Mindfulness can make a positive impact in your life even when you don’t meditate. These simple and quick exercises help to grow that mindful approach. You can teach your mind to lower the stress, choose calm and to grow your coping mental muscle!

Build your resilience by being mindful every day, all day!

I frequently remind my clients that we only have full control over ourselves. These simple mindful exercises build your positive power, calm, ability to cope and resilience. My method, ‘The Chapwell Method’, coaches individuals back to their natural state of wellbeing and includes lots of mindfulness approaches to enable you to make the changes to support your well-being.

8 Ways to Practice Mindfulness when time is Short

1. Start your day with a pause – as you get out of bed and your feet hit the floor, just stop and take 3 deep even breaths. On the in breath just mentally say ‘breathing in, breathing in’ and on the outbreath just say ‘breathing out.’

2. When you go to wash in the morning use your sense of touch as you feel the water, soap, whatever you use, really tune into the feel of everything you use to wash and dry. Just focus on using your sense of feel to feel your way through your morning wash routine.

3. Savour your morning drink – when you are drinking that first drink of the day really look at it, notice the colour, the shape and the feel of your mug/cup. Then notice the smell, really smell the smell of your morning cuppa and enjoy. Then as you sip allow its full flavour to be your focus of attention, really savour the taste as you sip.

4. As you take your morning journey to work or move around your home really focus your attention on what’s there by naming everything you see in your mind. Keeping yourself fully focused on where you are as you move or travel. Too often we move in familiar places or travel familiar places on autopilot allowing our minds to do that planning, nagging or worrying or anything other than just focusing in on what we are actually doing, NOW!

5. Be Grateful – use gratitude to trigger all those good feelings. Make it a regular habit to think about something you are grateful for in your life. It can range from a person, a thing or an event. Just allow yourself to enjoy that feeling of gratitude that it’s in your life.

6. Take a walk even if it’s from one area at work to the other. As you walk about use your steps. Every time you take a step mentally say I feel good, or I’m okay, every step helps to physically and mentally boost your well-being. After just a few steps you’ll start to feel those feelings flow through you. Use it all day and every day a simple yet effective booster. This also works to clear your mind and allow you to focus on the now with a stronger, more resilient frame of mind.

7. If you find yourself feeling stressed take a few soothing breaths. Just pause, if it’s safe to do so you can close your eyes or just stare at a fixed point. Then breathe in to the count of 4 and out to the count of 7. Shorter in breath and longer outbreath. Then scan your body and find any tension and slowly focus on relaxing that part of your body. Open or refocus your eyes feeling refreshed and more relaxed to carry on with what you are doing.

8. Use Positive Self Talk – allow yourself to start noticing any negative thoughts, often our minds are geared towards the negative in a misguided attempt to keep us safe. If it helps imagine you are your best friend and say to yourself what he/she would say.

Copyright Fiona Chapman 07766671398

www.chapwellmethod.com