Tag: TV

Mindfulness: The practice of curating the life you want

There are a number of buzzwords on the internet: Minimalism, Essentialism and Intentionalism. Mindfulness is what they all have in common. When practicing minimalism we are being mindful with the focus on our surroundings, when practicing essentialism, we are focusing on how we spend our time. Mindfulness can make us very happy. And I would go as far as saying many people are unhappy, because they are not being mindful.

But what does being mindful really mean? A minimalist, does not have less stuff, because he or she hates stuff. An essentialist, does not carefully choose what he will work on next, because he is lazy. We practice minimalism, because we want to appreciate the things we own. And we want to only own things that add value. And we focus on the essential 20% that produce 80% of the result, because we want to be effective rather than efficient. We want to do the right thing, rather than a lot of thing. It is the difference between being productive and being busy. It really is about value.

Why are things related to mindfulness such buzzwords? Truth is: we now need it more than ever. In today’s day and age it is so incredibly easy to not be mindful. To go shopping and impulse buy all the things that we think are awesome, but we really don’t need them. It is so easy to just spend hours on the couch watching TV and being genuinely bored. We do it because it is the path of least resistance. And then when it gets real bad, we get addicted to shopping and watching TV. Our brains get stimulated by pretty colors and release feel good hormones, why would we ever do anything else? Because we are unhappy.

We often wonder why we are unhappy. But are not even mindful enough to notice why it is we are unhappy. Or perhaps, we are just not willing to admit why it is we are feeling unhappy. We may even have a vision of who we want to be and it might even literally include “I am not someone who spends all day binging TV.”, and yet we turn a blind eye to what could actually make us feel happier and more fulfilled.

But how can we become more mindful? It is all about value and realizing our own limitations. The space we have in our homes is limited. Our time, attention and emotional capacity are limited. So we must learn to spend those resources on “things” that add value to our lives. That can mean different things. Some things make life easier, those are mostly tools, but if we don’t use them, there is really no point in keeping them. Some things add value by making us smile. If we are excited to read that novel that is on our shelf, we should read it. Otherwise, we don’t need that pile of paper. And if that TV show that we are watching is making us smile or ponder deep philosophical topics, go for it!

Maybe one of the most stigmatized thing is to “get rid” of people who don’t add value to your life. Yes, I know this sound very harsh. And no, “getting rid” of those people does not mean killing them. But it means to spend significantly less or better yet no time with them.

So for being mindful about possessions I recommend reading Marie Kondo’s Life Changing Magic of Tidying up. But in essence it is about questioning whether an item “sparks joy” or is useful. And useful means we have used it in the last few months.

For being mindful how we spend our time, consider this: “Priorities are what we spend your time on.” And “We are what we do on a regular basis.” Let’s think about who we want to be. Figure out our goals and your vision. Because unless we do, we don’t know what it means to spend time on something that adds value. I am not saying to never ever do the dishes again. But quit that emotional shopping habit and get a dishwasher. And once we know who we want to be, we will know what we want to be spending our time on. No worries, it’s okay if that changes. But we have to start somewhere. Then every time we go to do something, whatever that may be, we must ask ourselves: is this who I want to be? Do I really want to spend my precious time on this? This also means that we will not be multitasking. I have mad a whole post about this, so I will not be elaborating on it.

There is one more category that we have not yet addressed. And that is our mindsets. We have to be mindful about those as well. The mindset is the sum of our thinking habits. That includes anything from how we think about ourselves to our attitude towards the world and our work. The way we think reveals a lot about who we are. Therefore curating our thoughts will impact who we are. This one might be the most difficult one because we often don’t catch what we are thinking in each given moment and often we have multiple thoughts at the same time. Once we also have our emotions mix in with our thoughts, it becomes even more complex. And yet, being aware of how we tend to think has a huge impact on our mood, our image of ourselves and therefore also our confidence. I hence recommend trying to be mindful about our thoughts and curate them.

One more thing we need to talk about: Being mindful of our emotions. Our emotions are very strong. And is alright. But we need to learn to express them. We are unable to deal with emotions, if we are not capable of explaining them at least to some degree. I am currently doing a simple exercise that helps with identifying emotions: It is a bullet point journal (no, not a bullet journal). Each bullet point refers to one thing that happened and how it made me feel. I keep it in two columns one for negative and one for positive emotions. I will write 1-3 bullets in each column each night. This is of course very customizable and allows us to learn to identify emotions, but also is a nice journal to look back at and design your life around. Of course more traditional journaling as in: writing down what happened, how it made you feel and how to proceed in more detail is also a great way to become more mindful of our emotions.

