Like most people, I have found myself zoning out and getting lost in thought or distracted by my phone or anything else that is going on. I start to drift into a land of my thoughts and I have only the most passive awareness of what is going on in real time. This happens to the best of us, it is just an accepted fact of how people are. A few weeks ago, I listened to a Ted Talk about mindfulness given by Amishi Jha. Although I had heard about mindfulness before and I had thought about the idea of being present to your life, I had never really made a conscious effort to apply those ideas to my own life. I considered myself an aware person based off the reasoning that nothing catastrophic had ever happened during my zoning out. I told myself that just because I had never been distracted enough to get in an accident while driving, that I was a focused person. But, after listening to Amishi Jha’s talk, I realized that merely being focused enough to not let anything bad happen is not the same as being fully present in your life. So for the past week I have come up with a few exercises to help myself stay focused and stay present.

The first and easiest one for me to remember is checking in with my body. Every few hours (and I am trying to do this more and more often) I check in with the way my body is feeling. Am I slouching? Can I fix my posture? Do I feel any discomfort with the way I am standing or sitting? Do I have any tension or aches and pains? I have noticed that I become more aware of what my body is doing and how it moves by checking in. I have started to notice how making adjustments to my posture to alleviate discomfort makes me more focused on the task at hand. When my body feels right, I am more motivated to get things done.

The second thing I am working on is trying to only do one thing at a time and really notice what I am doing. If I am writing then I am fully focused on writing and I am not glancing around, thinking of other things, writing as fast as I can. If I am eating, I am only focused on that. I am not looking at my phone with one hand and shoveling food into my mouth with the other. Whatever I am doing, I try to put everything else aside, even if it is only for a few seconds to take a sip of water and focus on the task. I have found this increased my accuracy when completing a task. I have noticed my handwriting improve, I feel more careful as I am not jostling and banging things around. The more focused I am on one thing, the better it gets done and I better I feel about completing it knowing that I put thought into it and I wasn’t rushing through to try and get it done.

Although I have just started doing these exercises in mindfulness, I have seen some exciting improvements in the way I live my life and I like the feeling of being more present in my life. I also feel more in control of my time. I noticed I have less “lost hours” when I am thinking more about every task I do and I am putting all of my energy and focus onto one task as a time. I look forward to adding in some new exercises to continue practicing mindfulness and seeing where it takes me!