Motivation for Creating Your Best Life
Looking around, you can see that people live many different types of lives. But so many of them aren’t really present in the lives that they’re living. Plus, they’re not taking the steps that they could to create the best life possible.
By using mindful motivation, you can create a life that brings you great relationships, enables you to meet your life goals and sets you free from negative emotions.
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness means that you’re specifically in the present. When someone is mindful, they’re aware of and paying attention to the moment that they’re in, not mired down in the past or future. Put simply, mindfulness is awareness of the present moment and circumstances.
People think many thoughts at once and many of them are concerned with the past, or the future, or abstract things. Being mindful means keeping your mind on the here and now. This can be very calming, allowing worries and regrets to be left alone, especially when it is the focus of meditation.
When you practice mindfulness, you focus your mind purposefully. Have you ever driven from one place to another and at the end of your destination, you weren’t aware of the sights you saw or how you arrived there? If so, you weren’t practicing mindfulness. It’s the same concept with every area of your life. You can go through life on autopilot. This means that you can sit down and have a meal, but because you’re not practicing mindfulness, you won’t even be aware of what you had to eat in terms of portion or even the pleasure of tasting it.
This is why you can eat something and then wonder later on what it was that you had for dinner. You have to stop and think to remind yourself. The reason that you can go through life and miss things is because the mind has a tendency to blank or go through the motions when you’re doing something you’ve done numerous times before.
Mindfulness is putting a stop to allowing the mind to simply wander unchecked. It means that you direct your mind back to focus on whatever it needs to focus on. When you don’t practice an awareness of your thoughts, you can go through life and miss out on having the best life you could have.
The art of using mindfulness has its roots in Buddhism and the practice has been around for thousands of years. Not only was it practiced to enhance spiritual connectivity, but also to bring calmness, focus, and improve the brain’s ability to think.
Today, many studies have shown that there are multiple reasons why practicing mindfulness can help you create your best life. There are physical health and emotional well-being boosts that can be had when you practice mindfulness.
When you become aware in the present moment, it can soothe your emotions and help strengthen your immune system. The use of mindfulness is tied in with many forms of meditation that are designed to bring self-awareness and rid the body of negative thought patterns.
Mindfulness helps center the user and cause him to choose to live fully active in today rather than focus on the past or get caught up in what might happen in their future.
What Can Mindfulness be Helpful For?
The mental and physical state that mindfulness brings about can be helpful in treating many diseases since stress is a key factor in everything from heart disease to bipolar disorder.
Mindfulness also helps many people who are not 'ill' but feel that they could be living a happier and more meaningful life. However, there are two particular conditions that mindfulness can have a particular impact upon:
1.Depression
When we are depressed, our negative thoughts and negative moods become intertwined. We feel awful, we think we are a terrible person or that everything is going to be awful, and that makes our mood even worse. A downwards spiral is very easy to get into, especially if you have been depressed before, and we gain no pleasure from the things that usually cheer us up, and nor can we see anything in perspective.
Mindfulness helps to halt the escalation of the negative thoughts associated with depression and teaches us to focus on the present moment, rather than reliving the past or being concerned about the future.
Mindfulness can help us experience the world directly and without judgement. We may notice that we are feeling awful but we accept it, rather than trying to fight it, or let it worry us, and we do not panic. Hopefully, a depressed state can be avoided in this way or at the very least accepted: people with depression very often feel guilty or anxious about being depressed and that makes it worse.
2.Chronic Pain
People who are in chronic pain have got stuck there because their brain became attuned to pain during an original painful condition. So, even though they are healed from a physical perspective, their brains are so well wired to feel pain that they take a lot of convincing that the body is not, in fact, under any threat.
Sufferers are usually trapped in a cycle where they have a good day, do too much, and then have a bad day or several of them, a process known as activity cycling. The 're-wiring' of the brain needed is usually done by the sufferer staying well within their limits and then gradually increasing their level of activity. It is also very important to exercise the body gently so that the brain stops 'being afraid' of certain areas.
Sufferers usually attempt to hold a painful area rigidly so that it never moves, and the clenched muscles that result can just cause more pain. Mindfulness means that the sufferer is firstly aware of their pain, and then accepts it, rather than worrying that they are hurting and not going to be able to do something later on. It also means that sufferers are aware when they need to rest and do not push themselves too hard, and thus avoid activity cycling. This process is not easy and chronic pain programs generally do not result in a complete absence of pain. However, sufferers generally find that they manage their pain much better and enjoy life far more as a result.
Mindfulness Can Help You Make Better Choices
You might be surprised to learn that some of the choices that you make in life, you’re making without being fully aware in the present. When this happens, the choices that you make aren’t really the ones that can give you the best outcome. This can impact your entire life. But when you practice mindfulness, you can make better choices and change your life to let it become the one that you’ve dreamed of living.
One of the areas where mindfulness can help you make better choices is in the area of eating. Many people eat countless times a day without ever giving a second thought to what it is that they’re doing. This is because it’s easy to eat while you’re busy with things unrelated to eating. You don’t have to focus on putting fork to mouth in order to accomplish this task. You learned how to do it at a young age, so you can multi task easily.
It’s easy to eat while you’re reading, while you’re talking on the phone or while you’re watching a movie. What happens then is that you miss being in the present while you’re eating. It means that you miss out on the taste of the food, the pleasure that you could derive from it – and this can also lead you to make poorer food choices in terms of the types and quantities of food that you’re consuming.
Plus, when you eat without practicing mindfulness, it can be easier for you to not connect the emotions to what you’re eating. That means if you’re an emotional eater, lacking mindfulness can cause you to eat more and not be aware of what it is that you’re eating that could be
