Behavioral Health Services Feature Story

Mindfulness: Being in the Present:

The following 60-second exercises can be integrated into your daily life most anywhere at anytime.
1. Deep Breathing: calms your mind bringing your thoughts to the present.
2. Body Scanning the tense areas in your body from head to toe increasing physical and emotional awareness.
3. Environmental Exploration by studying something indoors or outdoors and explore the details of it.
4. Use Mindful Activities as a way to create a new experience by noticing every aspect of the activity.
5. Take a Time Out from Electronics by replacing it using one of the exercises from this article.
6. Use Reflective Listening to focus on the meaning of what is being talked about.
7. Use Your Senses by seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling the environment around you.
8. Thinking Positively by creating a personal mantra or affirmative statement and practice saying it several times a day.
9. Show Appreciation by becoming aware of things that go unnoticed.
10. Planning Mindful Moments by setting your watch to breathe, reflect and dedicate your time to what’s important.
11. Eating Mindfully by using all of your senses.
12. Take Your Time instead of multi-tasking or hurrying from one activity to another.
13. Deactivate Diversions by just turning off your electronics or blocking time off in your calendar.
14. Pay Attention to how you treat others by treating them the way you want to be treated.
15. Make Stress Your Friend by changing a negative attitude toward certain situations to a positive attitude, which includes changing your body language and smiling more. 16. Practice Acceptance by accepting things as they are instead of what they should be.
17. Use Self-Reflection by identifying what you accomplished for that particular day without judging yourself.
18. Set Daily Goals by determining what you would like to accomplish and what you would like the end result to look like.
19. Commit-to-Commit by practicing one or some of the above exercises and in time you will become more mindfully present.
Charlene Caiano ~ Mental Health Counselor ~ Office: (802)-338-3445