mindfulness Archives | ElizabethJournals

3 Reasons Why Mindfulness in Self-Care Will Soothe Your Mind

Have you ever thought to incorporate mindfulness into your self-care routine? Here are some of the ways mindfulness improves your wellbeing.

Self-care is so essential if you want to live a happy and productive life. It’s easy to let stress get the better of you. Many people find it challenging to fit self-care into their schedules. Simple things, like meditation or healthy eating, are important aspects of self-care, and they’re easy to incorporate into your daily routine. But have you thought about mindfulness? Mindfulness simply means being present and letting your thoughts come and go naturally. It’s an incredibly important part of self-care. If you can learn to be more mindful in your everyday life, you will be a lot happier, and you will find it so much easier to deal with stress and anxiety. These are just some of the ways that mindfulness can improve your wellbeing.

It Reduces Stress

When you have had a stressful day at work, it’s easy to sit at home in the evening worrying about what tomorrow will bring or thinking about things that you could have done differently. This is rumination and it leads to a lot of excess stress. If you are always on your phone, negativity from the news or social media can lead to a lot more stress. But if you can take a step back, put your phone down, and be in the present moment, that stress will melt away. At the end of a long day, don’t sit in front of the TV or scroll on your phone. Instead, spend some time practicing mindfulness. Consider getting a mindfulness journal that is filled with great tips and space to record how mindfulness is improving your mood. Journaling can help you keep up with the practice. Everybody has their way of dealing with stress, but mindfulness is one of the most effective.

It Improves Relationships

Friends and family are an essential part of self-care for many people because spending time with people that you love helps to reduce stress and boost your mood. But sometimes, relationships suffer because of a lack of mindfulness. Often, even though people are spending time together, they are not present. They are thinking about something else or playing with their phone instead of listening to one another. This can take a toll on relationships. However, if you practice mindfulness, you will get more out of the time you spend with loved ones, and your relationships will be better.

It Improves Sleep

Sleep is an essential part of any self-care routine. It’s important because a lack of sleep increases stress levels, takes a toll on your mental health, and affects productivity. Many people struggle to sleep as a result of stress and an overactive mind. But mindfulness can be a huge help with stress. When you practice mindfulness, it teaches you how to let those stressful thoughts drift away instead of sticking around, so it’s a lot easier for you to get to sleep at night. You will also find that the quality of your sleep improves, so you wake up feeling well-rested and ready to face the day.

If you want to improve your self care routine, it’s so important that you practice mindfulness on a daily basis.

This post was written as a contributed post. Contributed posts are written by another party who may wish to be anonymous. Further, all posts are edited and formatted by Elizabeth Ghekiere. Want to guest post for ElizabethJournals? Learn more here.

How To Enhance Your Mental Health

Mental Health is your overall well being, and isn’t something that should be ignored. Here are a few tips to enhance your mental health.

Mental Health is your overall well being and isn’t something that should be ignored. According to the World Health Organization, one in four people in the world would be affected by neurological or mental disorders at some point in their life. Currently, around half a billion people suffer from conditions of mental health. It affects your social life, career, academics, and a lot more. Here are a few tips to enhance your mental health:

Positivity

Research suggests that your perception of yourself may affect how you feel. When you perceive your life and yourself in a negative light, your brain helps to confirm that bias through daily experiences. So, always promote positive feelings of personal power and self-worth. Tell yourself, “I guess I’ll have to work harder on the next interview” instead of “I’m such a loser, this was the third interview I tanked.”

Gratitude

Your psychological mental health, well-being, and happiness have close links to gratitude or how grateful you feel. To become more grateful and find happiness in little things, you can adopt the practice of maintaining a gratitude journal. It encourages you to be grateful in general and make a gratitude list that you can refer to whenever you are feeling down. It fills up your heart with satisfaction and gives you that intangible warm feeling that has nothing to do with temperature.

Be Mindful Of The Moment

Living in the moment and being more mindful helps you to shed off negative emotions and move on from a difficult past. Being mindful means, you are more aware of your surroundings and sensations in everyday mundane routine like having breakfast, showering, biking to work or back home. Pay more attention to the sounds, smells, touch, and taste of your daily experiences.

Workout

A workout is great for your muscles, bones, and especially useful for a healthy and functional brain. During a workout, your brain releases plenty of hormones called endorphins. These chemicals improve your mood and relieve stress. It’s one of the reasons why people have an unexplainable smile after an intense session of sweaty exercise. These hormones work well to fight against depression, stress, and other conditions that may affect your mental health adversely.

Change Your Diet

A diet filled with nutrients goes a long way to nourish your physical self and your brain. Try to stay away from trans fats and fast foods. Instead, plan out a diet with a moderate amount of complex carbohydrates, proteins, good fats, and of course, veggies and fruits. These food items increase serotonin, dopamine, and more chemicals that have a calming effect on your mind and keeps you alert. A healthy diet also keeps you away from obesity that has been linked time and again with negative mental health.

Don’t wait for a resolution or the “right time.” Start with these tips today to take care of your mental health. A healthy and active brain keeps you productive and happy and it ripples into your social and professional life as well.

The True Benefits of Meditation

Meditation has many benefits. If you were expecting from the title of this article for us to debunk collected centuries of Eastern wisdom and refute a number of reputable studies into the virtues of Mindfulness, you’re in the wrong place. However, when starting a meditation practice, it can be hard to know what to look for. Some might feel it’s simply a waste of time after struggling to make much progress over a period of months, while others might feel that the practice is starting to fix every problem in their life. Of course, both viewpoints, while subjectively correct, are not objectively correct.

But with the wisdom of meditation, it can be hard to remain objective. Each person will experience it in their own way, and make their own progress. This leads people to look for concrete examples and definitive proof that their practice is worth it. It is, but it’s important to know why and how. With the following advice, you might find this help more practical and worthy for your aims:

Presence

Of course, the art of positive meditation is to come back to yourself and to help your mind settle on that which is actually in front of you. The present moment is all any of us have access to, and so it can be important to live there as much as possible. Of course, this isn’t to say that thinking of the past and future isn’t integral to the living of our lives, but it’s truly important to practice this form of comfort and to develop competent understandings of how to manage it.

Presence can often give us a range of benefits, from helping us become more observant, listening to people with more depth, and being able to focus on tasks with more reliability. It can also help us become more patient, and prevent our aggravated reactions to difficult experience.

Ego

Ego can be of great benefit, but can also be a double-edged sword. It can help us defend ourselves and feel pride in who we are and our achievements. It can help us consider bettering ourselves and helps us form our identity in the world. But it can also become toxically directed, perhaps overblown, and often prevent our connection to other people.

With a good practice of meditation enacted, your need to satiate your ego will be reduced. This is because you’ll feel value in who you are rather than who you believe yourself to be. It’s a much more authentic kind of practice, and it can be great to experience things from this lens.

Fear

Much of fear is based around not what is happening, but what could happen. Of course, there is wisdom here. It shows maybe we shouldn’t fish in the crocodile-infested waters, because something bad could happen. It can also conjure up plenty of faux-threats that simply are not true or worth worrying about.

Meditation helps you differentiate between reality and imagining with much more presence, and also helps you respond to the threat of a moment with easier reactions. This naturally helps you feel more confident, and thus reduces your irrational fear.

With these tips and a solid practice, you’re sure to experience the true benefits of meditation.

This post was written in collaboration. Collaborative writing means that while I have contributed to this post and edited its content and formatting, I am not its original author. By posting this content on my blog, I may receive financial compensation. Want to guest post for Jihi Elephant? Learn more here.