by Ray White
Activity – Using Your Time Wisely:
1.Write a list of things you want to take control of in your life.
2.Choose from these categories or add your own: time, health, diet, exercise, spirituality, career, being mindful, etc.
3.Pick one. It is important to start small. Don’t try to change everything at once.
4.Find 5 minutes every day at the same time. Write down that time here. ____________
5.Write down in one sentence exactly what you're going to do (for example, "walk in place for five minutes," "plan my day," "think about things I appreciate").
6.Put an index card or small calendar in your pocket, purse, or taped to your mirror. Every day, mark down that you took control of those five minutes. You can use hash marks or you can put checks on a calendar.
7.Reward yourself the first time you complete seven days in a row. Then again when you do three weeks in a row, and then a big reward when you go six weeks in a row.
8.Write down the date, probably six weeks from now, that you will add the next 5 or 15 minutes of time to take control of. Change that date if you have not made the first five minutes a habit. Don’t move to your second choice until you have proof through measurement that the first five minutes is a habit.
Don’t get discouraged or sidetracked if you happen to miss a day. Just follow up and do it the next day. Keep trying until you feel like you have control of at least five minutes every day.
Side Note: One of the excuses we often hear, is “I already have control of a lot of my time. I just like to watch TV and relax.” There is nothing wrong with watching TV or other mind-numbing activities if that is what you choose to do and you feel like you are in control of your life. But consider whether you're choosing that over other areas of your life like health and exercise. Are you overdoing the pleasure and missing the happiness?
Chapter 9
Gratitude
“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” Cicero
Jacob Sokol said it well in his book 12 Things Happy People do Differently: “Express gratitude. When we appreciate what we have, what we have appreciates in value. Being grateful for the goodness that is already evident in your life will bring you a deeper sense of happiness. We can never really be happy if we can’t find a way to be thankful for what we already have.”
Rabbi Noah Weinberg tells a story about a young man who learned how to appreciate life at an early age:
A young man with an unusually happy disposition once came to meet me in Jerusalem. I asked him, "What's your secret?"
He told me, "When I was 11 years old, God gave me a gift of happiness. I was riding my bicycle when a strong gust of wind blew me onto the ground into the path of an oncoming truck. The truck ran over me and cut off my leg.
"As I lay there bleeding, I realized that I might have to live the rest of my life without a leg. How depressing! But then I realized that being depressed won't get my leg back. So I decided right then and there not to waste my life despairing.
"When my parents arrived at the hospital, they were shocked and grieving. I told them, 'I've already adapted. Now you also have to get used to this.'
"Ever since then, I see my friends getting upset over little things: their bus came late, they got a bad grade on a test, somebody insulted them. But I just enjoy life."
At age 11, this young man attained the clarity that it is a waste of energy to focus on what you are missing, and that the key to happiness is to take pleasure in what you have.
We once had a neighbor who, due to infection, had lost both of her arms just below the elbow. Despite her disability, she was a very happy and joyful person. She had migrated to the U.S. some 20 years before and was appreciative of the life she was now able to lead. She paid her bills by walking and taking care of dogs, so she was constantly surrounded by loving animals that didn’t notice or care if she was missing her arms and were excited to see her no matter what the situation. She would openly talk about her arms and how that had changed her life. But rather than being sad and angry, she was appreciative that she could still be independent and still do the things she wanted to do. Her gratitude turned her life from sad to fantastic and added joy and happiness to our lives as well.
Other research on gratitude found that participants who recorded their gratitude on a regular basis or participated in other gratitude exercises:
were more successful in attaining their goals
had more energy and were physically healthier
slept better
exercised more
felt more optimistic about their lives and were less stressed
were more alert, enthusiastic, and determined
were more likely to have made progress toward goals
were more likely to help someone else with emotional support or in solving a problem
had more positive moods
felt more connected to others, were less envious, and shared more
Gratitude doesn’t eliminate your negative feelings. It provides you with more reasons to feel positive and enhances your normally positive feelings. Spending time with your friends or family is nice. But taking a few seconds to acknowledge how grateful you are to have those people enhances those feelings and brings them to the surface. When you have a flat tire or car problems, you are likely to feel frustrated or even angry. If you take a second to be grateful that you have a car, and grateful that you know someone who can help, then you will have positive feelings that provide a balance to your negative feelings.
The power of gratitude appears to be one of the most common and agreed upon themes in happiness research. The belief in its positive impact is almost universal. Gratitude is also a keystone habit, in that practicing gratitude is foundational and helpful to most of the other habits that improve happiness. Gratitude is geographically universal. Almost every culture has a practice of showing gratitude. In most cases, that includes giving thanks to a higher power or deity. Grateful people tend to find less conflict and more harmony in their relationships and interactions. They appreciate the action that was taken rather than being upset about the action that wasn’t taken. Feeling grateful has been shown to help people feel more energized, alert, and enthusiastic. People who are grateful tend to be more spiritual and more agreeable. Grateful people have a higher sense of belonging. They are less stressed, less depressed, and feel like they have more social support. This encourages them to be closer to people and to build harmonious rather than fractious relationships.
