While out to dinner with friends the other night, I encountered a decidedly befuddled waiter. He fumbled through the wine list. He wasn’t sure how the chef prepared a dish and rushed back to the kitchen to ask. When he finally returned, he confessed: “I’m super anxious. I’ve never waited tables before.” My friends and I rallied around him, saying we weren’t in a hurry and he was doing a fine job. Afterward, I thought about how our waiter’s authenticity created a lovely moment of connection. Suddenly, we all belonged to the common cause of having a good meal despite, or even because of, minor blips in service. It’s a small example. But it holds a lesson about how being ourselves often creates the belonging we yearn for in our lives. “True belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world; our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance,” writes Brené Brown in Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.   Brown’s wisdom might be easier said than done. Sometimes self-acceptance seems like a never-ending quest for an elusive alignment between what we’re thinking, feeling, and sensing and an attitude of: “It’s all O.K.” What’s more, sharing our tender thoughts or feelings with others scary. And, to be sure, there are times, people, and places where it’s inappropriate, unsafe, and unwelcome. And, yet, I keep returning to the waiter and how his vulnerability joined us in the shared humanity of anxiety and compassion. Because belonging is such a primal and often unmet need, it’s worth exploring how being more of our full-fledged selves might foster more inclusivity. Mindfulness can help. When we attend to what we’re thinking, feeling, and sensing with curiosity and openness, we gain self-awareness. And self-awareness is a powerful ally in aligning our inner selves with what we present to the world. It’s also a starting point for getting the courage to express ourselves authentically. Another example comes to mind: I led a community meeting many years ago. The meeting had a protocol I was unaware of, and when I didn’t follow the rules, some group members became upset. (It happens.) Amid the dust-up, the woman who invited me to lead the meeting reassuringly said to me: “This is my fault. I’m learning some new leadership skills, and I neglected to tell you the meeting’s format.” I still remember how her kind, honest admission made me feel less alone and adrift. How might we learn from her and the waiter so we, too, can create connection and belonging for ourselves? Here are a few perspectives and practices to try:   Meditate: We often meditate to relieve stress. That’s wonderful. But it’s not the only reason to meditate. When we meditate, we become aware of our internal landscape. Such awareness might not always be pleasant, but it’s often illuminating. After all, we can only be true to ourselves if we truly know what we are thinking, feeling, and sensing. Risk Vulnerability: At some point, we need to open up to others to create connection and belonging. If we’re leading a meeting, this might mean acknowledging we don’t know the answer, or it might mean confiding in a colleague when we’re overwhelmed. When acknowledging and expressing what we don’t know or how we feel, it’s wise to share what’s contextually relevant, which fosters understanding while avoiding the pitfalls of oversharing. The waiter shared his anxiety within the context of work and perceived mistakes he was making. He didn’t tell us more than we needed to know, but what he revealed united us in shared understanding. Shift from Me to We: As we become more aware of our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations, it’s easier to imagine how others might have similar experiences. Everyone experiences physical pain, sadness, or confusion at times. Knowing that we can become more empathetic and intentional about including others and building bridges of belonging– whether by asking someone their opinion in a meeting or inviting them out to lunch.   A Version of This Blog appeared at eMindful.com

On My Mind   Sometimes reading something true or beautiful creates a translucent connection through which we can more clearly see our shared humanity. Read Miller Williams’ poem below and notice if it stirs within you a wish to be kinder, more inclusive, or at the very least moves you to give yourself and others a break. Compassion Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone. —

The hardest thing about mindfulness and, more specifically, meditation is actually doing it.

It’s also true of other wholesome habits, too. Eating well, exercising, getting a good night’s sleep, not nagging your husband. Oops! That last one is entirely self-referential.

Either way, an essential question tugs at us: How can we make activities we know are good for us long-lasting, life-affirming habits?

It’s a question many are mulling as the New Year begins, and we seek a fresh start with a meditation practice or something else that nudges us closer to the person we aspire to be. It’s also not an easy question to answer.

A few surprising statistics about gym membership provide a glimpse into how our best intentions to get in shape, for example, often fail. Nearly 63% of gym memberships go unused; 82% of people use their gym just once a week, and after six months, 22% of folks stop going at all.

