on and on, but what is really important is our willingness to actively fight and self regulate, as it comes out is an important tool in our box to fight procrastination with. How well do you self regulate? Please comment below or on our facebook page.

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Actionable Growth Mindfulness Procrastination

The “Productivity Equivalence” II

As promised here’s the second part, maybe we’ll have to stretch this out even more, but I think it’s worth it. We saw last time the Productivity Equivalence, this one:

PE = Sleep + Diet + Exercise + Meditation/Prayer/Silence – Stress – Distractions

We talked about the first two components, Sleep and Diet. I’d like to finish with the diet entry fast with this.

Diet, part 2 and ending. When we talk about diet and productivity we also need to talk about our immediate intake of food and drink and our immediate productivity. It’s clear that a three martini lunch on a daily basis not only will destroy our liver in the long run but our productivity that afternoon, as a matter of fact, even if we don’t do it ever again, that afternoon is gone. So, to bring this more down to earth, we need to seek foods that are good for us in the long run, but also we need to have at our disposal foods that can help us immediately. A cup of coffee will help you be more alert, a lunch heavy on fatty food and meat will have the opposite effect, but I am not a dietitian and know nothing about nutrition, just about productivity so go see a specialist before doing anything “crazy”. Seek their help, after all, they have all those student loans to pay, you’ll be helping them too.

Exercise. Another no brainer, wow, all the things we know we should do but somehow, we don’t, we keep putting them off and… you’re right, procrastinate, you’re a smart bunch, that’s why I like you. Now, not only need you to get your weekly cardio, and you need to make muscle, you need to activate your body at the gym if this is something you can afford, there’s more to it. We need to move, upstairs and downstairs, up the hall and down the hall, take periodic walks, stand up as much as you can because, drum roll, latest studies have found that sitting is killing us. Yes, you read it right. Sitting is the new smoking, so they say. The studies are very compelling suggesting your are doing a horrible disservice to your insides by sitting down on a chair, just by doing what seems to be nothing. This is where the standing desks craze comes from, then some smart guy figured out that since he was already standing he might as well do a couple of miles and incorporated a treadmill to the mix and there you go, the treadmill desk was born, and then this guy came with this idea and the “rat race” was finally materialized with this HamsterWheel Deskhamster wheel desk…
But I digress. Don’t sit down all day, it will kill you, get your body moving and you’ll be better off.

Meditation/Prayer/Silence. Now this is where the juicy part is on this whole Equivalence is. You might say “what does standing still have to do with doing more? You make no sense!” so glad you asked. Meditation, oh sweet meditation. I’m a new but fully convinced convert on the value of meditation. I’ve been doing it on a daily basis for the last 6 months and it has changed my life, or at least my perception of my life. I’m now more calm, less irritable, and those of you who know me know what I mean, am I right? I don’t get angry as I did before, and most of all I’m more aware of my role in my life and that of others. I’m a much better listener also, because I can much better stop listening to my own inner narrator, I have a much better grasp of reality around me. If you don’t like meditation I suggest you give it a try, and then another, at least 6 months of daily practice. I am not kidding, you know you need to slow some things down, mainly in your head, and this will help you, I am positive about that. What’s that? You don’t want to do it even after what you know about it? You’re like a smoker who won’t quit! But OK. Are you religious? Try praying, yes, pray, but don’t enter in a dialog with the supreme being of your choosing, no, just say your prayers, don’t think about them, don’t try to find a meaning, no nothing, while you’re praying just pray, that’s it. What now? You won’t meditate and won’t pray either? Sit in silence then, don’t lay back because you’ll fall asleep, sit, on the floor preferably, and stay in silence. Don’t try to think about your day, or the stuff you have to do, or what you need, or nothing. Silence around you and in you. You’ll need to concentrate on something, use your favorite tree from when you were a kid, concentrate on it. Do it again and again, get distracted? Back to the tree, remembered something? It can wait 5 minutes, back to the tree. Visualize in your head all you can remember from that tree. Do this five to ten minutes everyday for at least 6 months. Your life will change.