The practice of being grateful forces us to find the positive things in our environment and relationships that are applicable and specific to us. It's a method of thinking positively that connects more to our feelings than to our logic. Some of the research showed that grateful people perform better specifically in areas where they practice gratitude. Sixth- and seventh-grade students who were asked to write what they were thankful for about school showed improvement in their performance at school. Gratitude also has a pay-it-forward characteristic that creates a virtuous circle. The more grateful we are, the more we want to help other people, which makes us feel better and more grateful. In turn, the people we help become more motivated to help others themselves.
Activities for Gratitude:
1.Spend 10 minutes counting your blessings. Don’t stop writing until the 10 minutes is up. Don’t stop until you have over 100 items on your list. Most of us have a lot more to be thankful for than we realize. We take for granted the simple things in our lives, like a bed to sleep on and running water.
2.Every morning, think about things you are grateful for and write down three of them. Do this daily to create the habit. Longer term, you will want to vary your timing based on how you feel and what works for you. For some people, doing this exercise weekly created more happiness than doing it daily. You can find the timing that works for you.
3.Write a heartfelt letter of gratitude to someone important in your life and read it to him or her
in person. The significant increase in happiness comes from actually reading it to them, not just in writing it.
4.Write thank-you notes to five people and make sure they get delivered.
5.Find a gratitude support partner. Someone you can work with for mutual support for regularly practicing gratitude.
6.Introduce someone to something new that you enjoy. Show a friend your hobby. Show a new co-worker around the office. Show a visitor the great things in your town.
Chapter 10
Mindfulness
“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it is called the present.” Alice Morse Earle
If today is a gift, how do we make the most of it?
One of our biggest challenges in life is focusing on what is right in front of us. Mindfulness is the ability to remove the distractions of what might happen and what did happen, and focus on what is happening right now, this second. Too often, we're either chasing the happiness that will come if all the stars align, or regretting our past mistakes and things we didn't do that we should have.
Practicing Mindfulness is one way to experience the gift of the present. Observing and appreciating what we have and what is around us today helps us find peace. Having gratitude that we have made it to this moment sets us up for a better future by giving us hope and confidence.
Mindfulness has been shown to improve immune function as well as reduce muscle tension, headache, and other forms of chronic pain. It also has longer-term impacts such as lowering blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Mindfulness has also been shown to help with stress, anxiety, and depression.
Mindfulness can help with diet and weight management. Many of us are caught up in “mindless” eating. We're too busy to pay attention to what or how much we are putting into our mouths. Research by Liesal showed that women who are mindful about eating ate fewer calories, and men who consciously focused on chewing their food at least 40 times ate 12% less than those who didn’t.
Mindfulness includes being curious and open to discovering new inspirations and information in the current setting. As a society, we tend to place a high regard on our ability to multitask. The challenge is that, according to an increasing amount of research, multitasking doesn’t really work. We tend to shift between multiple tasks quickly and for short periods of time. We are eliminating parts of the task in order to quickly shift in and out of it. The parts we are eliminating include focus, thoughtfulness, and appreciation. Instead of living in the moment, we attempt to live in several moments. Think of one of the most common and rude forms of multitasking: having a conversation with a person while simultaneously receiving, reading, and answering a text while they are talking. We are physically in the same space as the person and we probably get the overall idea of what they are saying, but we miss the opportunity to connect with them, to stop and really think about and feel what they are communicating. Most importantly, we're not allowing time to stop and appreciate the here and now of our lives. We are focused on the message on our phone, which is often trivial in comparison to our feelings about the person with whom we're actually conversing. As a result, we go from activity to activity throughout a day or a week, and our memories reflect not the great moments in our lives, but how busy we have been. We have missed our opportunities for happiness by attempting to do everything, rather than choosing the few things that will make us happy and productive.
Mindfulness has several levels, from being aware of nature during a walk to focused meditation of the mind, spirit, and body.
Have you ever noticed, while standing in line or waiting, that you have a strong desire to either look busy or be busy? We are almost afraid to be alone with our thoughts; waste time; or, worse yet, appear not to be productive or engaged. Next time you get this feeling, you can become productive by being mindful and appearing to do nothing. Observe the people around you and the environment. What parts of your surroundings can you appreciate? Look at the details. What can you notice that you've never seen before? Being mindful requires us to make two choices: we are intentional about our observations, and we are accepting rather than judgmental. In other words, do it on purpose and collect and savor the information from your senses rather than evaluating it as good or bad.