In summary we need mindfulness to allocate our limited resources in the way that will create the most value. This is why I think that making a significant difference between the buzzwords I mentioned in the beginning makes no sense. Of course minimalism has as lightly different focus than essentialism, but they come from the same place. And that really is not a mindset of scarcity. It is about being grateful and fully present in the moment. It is about choosing and curating the life we want, rather than going the unhappy path of least resistance. It is about building your happiness.

Anxious because Lazy

Sometimes all we do is focus on ourselves. We focus on our body image. And we focus on our goals. And we focus on our mindset. We focus on setting up the perfect life. And when everything seems in perfect order we check back in with ourselves and wonder:

“My Life is perfect, why am I not feeling good?”

Of course this can have a multitude of reasons. But one possibility is, that we are lazy. We know what we would have to do, but we are not doing it. And we may even use our mental instability as an excuse for it. We put off the work we should be doing in favor of creating our mindset, or exercising more, or whatever that may be. With me this would go so far, that I would engage in self-harm, just to have a bigger problem to focus on. Of course not everyone who self-harms does it for that reason, I would even go as far as to say most people do not. But I did. I am also not stating, that anyone with a mental issue, is simply lazy. That would be outspokenly ignorant. But what I am saying is: If our lives are perfect and we still feel anxious, it may be because we are lazy and I think it is absolutely worth checking up on that.

How does our laziness affect our emotional state? We may long for someone telling us, that we are doing well enough. We may long for external approval, because deep inside us we know, that we could be doing better. We end up being anxious, because we do not approve of what we do. We do not approve of ourselves. This can lead to a wrong self-diagnosis. We think, we are attention-seeking, have mental issues and don’t love ourselves the way we should. While this may true as well, the real reason is laziness.

I do not believe, that lying to ourselves, and telling ourselves that everything is fine when it isn’t but can be made alright is a smart move. Sure, there are things we cannot change, like our past. But it does not mean, that we should accept that we are lazy and just decide to roll with it, when it really is something that bothers us. We have control over this. And why would we find ways to cope with laziness, if we can just eliminate that very laziness and make our lives better this way?

How do we know, if we are lazy. We all are aware that emotional state fluctuates and maybe we are not equally lazy all the time. There is a simple way to assess this. We need to have a look at our commitments. All of them. School, work, family life, hobbies, you name it. Once we know what our commitments are, we need to determine, how committed we really are to them. When was the last time, we worked on that project we claim to be close to our heart? Do we only do the minimum of what is expected of us? And if so, why? Could we do more? How much TV and alcohol do we consume? As sad as it is, that last one is a good indicator, because when watching TV we feel, like we are doing something productive, but we can end up doing it for hours, without really doing anything.

How can we fight our own laziness? This is difficult. And I have just started struggling with this, myself. However there are three main steps, we have to take: We have to first acknowledge that we are lazy and in what regards we are.
Then we have to choose not to be lazy. We have to remember, why we made that commitment. Without a good reason to do something we should not be doing it. Everyone whines about how they do not have enough time, but they could not tell you, why they made half of their commitments. So let’s get our why.
And finally we need to strategize. We need to find out, what actions we can take, to not be lazy anymore. We can either increase the effort we put into something, or the time we put into something. We can run faster, or we can run for longer. We can finish a task well or we can work on it for longer. To spend more time on our commitments, I recommend Calendar Blocking. Using a calendar and assign tasks to time slots. Because this way we have full control over our time.
We should not try to force ourselves to doing more than a little more. This is a journey. We need to improve step by step rather than setting up a schedule that we cannot keep to for longer than a day.
Once we have our time slots, and we are working on that task, there is one thought, that I find helpful:

“I am spending time on this. I might as well do it well.

This is great, because it allows you to gradually not only increase the time spent on our commitments but also improve the work we do during that time.

One final tip: Try to quantify. Not everything can be quantified. But some things can. How much time we spent, how fast we wrote something. How long it took us to accomplish the same task as last week. Because even though this sounds very competitive it is true: Success is measurable. And if we only think we are good, with no recent measure to back that up, we are probably not that great and we have most certainly stopped improving, because improvement is change and change is visible, at least to ourselves. We deserve success stories, we are working on improving ourselves after all.

So finding ways to measure the improvement is crucial for our motivation, but also to battle that anxiety, that comes with laziness. Because when we see, how we improved, we know we are not lazy. We are not just telling ourselves, we aren’t to make us feel a little better. We are not lying to ourselves, we are telling the truth and with that, the anxiety will disappear. (Unless there was another source for it, in which case, we are now not to lazy anymore to deal with that as well.) In any case making sure we are not lazy. Making sure, we are improving is equal to being the best version of ourselves. And I kid you not: the best version of ourselves tomorrow is a little better than the best version of myself today. Working on fighting laziness will improve everything. Us as a person, our lives our relationships with ourselves, the world around us and the people around us, but especially the relationship with the people we love.