Well, there you have it, we’re out of time, and when I say we I mean you, I want to keep this posts as informative but short as possible because I know time is of the essence. Please share this on your Facebook wall if you found it informative, and comment, here or on the social media app of your choosing, have a great day.

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Actionable English Mindfulness Money Procrastination Self-confidence

The “Productivity Equivalence”

Since the last quarter of 2015 I’ve been changing my habits to positively change my life. I’ve changed the way I see time and also what I do with it. All of this to start applying the “Productivity Equivalence” or SE for short.

PE = Sleep + Diet + Exercise + Meditation/Prayer/Silence – Stress – Distractions

This simple equivalence tells you where to put in and were to take out to attain a higher level of productivity. Higher levels of productivity give you more results, whether your goal is being healthier, spending more time with your family, being wealthier. What this means is simple. You can’t get better results by removing where you should be adding and adding where you should be removing. Also, you can’t eliminate any of the components totally, either the good ones or the bad ones. The good ones have minimums you have to try to achieve and the bad ones, no matter how hard you try to eliminate them they find a way to creep up again if you ever take your eye off of them. You can’t, for instance, stop sleeping altogether and use that time to exercise because that would not work, the result would be a lesser PE value than before. And remember, this is only an equivalence, it’s not a complete equation for Productivity, you can think of things missing here that are important to you. You should put them in and evaluate for yourself what is better. I use it as a reminder and as a guide of what to look for if I suddenly notice a drop in my productivity, so I can make an introspective assessment of what might have changed on this equivalency and work on that.
Let’s take a moment now to view the components.

 

  • Diet. This one is obvious, we need to eat right, I don’t need to tell you that, again. Now, maybe something you didn’t know is this hypothesis that says that our willpower is like a gas tank, we can use it again and again and again until it’s drained and then we succumb to temptation much easier. What does that mean? That we need to be careful on what we use our willpower. If we have to refrain ourselves from taking a donut instead of a piece of fruit from a platter in a conference, then we will have used some willpower to do that, if we have to choose from taking the elevator instead of the stairs then again, willpower. What to do then? We need to save our willpower for really important things. We can remove this decisions in two ways. Always make a decision in advance, we talked about triggers before, well, here’s an example of one of them. “If I have to go up I always take the stairs” “If I want a snack I’ll never eat pastry” We decide beforehand what we want. We can compound that with physically removing temptation and get as far as we can from those delicious chocolate chip cookies.

So, as I’ve accustomed you to this before I won’t change it today. I’m going to stop here for length but I’ll continue tomorrow, how about that, a two day piece. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you, please comment down here, even if it’s only to say hello.

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English Mindfulness Procrastination