We can be mindful in many different situations. While eating, stop and look at the food. Observe the colors and how they interact. Observe the shapes and sizes. Smell the food and identify the different aromas. How do they smell separately and how do they blend together? Slowly take a bite, paying attention to the whole process of cutting, scooping, or biting. Think about the flavors and aromas as the food enters your mouth. What kind of textures do you notice? How do the colors, flavors, and textures reflect one another?
You can do the same thing while taking a walk. What do you see? Look closely at the grass, flowers, trees, buildings, people, and wildlife. Do you notice a bug or a butterfly you might have walked past? What are the colors and smells? How hard or soft is the ground? What shapes are the leaves on the trees?
When you are spending time with someone else, be mindful of that person and what she is communicating. What is she trying to get across? Does she need to get something off her chest? Is she sending a different message with her facial expressions and body language than what is being expressed through her voice? Is she interested and engaged, or is she distracted by something else in her life? Is she leaning in with intensity, or is she leaning back and relaxed? Is her smile genuine or forced? Look deep into her eyes. What do her eyes tell you? Take time to be thoughtful and think through what she is saying. Focus on her message by being mindful and observing the whole person. Be fully engaged with her, rather than letting your mind wander to everything else in your life or environment. If you are mindful with the people you interact with, they will seek you out and want to talk to you. People want to talk and spend time with someone they believe will listen and pay attention to them and what they are saying.
Recently, I was talking with a student from one of the local colleges where I am part of a mentoring program. We were discussing this young man’s future and his biggest life challenges. This was a serious discussion that included decisions about what he would do over the next year of his life, and how that would affect his life and career over the long term. An acquaintance in a study group with him was sending a stream of texts about where and what time the study group would meet. The study group was meeting soon after our meeting ended. This young man continued to look at his phone and texts throughout the conversation. He would be in the middle of a sentence and would pause, pick up his phone, read the text, and then continue, somewhat awkwardly with his train of thought. He unwittingly had prioritized a study group for one class over decisions that would affect the rest of his life. He had chosen the urgent over the important. These discussions were intended to give him a clear path about what classes to take, what jobs to accepts, and what actions to take to reach his goals and dreams. Clear answers would have given him a roadmap of how to be productive and efficient with his time over the next 12 to 18 months. Instead, he chose to be productive and multi-task for that single hour. He traded long-term clarity and success for short-term productivity. His biggest challenge was confusion and lack of clarity on what he should be doing; yet when it came time to create that clarity, he was too busy trying to be minutely productive to work on the longer-term clear path (a likely contributor to the confusion in the first place!). If he had taken a few seconds at the beginning of the conversation and had decided to be mindful and focused, he would have accomplished significantly more than changing times and locations for a study group.
As we go through the activities in our lives, are we worried about the future, fretting and reliving the past, or focused on what we can enjoy, learn from, and appreciate right now? It comes down to what we value. Do we value the text that is planning our next interaction with someone more than we value the present moment? Is it possible that in our next interaction we will once again be look
ing at texts about yet another interaction and another after that? Are we so busy planning and thinking about what we need or want to do to be happy that we are not finding the happiness available right now in front of us? James Oppenheim said "the foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise man grows it under his feet." Mindfulness is about looking at what is around us and under our feet, rather than missing the “now” because we are worrying about the future.
Mindlessness is the opposite of mindfulness. Ellen Langer, a leading researcher on mindfulness, likens mindlessness to being on auto-pilot: “The past determines the present; your rules and routines govern rather than just guide what you do.”
“Children think not of what is past, nor what is to come, but enjoy the present time, which few of us do.” Jean de La Bruyère
As children, before we become overwhelmed with the pressures of life and a need to be as productive as possible, we are naturally mindful. When we see a toy or a friend, we stop what we were doing and put our full attention on playing. We don’t evaluate or worry, we just start playing. We become completely absorbed in our games and our friends. At some point we learn the concept of scarcity, and we start trying to cram as much into our days as possible. We get so focused on finding productive hours that we forget to actually “be” in those hours.
Our minds are really good at categorizing. Everything we see or are exposed to gets categorized in our brain so we can more quickly understand the world around us. At some point we start believing that since we have categorized it, we have all the information we need. Our natural curiosity wanes, and we see no need to gather more information. Since we think we know everything there is to know about the person or environment in front of us, we get bored and start looking for something more interesting. We get caught in a vicious cycle of being able to quickly categorize more and more new experiences and therefore finding fewer and fewer things to be excited about. Mindfulness is the act of stopping and discovering something more to be excited about. It requires us to realize that we really don’t know everything there is to know about what we are eating, where we are walking, or even the person we are with. Reigniting our curiosity gives us more opportunities to be happy as we find ways to re-engage with the world.