Despite dreary statistics about gym-goers, it’s absolutely possible to begin and keep good habits. You’ve undoubtedly kept several for years and even decades, whether it’s brushing your teeth, making your bed every morning, or donating to charity annually.

If you’ve managed to maintain even one good habit, that’s extremely helpful when it comes to adopting a new one because you can look to it for clues as to how and why you’ve successfully maintained it.

Take tooth brushing. Most of us continue this twice-daily habit because we know it’s vital to our health, good looks, and enjoyment of one of life’s greatest pleasures – eating. We’ve got multiple high-stakes reasons to carry on. We’re also emotionally invested in keeping up with the routine. None of us enjoy it when the inside of our mouths feel and smell like a garbage can.

I’ve observed similar patterns in myself through the decades of maintaining my meditation practice as well as the students I’ve taught. Those who meditate regularly have high-stakes reasons for doing so, and they’re emotionally invested.

Many feel their lives and relationships don’t function as well without a daily practice. They’re too anxious, irritable, or joyless. Ultimately, the cost of not meditating is too high to pay. What’s more, the rewards of meditation or anything worthwhile done regularly add up over time, creating a virtuous cycle that keeps us engaged. Over time we may come to love our healthy habits. Though, that’s likely not so true for tooth brushing.

Meditation, of course, isn’t for everyone. But if you are interested in starting a practice in the New Year, here are three tried-and-true tips. Also, see below for resources to support your practice as 2022 gets underway.

• Keep your Why Close: A teacher of mine once told me that to do anything regularly, you have to “get your heart on board.” In other words, you have to have a meaningful and sometimes desperate reason to begin and keep the habit. Writing down the reasons why you want to adopt a new behavior and the costs of not doing so raises the stakes and keeps you committed. Once you begin, keep your “why” close and continually return to it as a source of encouragement.
• Consistency Over Duration: When a rocket gets blasted into outer space, it purportedly uses as much as 90% of its energy to launch. After that, it only takes a small amount of energy to orbit. The same is true of wholesome habits. It takes a lot of energy to get them up and running, but afterward, you can rely on momentum to fuel them. That’s why consistency is vital. Even if you only have time to practice a minute of meditation each day, doing so consistently is what launches the habit. Once you’ve strung together days or weeks of practice, challenge yourself to lengthen the time you meditate.
• Habit Stacking: Along the lines of relying on momentum, we also can use existing habits to help us create a new one. I once had a student who decided she would meditate every morning after making her morning cup of coffee. Making coffee was already a hardwired habit, making it easier for her to stack meditation on top of it.

 

On My Mind

 

The holiday season is upon us, and many of us are still adjusting our waistbands from Thanksgiving.

It’s normal and festive to indulge during the holidays. Far be it for me to spoil the fun.

But anything we routinely do is ripe for review. And overeating from November to January has become a national habit.

Research shows Americans gain an average of a pound during the holiday season. That’s far less than the scale tipping and, apparently, erroneous headlines reporting we gain five pounds or more during the holiday season.

But it’s also a lump of coal in our stockings. According to researchers, that solitary pound we put on tends to stay long after the holidays, contributing to the weight we gain as we age.

Rather than punish ourselves with diets or intense exercise in the New Year, a kinder, more holistic approach to dealing with the holiday food glut – for those of us fortunate enough to have one – is to practice mindful eating.

Mindful eating isn’t about rules or restrictions or even losing weight. Though, as we bring more awareness to what we eat, the shape of our bodies might naturally change.

Instead, mindful eating is about bringing attention and intention to what we eat and kind awareness to our relationship to food. It’s also about asking ourselves an essential question: What am I hungry for?

The answer might not be as straightforward as peering into the fridge to see what satisfies.

Food is nourishment, but it’s also cultural and familial, social and emotional. And often, what we’re hungry for isn’t food at all, but for something, food represents to us.

Mindful eating expert Jan Chozen Bays says the intuitive, body-based hunger that guided us as children can get altered by our environment and our minds as adults. (Anyone who has ever eaten a bowl of popcorn or two or three out of boredom knows this.) The point is there are numerous forces and types of hungers that drive our eating, says Bays.