A quick thought on mindfulness

As this is my first post of 2016 I’d like to thank all of you who have being reading me, it’s a good feeling to be read even if it’s only one person. As you’ve seen by now procrastination is my demon. I’ve lost many things to this demon and thus I’m committed to fighting it and help my fellow procrastinators transform into actors of their own lives, creators of their destinies, masters of their present and future. As we’ve seen so far on other posts, if you haven’t read them do it now, I’ll wait, they’re not that long, it should take you at most 5 minutes, so go, now, yes now. Ok, as I was saying, as we’ve talked before procrastinators are not all the same, and so not one technique will work on all procrastinators, we need many. The same way that we’ve heard the saying that when the only tool you’ve got is a hammer every problem looks like a nail here we need to go beyond a single method to combat procrastination. We can use focus and visualization as we’ve seen before. This tools allow us to have a better grasp on what it its we want to accomplish, our goals. Visualization helps us first by establishing what “done” looks like. We’re not talking here o a single or multiple metrics goal, as would a business KPI, or a timed performance for an athlete, we are talking about a visualization of much more than that. Again, I’m not trying to be esoteric here, I’m very much grounded, but what I’m saying is that a description would require a narrative worthy of a novel, and unless you are or want to be a writer this is not necessary. I’m talking about establishing how we will feel when we’re done, how we will look like when we are done, how our environment will be when we are done. This is a visualization that will help our brains set targets and our actions will then be compared to those targets, we will feel stress building if we are pulling on the wrong direction. So that for visualization, now, for focus. We need to focus our actions to go in the sense of that visualization. We need to set boundaries to our attention so we can achieve our goals. When we don’t set these boundaries what we do can in the worst case destroy work we had already done to achieve our goals. Focus allows us to work, advance, build on the path of our goals. Now, having focus is not easy, we are easily distracted, all the time something is there competing for our attention, be it external like social media or plain old media or be it internal, our own thoughts. We can blame every gadget we own for our lack of attention, but we are, by far, our worst distractor. We are constantly being bombarded by wandering that emerges from the most subtle reference from our senses and mostly from the last wandering thought and build a chain of disperse ideas linked by the most obscure references. And now, here we are, at last, ready to talk about mindfulness. MeditatingInBrugesWhat does it have to do with focus and visualization? Mindfulness is a tool for us to use, a way on which to travel to gain better focus and be better at visualizing. By practicing mindfulness we learn how to be in the moment by stepping in front of our wandering minds and not letting those pesky meandering thoughts catch our attention. Current Internet mythology establishes our thoughts at about 50,000 to 70,000 different ones per day, most would have to come and go and come back some more. Mindfulness trains by constant repetition, and if we are attentive enough we could call it deliberate practice, to keep those thoughts at bay and get a genuine sense of calm, but also it trains us to swiftly bring our focus back when distracted and that’s the most important part. By using this ability we can bring our focus back when we get distracted from our tasks or from our visualizing. Visualization is a difficult exercise because we can be thrown to every other direction by any distinct thought, but realizing this and getting back on track, by bringing the focus back to our visualization, we’ll be able to set our paths to our goals and have a safe journey.

So, have you thought about mindfulness before and are you interested in it? I’d love to read your comments.

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English Mindfulness Stories

Love yourself first, second part

Hello my two readers. Well, I may have to change that because I’ve received a lot of comments on the last post, so many that I had to write this one. I firstly have to agree with many of you that it wasn’t my best effort that put through that piece, it was hurried and it showed, and for that I apologize. Then again, see the sign on the door to this blog, yes, that one, what does it say? “Procrastinator’s Den” that’s right, I hurried my last work because I procrastinated, of course I did, I had a good excuse to do it too, but that I’ll tell you tomorrow. Let me get started so I don’t take too much of your time. I had many questions regarding the amount of love, what amount of love was too much or not enough. That was never the point. I don’t think of love as a measurable entity. Some will say love is infinite, let them. I can only say that within each one of us there is enough to seem infinite and that’s all the love we need, and if it seems we are running out, we can create some more, so not a problem. What if we love ourselves much more than we love others? Then we are not really loving ourselves because real love is a love that transcends our bodies and expands around us. It’s stronger within us, then our closest family or friends, then people we know, then the rest of the world. Please, don’t ask me if it follows an inverse-square law because as I said before, it can’t be measured and therefore doesn’t have a unit of measure, but if I was forced to answer I’d say it was sort of like that. There are exceptions like people suffering from NPD you won’t “love” anyone but you. On the other side of the spectrum, you can be a “Francoise” and love and worry more for an unknown person living on the other side of the world than for people close to you. sea-dawn-sunset-boatsBut those cases are extreme. Now, on the other hand, people who don’t love themselves enough or not at all are much more common. I myself am going through an episode right now, when self doubt and loathing were part of my routine, as you can deduce from my earlier posts. Loving myself means respecting myself, doing what is right and good for myself, not letting others hurt me or the ones I love as suggested on a comment somewhere, all of that and much more are components of my love of self. As mentioned in the previous post this includes shutting down my inner bully. You may think “not that inner bully again…”
Believe me, it’s very real. It even comes out in certain circumstances, like, when we are driving. Yes, that’s him/her that screams like a mad person to the other driver that he’s the most stupid person that ever lived on this or any other planet in this or any other universe just because he had the terrible idea to change lanes in front of you. How dare he! Well, it’s the same creature. But it screams and shouts at you all the time if you let it. It’s tell you “you’re fat, but go ahead, eat that muffin, you deserve it… fatty” and once you ate it will recall you “you shouldn’t have done that! It’ll go straight to you belly or hips! Whatever… fatso!” or something of the sort. That bully inside our heads prevents us from truly loving ourselves, that’s why we need to silence it. I’ve been using Mindful Meditation for a few months now and it’s helped me so much. The same question, and now I’m leaving a poll what do you do to try and shut down that little bully?

