How to be more mindful

In my previous post, I shared the evidence of how nature can restore you.  I appreciate that not everyone in London lives within easy access to a green space, and it turns out that it may not be necessary to visit the green space just look at a green space. This first occurred to me a few weeks ago, when I was in Manchester.  In the hotel reception they had screens playing a short video clip of a roaring log fire.  A roaring log fire just happens to be another of those things that I find both calms me, reduces my stress levels and restores me.  What I noticed is that I had a positive response to the video clip, even though it was just a film of a log fire rather than an actual log fire.  So this made me think, would just looking at a picture of nature on your PC have the same positive impact as going out in nature. Li & Sullivan in a randomised controlled experiment demonstrated that views to green landscapes promote attention restoration and help individuals to recover from stress.  In another study, researches in China, have discovered that viewing nature based scenes were restorative and those with more openness but no people were more lived to reduce stress.  So maybe you could just look at a picture instead. So for those of you where its not practical to spend 5 minutes in nature per day, why not look at a picture of a green landscape (without people) on your mobile phone  or tablet or pc, and see if it boosts your attention levels and restores you. References D Li and W C Sullivan, Impact of views to school landscapes on recovery from stress and mental fatigue.  Landscape and Urban Planning, vol 148, 2016, pp 149 - 158.

In my previous post, How to be mindful, I described a mindful breathing exercise.  Now I want to share with you more mindfulness exercises. 1. Mindful Observation Choose a natural object, plant, flower or cloud in the sky.  Simply focus solely on it for a minute or two.  Visually explore it and allow yourself to be consumed by its presence. 2. Mindful Listening Listen to a piece of music you have never heard before.  You could re-turn your radio to a new station or download a new track to your ipod.  The idea is to listen, to become fully entwined within the composition without preconception or judgement of the genre, artist, lyrics or instrumentation. 3. Mindful Appreciation The point of this exercise is to simply give thanks and appreciate the seemingly insignificant things in life; the things that support your existence but rarely get a second thought in our desire for bigger and better things.  All you have to do is notice 5 things in your daily life that go unappreciated. Once you have your 5 things, then consider

• the benefit they bring to your life and the lives of others
• what life would be like without these things

Mindfulness is gaining popularity as is meditation. Advocates recommend both as tools to assist us with our modern 24/7 non-stop busy lives that are packed with conflicting demands and uncertainty. But Mindfulness and Meditation are not synonymous. Meditation is one technique for practicing mindfulness but not the only one. I know many people, including myself, find meditation difficult as it requires dedication and practice. So I was very interested to read Ellen Langer, (of Harvard University) who is considered the mother of mindfulness, define mindfulness as the "simple process of noticing new things.". One of the things that puts busy people of Mindfulness is the misconception that is requires effort. So if you thought mindfulness was just as easy as mindlessness would you be more mindful?