Here’s a brief example: When I was 16 years old, I sprained my ankle badly, and my Dad was the only one on hand to help. Not quite knowing what to do with a tearful teenager wincing with pain, my Dad did the only thing he could think of to comfort me. He ran up to the grocery store and bought me a pint of peppermint ice cream. It was literally sweet of him. But it wasn’t the comfort I needed. Nonetheless, the relationship between peppermint ice cream and love was forged, and when I’m upset, I sometimes find myself hunting for it at the grocery store.

Bringing mindfulness to those kinds of associations and urges for certain foods helps us better understand our relationship to eating. It also helps us untangle strands of emotional hunger from body-based hunger, giving us more choice about whether to dig into our pint of peppermint ice cream or call a friend for comfort instead.

If we wind up going for the ice cream, at least we’ve increased our awareness around what else we might be hungry for and how we might meet that need in the future. For tips on how to mindfully answer the question – What am I hungry for? – see below.

On My Mind

 Two people I know recently told me they’d closed their Facebook accounts because of concerns about how the social media platform affects mental health – not just theirs, but everyone’s mental health.

Two doesn’t make a trend. But I suspect many more are reconsidering their relationships with Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram after recent revelations about how the social media giant damages mental and civic health.

First in the Wall Street Journal, then on 60 Minutes, and this week in Congressional testimony, former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen divulged scores of internal Facebook documents and research showing how the social media giant harms the mental health of teenage girls, pollutes political debate, and rewards invective content.

Facebook has faced such criticisms before and years ago the company acknowledged that passively using its platform increased anxiety. Research also has previously linked spending too much time on social media in general with anxiety, depression.

The bombshell here, though, is that Facebook knew long before we did about some of the ill effects of its products. And, according to Haugen, the company routinely puts profits over public safety.

It would be too simplistic to say there aren’t benefits to social media or to deny some of the inspiring ways Facebook connects us.

But we’ve been here before. Research on the deleterious effects of products – digital or otherwise – lags corporate transparency and consumer demand. And sometimes it does so with disastrous results.

Prodded by marketing and often addictive product design, we gobbled up fast food before we knew it was linked to a spate of health issues ranging from diabetes to obesity. We smoked cigarettes believing they were sexy and cool before we knew they caused cancer. And now we’re using social media without knowing the full impact on our mental, emotional and physical wellbeing.

The phrase buyer beware has never rung more true. And Haugen is right to point out that unlike other industries – such as tobacco or automobiles – there’s no outside oversight that allows users access to internal or independent research into Facebook’s products or those of other social media companies. We’re operating in the dark.

But as consumers, and especially as parents, we have the power to make choices that right-size Facebook in our lives, regardless of how or if Congress and governmental regulators compel the company to change.

At the very least it’s time to shift the conversation with our kids about social media. Knowing social media isn’t benign, we need to teach our kids about the potential dangers of Instagram and share what the scant research show about how social media can potentially affect them. Just like we talk to our kids about drugs and alcohol we need to see social media as a substance that can be abused. (See resources below. Also, for a look at Facebook’s recently released internal research on how Instagram affects teen girls click here and here.)

We also can begin our own self-investigation into how we use social media and what we model for our kids. Our kids watch what we do far more than listen to what we say.

I’ve written before about how we can use mindfulness to notice whether our interactions with Facebook or any other social media platform add or subtract from our lives. While we’re waiting to see if Facebook grants parents greater control over the content they allow their children and teens to view, we can share with our kids some internal tools to help them self-regulate while online.

We can tell our kids to notice how they feel before, during, and after they use social media. Do they notice a downshift in their mood or sensations in their body that might tell them they feel anxious? Do they have more positive or negative thoughts while online?

Mindfulness isn’t a magic wand and in the face of a social media behemoth such as Facebook, it may seem less magical. And, yet, if we begin to teach our kids to be more aware of what they feel, sense, and think when they interact with social media they’ll be far more likely to create a healthy relationship with it.

