3 easy mindfulness techniques | psychologist explains

3 easy mindfulness techniques | psychologist explains



Want to learn how to be more mindful? Today I teach you 3 beginner friendly mindfulness techniques to get you started!

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// Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:49 What is mindfulness?
04:34 Mindfulnes is NOT
05:59 1. The 54321
08:05 2. Informal Mindfulness
09:24 3. Breathwork (but different!)
11:30 My experience

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🌞 ABOUT Me: Hi! My name’s Ro and I’m a psychologist (and clinical psychology registrar) from Sydney, Australia!
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so what i'm going to be talking about is so simple that every single person watching this video can start a daily mindfulness practice starting from today hi my name is toshida i am from mumbai india my favorite self-care activity is calligraphy welcome to psych diaries hi welcome nice to meet you my name is ro i'm a psychologist from sydney australia and today we're going to talk all things mindfulness before i get started i'm mindful of the fact that i'm sweating so be right back so this video is going to be a complete beginner's course we're going to strip away all the fancy bits of mindfulness and it's going to be for people maybe who have never had a mindfulness practice or people who find themselves getting into it and then continuously falling off the bandwagon because it feels too overwhelming there's too much involved and you have that feeling of like oh i just can't be bothered so my goal is that every single person watching this video can have a daily mindfulness practice because i am going to keep it so simple mindfulness was originally started in the eastern philosophies buddhism and it was brought to the west by people who started to practice it and then now mindfulness is completely secular which means that we've taken the religious parts out of it so there's thousands and thousands of studies on the effects of mindfulness and how it can benefit us just to name a few there's you know reduction in stress improvements in working memory reduction in worry and rumination i think people who practice mindfulness generally describe the sense of feeling a little bit more free and light and not as easily dragged away by their emotions for most of my clients i will have at least one session where i talk about starting some sort of regular mindfulness practice so in its simplest simplest form mindfulness is just bringing our awareness to the present that might be connecting with our senses your sense of touch taste sound it could be connecting to your breath which is often what we recommend starting with because we're always breathing and i think one good way of demonstrating it is just to draw a diagram of what this kind of looks like and what our brain does so essentially we have the now the future and the past and what usually happens is we have a bit of this pattern where we're concentrating on the present and then we kind of go to the future you know i wonder what i'm having for lunch oh my gosh did i actually pack that in my bag and then we kind of come back to the present so that might look a little bit like that and then we have moments where we kind of go oh my gosh i see olivia over there oh what did i say to her last week again oh my gosh that was so embarrassing i can't believe i did that i really hope i don't do that again come back to the present and then we might drift to the future again what is going to happen during that test next week am i gonna do okay what happens if i fail it oh my goodness am i gonna have to show my parents about that and then our brain does something a little bit like this so it goes between the past and it goes into the future as well we could say that if we spend all of our time thinking about the future all the things that could go wrong catastrophizing we might say that's worry and anxiety and if we spend all of our time in the past thinking about all about past failures and things that we screwed up we might actually characterize that as like depression or depressive thinking and the idea is that we don't want to spend too much time in the past or the future we want to spend most of our awareness in the present moment the here and now mindfulness is about reconnecting to the present moment bringing our awareness back in because it's the only time that we can enact change and if we really want to live life and be present and enjoy life like we have to be here we have to be aware of it i think all of us have had experiences of being unmindful and sometimes they're they're helpful you know for a long car ride maybe you were thinking about what you're gonna make for dinner riding on the bus to school and you're thinking about you know the party that you had last weekend reflecting on how fun it was there are times when being not so mindful is fine but if we spend too much of our time being dragged into the future dragged into the past then we're not really living our life are we i think with technology and social media it makes it really easy to not be mindful because there's no need to actually just sit there and look around and be mindful of our thoughts i'm going to give you three very very simple practices to increase your ability to bring your awareness back so mindfulness is not about clearing your mind of thoughts or like forgetting everything and having a blank slate mindfulness is just the practice of noticing when our mind is drifted and to gently non-judgmentally bring it back in so it is not a failure if you notice that your mind is drifted that's what minds do just notice oh we've drifted and just gently bring your awareness back to the present moment and the act of mindfulness is not how long we can stay in the present moment successful mindfulness is just being able to notice and bring back notice and bring back it's like going to the gym over time you start to build those mindfulness muscles and you get better at noticing when your mind is drifted and you get better at being able to detach and come back to the present moment we are always going to have thoughts we are always going to have emotions that's just that's human and so if you were like oh i haven't thought about anything in the last half an hour i would be rather concerned the idea is not that we just don't have thoughts we are aware of the thoughts we know the thoughts are passing by but we're just better able to detach from them and there are several