Five Practical Mindfulness Hacks

Practising mindfulness meditation on a regular basis is one of the best ways to reduce stress and anxiety in our lives. Using mindfulness meditation for practical outcomes is another thing entirely which gives a new motivation to start yesterday!

It is easy to think of meditation as a waste of time or something to be done only if you had spare time on your hands. When you get into the habit of meditating each day, even if just for 10 minutes, you will discover a whole range of real world benefits.

#Hack 1 : Being Luckier

After just a few days spent meditating each morning, you will notice a reversal in your fortune and good luck. You increase your ability to spot coincidences in your life.  There are two reasons this happens.

First of all, such serendipities happen all the time but we can often fail to spot them when our mind is busy and over-active. The calmness we get from meditating first thing leaks into our day and helps us zone in on the happenstances that can make our day.

The second reason is that the world around us mirrors our internal thought processes. If we think the world is out to get us, it has the tendency to do just that. If we harbour kind thoughts, remarkably the world and the people in our world reflect benevolence back to us. We become both lucky in life and in love, with who we are with and what we are doing.

#Hack 2 : Being More Creative

We are blessed with two minds in our heads that operate in slightly different ways. It’s an urban myth that our right brain is creative and our left brain is logical. It is still a generalisation but more accurate to envisage that the right brain concerns itself with the whole vision and learning new things. At the same time, it is thought that the left brain focuses on the detail and processed learned responses.

Regular meditation improves the interaction and inter-communication between both hemispheres. More accurately it reduces the tendency for the hemispheres to conflict with each other that often results in us being in two minds about something or other, quite literally. When we enter the Whole Brain Thinking state, [Chantal : I can write another article just on this] we become able to hold the whole vision and detail at the same time. This is a crucial skill for anyone working on a creative task, not least as it allows us to know when the task is completed to perfection.

#Hack 3 : Creating More Time

The normal human mind is only capable of experiencing one thought at a time. So take a typical day when you might have a task to do while writing an article like this one. If you start to worry about what people will think of you when they read it, your attention will drift from the task in hand. If your thoughts wander to a conversation you had wished you hadn’t had yesterday, your efficiency will drop too.

After a few weeks of practicing meditation, you will find you can stay in the meditative state with your eyes open, while working and creating. Now meditation is not about having no thoughts at all but changing your relationship with them. You quickly find that you gain a new level of control over thoughts that would previously have distracted you and you become more productive with an improved quality of output. When random thoughts do arrive, you will discover that they can be applied to what you are working on, as described in the next hack.

#Hack 4 : Becoming an Ideas Generator

Another common misconception is that our brains are generators of thought. They are as much a receiver of thought forms. As we are only capable of having one thought at a time, if our mind is consumed by internal dialogue and commentary, such external thoughts don’t get much of a look in.

Light bulb, or aha, moments are examples of thoughts that we pull out of the ether. They come from what is known as the collective consciousness and they arrive in less than a second. If you are short of an idea and ask for some inspiration before you meditate, you will quickly find that by stilling your mind, it just shows up. Your next bright idea is just one meditation away.

#Hack 5 : Becoming More Attractive

When we maintain a calm demeanour, it helps reduce tension around us. You will find the worry lines drop away from your face. People might ask if you have had treatment and you will become more attractive in all senses of the word.

At the same time our attractiveness increases, we hone our ability to spot coincidences, as in Hack #1. People like working with creative people, so #Hack 2 kicks in too. With more time on our hands, from #Hack 3, we have more time to be kind to ourselves and others which makes us even more attractive to be around. When we exercise #Hack 4, we become the ‘go to’ person for people who are short of ideas. The whole thing is cyclical and what goes around, comes around.

When all of this potential is available to us by investing 10 minutes of ‘me time’ each day, you can see why it’s a kind of madness not to meditate.

Tom is the author of The Authority Guide to Practical Mindfulness which comes with ten 10 minute meditations to help you with these hacks and more.

He is the creator of the world’s first time management programme based on mindfulness called Living Timefully and the host of the Zone Show podcast. He is also an expert at clearing creative blocks, a philanthropist and one of the leading meditation guides on the world’s most popular meditation app, Insight Timer.

For more about his work, visit www.tomevans.co