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English Mindfulness Stories

Love yourself first

Love yourself first. Yes mi dear readers, both of you, you have to love yourself first. Does this mean only love myself? No, that’s why I end my sentence with “first” and not “only”. Why should I love myself first? You should love yourself first because it is the only way you can have real love in your life, or could you love your spouse, your kids, your friends or your pets with a heart that has hate in it? Some are saying “wait, I don’t love myself first, but I don’t hate myself, that’s going too far” But is it really? Tell me, if you don’t hate yourself, then why do you let that little bully inside your head call you all those names that it does? Wouldn’t you let someone else treat you like that? Or wouldn’t you, at the very least, be alarmed if you saw someone been treated like that? We are our worst critics, that we know, but sometimes criticism is over the top and turns into plain old abuse. And abuse ourselves we do, and a lot, don’t we? Not only with the little bully that lives inside our heads, but by our actions or inactions. Some of us drink too much, or smoke or abuse drugs. Some of us find comfort in food. Some of us don’t like to move to much, let alone exercise. Reality TV? Yes please! Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all we can. It’s been 5 minutes, selfie time. All this actions and inactions don’t come from a place of love of ourselves. We indulge in this behaviours because we hate ourselves? Not necessarily, mostly because we don’t even care to find out why we do them. We end up in patterns that feel good by accidents or because we intentionally put ourselves there, but with another end in mind. Little story follows to illustrate the point. I started smoking as a teenager because it was cool, I was short and that let me feel older, bigger in a way, so I smoked, really smart. Like all smokers I didn’t even like it when I started, but the feeling I got from other people looking up at me, or even noticing me more than compensated for it. And then I got used to it, the displeasure changed into pleasure, yes, smoking is pleasurable, and then both combined and that was it. By the time I quit smoking I was burning through 30 cigarettes a day and 15 years had gone by. Did I really love myself during that time? Certainly not because by then the dangers of smoking were well known by all and by me. Do I love myself more because I don’t smoke anymore? Yes, a little. So, to love myself I only need to quit vice? Not that fast my friend. Yes you should quit vice, but it’s not the only thing.sun-741812_960_720 To love yourself you need to go deeper and silence the little bully. You need to love you so much that your love irradiates from you to the world. It sounds terribly corny but it’s right. True love irradiates from you like light from a candle or a star. It’s brighter near the source and fades with distance, and the only way to shine bright enough to illuminate the whole world is to shine stronger at the source, and that’s within yourself. So, please, love yourself first.

 

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English Mindfulness

I chose to be happy

Lone tree
Lone tree Photographer Jon Ottosson

Sometimes I get frustrated, angry, sad in fewer words, unhappy. I might be driving down the highway and someone would cut me off and I’d get angry and curse, sometimes terribly angry, you might know the feeling, a murderer lurking behind your own gaze. Other times it might be a terrible sadness that takes hold of me, but it doesn’t start big, it grows, like a balloon being “inflated” by my own thoughts. All this is “happening” to me just by pure choice! After a while I start to come back and think “I’m so dumb I swear to you that I bring misery to my life.”

Lone tree
Lone tree Photographer Jon Ottosson

You know the feeling, yes you do, and you relate, yes you do. And you know what the worse part is? I do it to myself. Nobody else is responsible for the way I choose to feel and react. It may start innocently by thinking too much about something or someone and what I would have done if it is a memory. Or by thinking about what other people would think, about how other people would act, about how other people would react to something I’ve got to say. It’s not even real! But I’m sure you don’t do it, do you? Of course you don’t because that would be crazy, wouldn’t it? Truth is, we all do it, and it’s terrible, we cause ourselves and our loved ones so much suffering. So I’ve chosen not to undertake this imaginary battles, I still think what I’m going to say and plan what my moves would be according to this or that reactions, but a plan is not an enactment. So you can be a master of your own emotions here, not that hard, is it? So in every situation you can can choose how to feel, and I chose to be happy.