Three Common Mind Traps that Sink Happiness

There’s a funny print cartoon that has a man and woman sitting on the couch staring at a TV screen and the caption below reads, “It’s 12 o’clock, do you know where your mind is?” As time goes on and we grow up from children to adults, somewhere along the way life begins to become routine. Day in and day out we’re walking, driving, talking, eating, going to the grocery store, working, or being with our families. Our minds switch over on auto-pilot as we develop habitual ways of thinking, interpreting, expecting, and relating to other people.

However, these daily routines also include habits of the mind that can keep us stuck in stress, anxiety, fear, depression, or even addictive behaviors. Let’s explore a few habits of the mind, and a mindfulness practice to help you break out of auto-pilot, and gain more control over your life.

Three Common Mind Traps that Sink Happiness:

1. Catastrophizing – If you’re prone to stress, fear, and anxiety, you may recognize this habitual mind trap. This is where the mind interprets an event as the worst case scenario. If your heart is beating fast, you may think you’re having a heart attack. If your boss didn’t look at you while walking down the hall, you start thinking you’re going to get fired. You get the picture. This style of thinking will increase stress, anxiety, and even panic.
2. Discounting the positive and exaggerating the negative – The news is especially good at supporting us with this one. This is where we habitually reject or  Continue Reading →

Embrace Your Past

A classic misconception of mindfulness is that the focus is solely on the present, and that we don’t have to review or reflect on the past. The reality is the past informs our present perceptions and snap judgments that are made about ourselves, other people and situations. This then creates consequences, so our past informs the consequences of this moment and the future. Therefore, it’s critical to become aware of our history, and the way it shapes who we are.

I would even go as far as to say, it’s important to embrace your past and start to welcome your pain.

One of the most powerful interventions, that is fairly consistent with many people who have been wounded emotionally, is learning how to embrace the wounded part of ourselves. Continue Reading →

Mindfulness Improves Sleep

More than a third of Americans aren’t getting enough sleep on a regular basis, are you one of them?

You may have trouble falling asleep,  staying asleep or both. Barring any medical issues, when it comes to difficulty falling asleep there is one main culprit and that is the mind. A barrage of thoughts often haunts us through the night, “I can’t believe I can’t fall asleep, tomorrow’s going to be horrible, please, please, please fall asleep.” The anxiousness grows as we fall further and further from a restful state of mind. What can we do when it seems like sleep is an impossibility?  Continue Reading →

Bring More Love into Life

Love comes in many forms; it can be kindness, empathy and even compassion. It can manifest as love toward ourselves or love toward other people. We might specifically consider the love toward people close to us,  but we can also bring more love to people we don’t know, or groups of people who are suffering.

Take a moment to notice if any judgments arose after reading about integrating more love into your life with those outside of your circle. If thoughts arose like, “this is silly,” or “my problems run much deeper than just intending to bring more love into my life.” See these thoughts for what they are, just thoughts, but that they are thoughts that bring you further away from something that is potentially nourishing.

Thoughts lead to actions and actions lead to consequence. If the consequence is moving further away from love that is a severe consequence.

Try setting your judgments aside and let your experience be your teacher.

What ways can you consider today to bring more love into your life? You can either be receiving it or giving it.

Here are some examples to help get started:

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Worrying Less in 5 Steps

In life there are ups and downs, or as the classic Eastern saying puts it “life is filled with 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows.” In this statement, there’s the wisdom that all things come and go, though our brains have a tendency to amplify the sorrows and minimize the joys in the flow of life (there were good evolutionary reasons for this but they no longer serve us in modern day).

Whenever the brain perceives something as “bad” it starts to worry about it. But often times there is no real utility to the worry – it only serves to dig us into a deeper hole and blinds us to the joys that might be waiting around the corner.

There really is no way to cure worrying but we can learn to get better and better at recognizing it and gently guiding ourselves back to a sense of perspective on what matters.

I’d like to share 5-steps to help you start worrying less:

Continue Reading →