 

 

No matter how you look at it, it’s been a slog. After more than a year of the pandemic, many of us are exhausted by remote work and online schooling, around-the-clock parenting or caregiving, and a host of societal and environmental upheavals. More than half of Americans are burned out, according to a recent survey from Indeed, the job aggregator website. Signifying an ongoing trend, the World Health Organization recently recognized burnout as a medical disease, ending 40 years of debate about whether the phenomenon classifies as a distinct condition. How do you know you’re burned out, and what can you do about it if you are? Psychologists and social scientists who have researched burnout since the 1970s define it as a multifaceted syndrome whose hallmarks include overwhelming exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalization, and a decreased sense of accomplishment. Healthcare workers, psychologists, first responders, and teachers are particularly vulnerable to burnout. But so are parents, athletes, and pretty much everyone who puts dedicated, sincere effort into what they do. “Our layperson’s definition of burnout is…that feeling of being overwhelmed and exhausted by everything you have to do, while still worrying that you’re not doing enough,” said Emily Nagoski, co-author of the book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, in a recent TED interview. Taking time to recalibrate If that sounds all too familiar to you, it’s time to recalibrate. Relieving burnout isn’t as simple as self-care. Taking a mental health day or a long bath is great. But if you’re exhausted and disengaged, you’ll need more support and an intentional strategy to move toward greater well-being. Mindfulness can help in a myriad of ways. Most essentially, becoming more aware of when you’re feeling physically tired, emotionally drained, or disengaged allows you to better manage your stress in the moment before it devolves into burnout. Here are several mindfulness-based perspectives and practices to help you cope: Move your body often and regularly: An fundamental way to move stress hormones through the body and restore balance to the nervous system is to move your body often and regularly, particularly after encountering a stressor. A 2015 study showed that doing cardiovascular exercise reduces psychological distress and burnout symptoms. Other forms of movement help, too. Going for a walk after a stressful day, doing jumping jacks after a difficult meeting, practicing yoga or slow, deep breathing during a lunch break all help signal to the body that the immediate stressor you faced is gone, and it’s okay to relax. Specific mindfulness practices such as a body scan, where you scan your attention from head to toe through the body, bring awareness to areas of tension that may need extra care, and help relax the body. Socially Connect: That pop of positivity you get from chatting with your local barista or a neighbor is significant.  Having positive social interactions is another way we signal to the nervous system that we’re safe. Casual interactions with others go a long way toward fostering wellbeing. So, too, do more intimate encounters with friends and family. Research shows, for example, that hugging someone for 20 seconds or more lowers blood pressure and heart rate and elevates mood. Feel Your Feelings: Challenging feelings accompany burnout, everything from irritability, resentment, anger, and anxiety. When we strive to get everything done or care for others, it’s easy to bypass our own feelings. But emotions are like an internal GPS. They guide us to a deeper understanding of what we need in any given moment. The next time you feel irritated, stop and notice how the emotion registers in your body. Is your chest tight? Is your jaw clenched? Notice what images or mental chatter accompany your irritation. Are you arguing with your boss in your head or criticizing yourself? Becoming intimate with our feelings and giving ourselves space to acknowledge them helps us take productive action to address what’s bothering us. Get Support: Sometimes, we can’t change the things that contribute to burnout – lack of childcare, a demanding boss, or long and inflexible work hours. But we can ask for support from friends, colleagues, and family. We can let our family know we’ve reached our limit and need help cleaning up the house or extra sleep. We can ask a colleague to take a task off our to-do list. If possible, we can have an honest conversation with your boss about how we’re feeling. And when all else fails, we can ask a friend just to listen to us. Engage in a Hobby: Playing guitar, knitting, building a model airplane, or meditating aren’t frivolous endeavors. Hobbies and daily practices such as meditation help us reengage in our lives. They also increase self-efficacy and give us a sense of control over burnout. The next time you feel compelled to cross something off your to-do list, pause and ask yourself whether putting a few more stitches in the scarf you’ve been knitting might make you feel better.  A version of this blog originally appeared on eMindful.com On My Mind The bond between humans and their pets goes beyond words. And sometimes the words we use to describe our deep connection to the animals we love sound trite. So, too, do our attempts to describe the grief we feel when our beloved pet dies. That’s why I still find myself at a loss to describe how I feel after my 23-year-old cat Peter died a week and a half ago. (See Peter at left.) I can only quietly honor the tremendous presence he was in my family’s life, the surefooted friend he was to my daughter, and the marvelous teacher he was to me. Peter taught me a lot about mindfulness as well as many other things. He taught me about beauty and contentment. He also taught me about patience, dignity, resilience, and how to be unreservedly oneself. I truly doubt I’ll know a finer cat than Peter. Though, because of him, my heart remains open to the possibility.