Meditation: Yes, You Can Do It With Your Whiskey Nightcap
Meditation: Yes, You Can Do It With Your Whiskey Nightcap
Do you ever:
Forget what you were stressing about?
Waste more energy trying to remember what exactly was stressing you out?
Work. Dad Life. Checking in on your buddy’s tailgate party via Facebook. We all are constantly bombarded with stuff.
Being Busy Is Normal…
But problems arise when our monkey brain cannot differentiate between a serious responsibility, and a GIF of a man attacking a table.
This is where mindfulness meditation comes in.
Think of your brain as your browser: Maybe you have 14 tabs open.
On one, you have CNBC pulled up…yikes.
One, your high-school girlfriend’s facebook page (dodged a bullet).
All of the tabs are like this, except one, which is your actual work.
With all of these mental distractions, it can feel impossible to focus on what is actually important.
At its most effective, Meditation is like closing out all your unnecessary mental-tabs.
This isn’t just a psychological process: Mindfulness practice has been shown to increase the density of Gray Matter in your brain, which is a factor responsible for cognitive performance.
Now, this doesn’t mean you have to shave your head and join a monastic order: This survey found that even five minutes of daily meditation can improve focus and reduce stress in individuals.
Thankfully, our digital overlords have made practicing mindfulness super easy.
I use Insight Timer (Not an Ad! Just a fan).
What this looks like for me: my workday is over, but I’m still rereading my emails for typos.
I open the App, and search: “Meditation for Work”.
I filter by time, and now Clarence’s soothing voice is guiding me through a five minute breathing exercise.
The five minutes is over. At its best, I feel totally relaxed and centered afterwards. At its worst, I feel only marginally better.
Never, and I repeat never, have I felt worse after a mediation .
Try A Five Minute Guided Meditation
Meditation is one of those weird paradoxes of productivity: By dedicating yourself to giving a little bit of time daily, you will gain a lot of time in the long-run.
By re-aligning your thoughts with your goals, you can spend your energy only working on the stuff that is actually important to your life.
More time with kids. Less time remembering what you need to worry about.
P.S.
Yes, you can do it with your whiskey nightcap. Just try to save your sips for before and after the meditation(Clarence will smell it on you).