metaphors that people use such as you're standing on the train station thoughts are like trains instead of hopping on every train and like going down that pathway you just kind of notice that the trains are passing by so i have three techniques i want to teach you that are simple and anyone can do first one is called the 54321 and this is a really good it takes like 30 seconds to a minute it connects you with your five senses and it's a really good reset if you just want something quick you've noticed that your mind's drifting it's kind of difficult to touch you just want to kind of ground yourself in your body again the idea is that we look around whatever space that we're in and we pick five things that we can see uh i see this leaf a lamp water bottle tissues and carpet i think that's five and then four things that you can touch and i don't need you to like reach out and touch things i just want you to be aware and start tuning into your body and the sensations that you can feel so for instance i can feel my foot digging into my sock it's causing a bit of pain i can feel the pressure of me sitting on this cushion i can feel my hair resting against my shoulders and i can feel my nose tickling then three things that you can hear i can hear my clock ticking the kind of gentle puttering of rain oh and i can hear like a very very distant voice out in the corridor uh two things that you can smell a little congested i can smell like cotton like uh like clothes i guess and i can kind of smell this it smells a bit like rain and finally one thing that you can taste um i don't really know how to describe the taste of saliva but saliva and what i love about the 54321 is it's simple everyone can do it you can do it anywhere anytime it's quick and also it's pretty impossible to do it while concentrating on some other thought like like i physically can't do the 54321 and like tune into what i'm feeling and hearing if my thoughts are drifting so that's number one second thing is informal or casual mindfulness and this is the idea that i tell to pretty much every client if they come in with reservations about mindfulness or they say i've tried it before it doesn't work for me i hate it it's literally just being mindful of your life you don't need to set aside any extra time you don't need to have a space or any tools for it you literally just bring your awareness back to things where you normally wouldn't so for instance if you are drinking a morning cup of coffee and that's usually when you start scrolling on instagram i'd like you to put your phone down and just notice how the cup feels in your hands notice you know is it warm is it cold notice the taste of whatever you're drinking notice the sensation of it in your mouth as you swallow if you feel it notice the smells notice you know is it thick is it liquidy notice what you're seeing and you can do that you know in a minute when you first start doing it it's really weird it's really surreal you start noticing like houses and shops for streets that you've walked by for years and never noticed and it's a really trippy experience just once a day pick one or two minutes to just tune in and be mindful of your daily activities and the third one this is for those who want a little bit more of a challenge if the first two you've got under wraps and you kind of want to progress to the next level it's mindfulness of breath and before everyone kind of freaks out it's not sitting here and doing any like long type of meditative practice what often happens is people start wanting to control the breath and so you hear guided meditations going breathe in and then relax and then breathe out but everyone has different lung capacities and we breathe at different rates and it doesn't really make sense to have to follow a particular pattern all the time sometimes it's helpful but we're not going to talk about that type today i want to just talk about literally just bringing your awareness to your breath so don't try and control it just notice it you might notice that you're actually going like this and that's okay we're just noticing non-judgmental we don't need to change our breath what often happens though is when we bring our awareness to our breath the more time we spend being aware of it it actually just naturally starts to slow down smooth out and feel easier and easier but how this is different to typical meditative practices is i don't need you to do anything with it i don't need you to slow it down i don't need you to breathe in through your stomach and like breathe out through your nose yada yada just do whatever you were doing every second of the day because we're always breathing just keep breathing and just bring your awareness to your breathing go am i breathing fast right now am i breathing slow does it feel deep does it feel shallow i just want you to notice details and that's a really really good starting point just come back to the breath before you launch into like a serious meditative practice or do longer meditations like i said i want to keep it super simple comment down below how it goes if you're interested in trying any of these or if you tried them and let me know how it goes and as always like this video if you got something out of it and subscribe to join me for more psychology videos i have been kind of on and off the meditation train for years and actually i did like a 100 day mindfulness or meditation challenge last year and i was very public about it on my social media if you dig back and i think after like around day 30 um i had a breakup and then i use that as an excuse to just completely ditch the whole thing but i didn't uh forget about mindfulness in an informal way and so actually probably uh starting this year i've done daily mindfulness because even when i can't do a sit-down meditation i will do my two minutes of concentrating on toothbrushing or one minute of walking down the street observing the bushes and the trees every single person can do mindfulness and i really encourage you just to give it a try just to treat it like an experiment and after you kind of get used to those really informal casual ways of doing mindfulness there's a whole range of guided practices of longer form mindfulness meditation practices there's apps there's books there's so many resources out there i hope i kept that quick and simple editing row get on it and thanks for watching i'll see you guys next time bye [Music] you

#easy #mindfulness #techniques #psychologist #explains

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