EAPworks April Newsletter- Tips on Mindfulness - please distribute to employees. We hope you find it helpful! The team at EAPworks
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Introducing you to mindfulness....
Mindfulness has become popular as a mechanism for improving mental, emotional and physical well-being. It involves focussing your mind with an attitude of acceptance, paying attention to thoughts and feelings without judgement.
Learning the skills of Mindfulness also gives us some practical tools to deal with challenging events that affect us all. Mindfulness focuses the mind on the 'here and now' and you may be less likely to get caught up in worries about the future or regrets over the past.
This newsletter would like to share some tips and insights which we hope you find helpful - in work and out of work.
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment.
It also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them—without believing, for instance, that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment. When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune into what we’re sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future.
Key components of practising Mindfulness
- Pay close attention to your breathing, especially when you’re feeling intense emotions.
- Notice—really notice—what you’re sensing in a given moment, the sights, sounds, and smells that usually slip by without reaching your conscious awareness.
- Recognise that your thoughts and emotions are fleeting - like clouds passing by - and do not define you, this insight that can free you from negative thought patterns.
- Tune into your body’s physical sensations, from the water hitting your skin in the shower to the way your body rests in your office chair.
Benefits of Mindfulness
Studies have shown that practicing mindfulness, even for just a few weeks, can bring a variety of physical, psychological, and social benefits.
How mindful are you?
Sometimes our thoughts and pressures overwhelm us. Here is a simple tool to help ....
Trying a short mindfulness exercise
Your capacity to be mindful is most powerfully developed through mindfulness meditation. One of the most popular mindfulness meditations is mindfulness of breath. This involves being mindfully aware of your breath. Follow these steps to try mindfulness meditation out for yourself:
1. Be aware of the sense of your own breathing. You don’t need to change the rate of your breath. Just feel the physical sensation of your breath entering and leaving the body.
You can feel the breath in the nose, the throat, the chest or down in your belly. If possible, try and feel the breath in the belly as it’s more grounding and is more likely to make you feel relaxed.
2. When your mind wonders off into thoughts, bring your attention back. It is the nature of thoughts to take your attention away from whatever you want to focus on, and into thoughts about the past or future, worries or dreams. Don’t worry about it.
As soon as you realise that you’ve been thinking about something else, notice what you were thinking about, and gently guide your attention back to your breath. You don’t need to criticise yourself.
That’s it. Mindfulness of breath is as simple as that. Bring a sense of the mindful attitudes to your experience such as curiosity, kindness and acceptance. You can do this exercise for as short as a minute, or as long as an hour.
When you get into a slump at work.....
Mindful eating involves really tasting your food.
Mindful eating involves tuning into your own natural physical hunger signals.
Mindful eating involves learning to know when you’ve had enough
Mindful eating involves choosing foods wisely, both for satisfaction and for health
