Mindfulness in everyday life: With these 4 tips you can reduce stress

Mindfulness in everyday life can help you reduce stress and better perceive your own feelings and needs. How to integrate mindful routines into your everyday life can be found in these four tips.

Mindfulness has become more and more a trend term in recent years. However, the exact meaning of the word is often not entirely clear. According to the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, mindfulness means perceiving the current moment consciously and without evaluation.

So it is about focusing on the here and now. This is difficult for many people, because our thoughts are often in everyday life for all possible other things – but not at the present moment. Instead, we think about our to-do list for tomorrow or whether we may have behaved strangely to another person or we have already checked the weather for the weekend.

In this chaos it is easy to lose sight of your own feelings and needs. In addition, we unlearn to enjoy this and now, because we only live in the morning or yesterday. Mindfulness in everyday life can help you to perceive the present more consciously again and to press the break button from time to time. We have put together four tips for you.

1. Mindfulness in everyday life: Consciously showering

The shower is an ideal place to practice mindfulness in everyday life, because most people stay in the shower once a day or every two days. In the shower we also usually enjoy complete privacy and can distance ourselves from the distractions of everyday life.

According to New York Times, the following tips can help you to practice mindfulness when showering:

1. Leave your smartphone, tablet and other electronic devices outside of the bathroom and may also switch them to silently so that you are not distracted.
2. Take a consciously perceive every piece of clothing when moving out by naming it in silence and carefully placing it on the floor or posting it.
3. Find out that a shower is not only there to clean your body, but can also strengthen your mental health.
4. Take notice when showering how the water comes up on your skin and make you aware of how grateful you can be able to use warm, clean water.
5. If you realize that your thoughts drift, they deliberately take them back to the here and now and focus again on the water that touches your body.
6. Make sure to wash yourself in a different way than usual. So you prevent you from switching back to an autopilot mode in which your thoughts drift.
7. How long you shower is not important. You can carry out the entire process at your own pace – depending on how much time you have and whether you want to save water in the shower.

2. Most name meal: eat consciously

Food intake is also a welcome ritual in which you can practice mindfulness in everyday life, according to the AOK. This can not only help you reduce stress, but also to better perceive your feeling of satiety and hunger. You can implement mindful food in the following way:

1. Make sure you feel before eating. Are you relaxed or stressed? If you feel that you are still very hectic or agile, take your time to take some deep breaths. In this way you can slow down your heartbeat and lower your stress level.
2. Then slowly and consciously take the first bite and chew. What consistencies do you perceive? What do you like? What do you smell? Maybe you also hear certain noises – for example, if you bite into an apple.
3. In this way, also proceed with the rest of the meal. In between, ask yourself regularly how hungry you are or whether you may already be full.
4. Also notice what feelings come up during food and what feelings you feel after eating.

3. Consciously try new things

Staying careful means switching off the autopilot mode. And in these we usually move as soon as we exercise habits that we have implemented several times beforehand. Therefore, you can practice mindfulness in everyday life by trying out something new. According to the AOK, this can help to perceive the beautiful aspects of everyday life more. For example you can

• take another way to work,
• Try a new recipe,
• Change some furniture at home,
• Or try a new sport or find a new hobby.

4. Mindfulness in everyday life: breathe consciously

If we are stressed in everyday life, we often start to breathe flatter and faster. However, this fast and flat breathing has a negative effect on our stress level. Conversely, we can reduce stress with a few deep and slow breaths and consciously arrive again at the present moment. Different breathing exercises can therefore help you to implement mindfulness in everyday life. You can find more information on this in these articles:

• Breathing exercises: You should know these exercises
• Really breath: why it is so important
• Pranayama: This is how the breathing exercises work in yoga
• Wim-Hof breathing: This is how the breathing technique works

You can also implement many of these breathing exercises in everyday life, for example when you have to wait at the cash register or traffic light, sit on the bus or train or take a short coffee break in everyday work. Breathing exercises are also suitable as part of a morning or evening routine.

Read more on utopia.de:

• 7 types of relaxation: Expert explains how relaxation can be done better
• Conscious complaining: Can you complain carefully?
• Waldbaden: Shinrin Yoku, Japanese natural therapy

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