Archive for the ‘Mindfulness’ tag
Habit Triggers, Krill Oil, and Eliminating Neck Pain (Sunday Reads #9)
Welcome to Sunday Reads on Refocuser, a collection of weekly links from around the web to help you do incredible things. These links span topics like creativity, performance, focus, exercise, nutrition, and positivity. I’m posting this on Saturday this time to make sure email subscribers get this on Sunday.
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On Work/Life Balance, Anxiety, and Habits
A new study in the Journal of Marketing Research: “Emotions such as guilt about where time is being spent or fear over loss of income both generate stress, and make a person feel more pressed for time than they actually are.” I’ve always been of the opinion that work/life balance and “lack of time” isn’t the problem, it’s the underlying feeling of trading off the things that matter most to you. Missing your daughter’s piano performance for a mind-numbing meeting evokes feelings of guilt and resentment regardless of how much time you’ve spent at work or with family. So what do you do? One tip from the study is to pause to breathe more often.
Being mindful about anxiety can help to reduce it. “The solution isn’t identifying why you’re anxious in the first place (though that knowledge has its place), but recognizing the signs of anxiety before nervousness, panic and rapid breathing hijack your emotional wellness.”
Using quotations from others can help improve your self-talk. For almost 15 years now, I’ve been working on my own self-talk as I realize how important it is to overall well-being. Here’s one of my favorites from this list:
The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join in the dance. —Alan Watts
Great post by James Clear on habit triggers, something I’m a big proponent of. Using Time and Location triggers have been instrumental in a number of my own personal habits, including a new one to “do at least 10 minutes of mobility work every day” thanks to Kelly Starrett’s new book, Ready to Run.
Creative Work, Stress, and Being “Ready to Run” (Sunday Reads #5)
Welcome to Sunday Reads on Refocuser, a collection of weekly links from around the web to help you do incredible things. These links span topics like creativity, performance, focus, exercise, nutrition, and positivity. I’m posting this on Saturday this time to make sure email subscribers get this on Sunday.
Join thousands of other readers by subscribing to this blog and email newsletter or by following @Refocuser on Twitter. If you’re receiving this in your email inbox, spread the love and forward it to a friend.
On Creative Work
How many times have you found yourself thinking “that really didn’t need to take an hour”? Brad Feld has some experience with that.
“People sitting at messy desks are less efficient, less persistent, and more frustrated and weary than those at neat desks.” I find it easier to keep my desk clean than to actually clean it, so at the end of every day I take 20 seconds to reset it before I leave the office.
18 Habits of Highly Creative People pulls together some great recommendations for how to do incredible things.
How to Keep the Creativity Train Running on Time
Some days you feel like absolutely nothing can go wrong. You’re on fire, unstoppable. Ideas are flowing, confidence is high, and you’re walking around with your chin up and your back straight. There’s no better feeling than knowing you’re at the top of your game. The world is your oyster. Everything you touch seems to turn to gold and you wonder how you were ever stagnant before.
Until the past few years, I had really only been able to identify these times when looking back. Now I’m acutely aware of them when I’m in them and I grab onto them and try not to let go when that train is rolling.
But these feelings never last long. Maybe a day or two, maybe a little more. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a full week of this superhuman ability to create things out of nothing without obstruction. Sooner or later things will return to normal and there’s no explanation why this happens. You just can’t self-motivate like you were able to the day before. Ideas are at a distance, just out of reach. You aren’t feeling flow and a day’s worth of work is taking two full days instead of just three hours.
It’s crazy frustrating when this happens. You try and recreate the environment, the feeling you had, and you just can’t. Your mind has moved on, your thoughts are elsewhere, and your current experience has been altered in some inexplicable way. And you don’t like it at all.
What happened? Well, nothing at all. It’s perfectly normal for creativity to ebb and flow like this. It happens to every single creative person dozens – even hundreds – of times throughout a year. It’s just not possible to keep anything running at its highest capacity all the time.
But are there ways to keep it running for as long as you can? Maybe. There are things you can do that will help but only in the sense that they may be able to prolong that window. There’s no guarantee that these things will work every time, but if they buy you an extra few days or a shorter period in the downswing, it could be worth it.
