Episode 04: How To Start Meditating So You Can Be Mindful AF
Anxiety and uncertainty are at an all-time high right now, so we wanted to share some strategies for finding some calm and peace in all the chaos. The average person has about 50,000 thoughts a day, and the best way to gain control of your thoughts and emotions is through a solid mindfulness and meditation practice. It’s like when you have too many tabs open on your laptop... it’s not going to run very fast, and it’s probably going to crash.
We called in the mindfulness Queen herself, Nina Purewal, to learn how we can get mindful AF and master our thoughts. Nina has been studying mindfulness and meditation for over 20 years! She's the owner of Pure Minds, a company that runs mindfulness workshops for the public and corporate sectors, and she's the co-author of the bestselling book, Let That Shit Go. If you’re looking for an approachable, no-BS approach to mindfulness and meditation, this book is for you.
We also recorded an incredible guided meditation with Nina, so make sure you listen to the end of the episode (at 36:20), or queue it up on its own in the bonus meditation episode we uploaded.
There’s never been a better time to adopt new habits like meditating and practise more self-care. Nina reminded us that “Self-love is about bubble baths, netflix and a night out, but it’s also about how we’re talking to ourselves and how we’re treating ourselves.”
What are the benefits of Meditation?
“It’s kind of like going to the gym for your mind,” says Nina. “It’s an opportunity for you to sit there in complete silence and just observe what’s going on. And by doing that, you’ll be much more equipped in the real world when your mind gets the best of you. You’ll know what to do with it, and you’ll have a better sense of how to reign it in.”
There’s a lot of information about practising mindfulness and meditation, so we’re boiling it down to the facts you need to know:
It’s all about living in the present moment, and leaning into your emotions instead of running away from them. Meditation increases awareness, clarity, focus, and even compassion! One study found that when experts meditated on compassion, they altered their brain’s capacity for feeling empathy.
Researchers at John Hopkins University found that meditation improves symptoms of depression, anxiety, irritability, and pain related to stress.
In one study, people who used a meditation app for 8 weeks had a 46% reduction in depression and a 31% reduction in anxiety.
In another study, after only 30 days of using the meditation app Headspace, participants’ stress was down by a third.
In our own experience, practising meditation and mindfulness has had a major impact on our mind and mood. But the key is trying to find a practice that fits into your everyday life. We love guided meditations apps like Headspace and Calm to help center us before our day starts, or help us get focused before we sit down to work.
How can meditation help shape your thoughts?
From the second we wake up to the moment we fall asleep, we are constantly connected. Whether it’s via our smartphones, work emails, or everyday stressors, our mind is always inundated with racing thoughts. Nina calls this our “chatty mind” (or monkey mind), and it just keeps swinging from thought to thought without stopping. This can lead to feelings of anxiety, overwhelm, or negativity for a lot of us. Meditation allows us to calm these thoughts and tap into what Nina calls our “observing mind”. “The observing mind simply observes what the chatty mind is doing. It doesn’t judge the chatty mind. It doesn’t try to solve for the thoughts you’re thinking. It doesn’t make you feel guilty for thinking those thoughts,” she says.
The observing mind’s job is to recognize what’s going on in your head, and to help bring you back to the present moment. That’s the exact skill that meditation develops— it helps us control the chatty mind. “The observing mind is like a muscle,” explains Nina. The more you lean into it, the more you’ll be able to leverage it. “Because at the end of the day, we are not our thoughts,” she says.
How can we stop the negative thinking?
Take the time to “CSI the shit out of your thoughts,” says Nina. Once you tap into your observing mind and create some space between all of those negative thoughts, ask yourself where they came from...Are they even really true? Are you really bad at your job? What proof do you have of that? Weren’t you hired for a reason? Take a step back and replace negative thoughts with truths, or with a more positive perspective.
How do we disconnect and check in with ourselves?
Set some boundaries for yourself. Nina suggests setting hard and fast rules when it comes to devices and distraction:
Don’t check your phone before bed. Give yourself a mental break, and try reading a book, meditating or doing something for yourself besides scrolling.
Don’t look at your phone when you wake up. Give yourself some peace in the morning before logging onto Instagram or responding to the 50 emails that piled up over night.
Pick a day to disconnect. Try doing a digital detox on Sundays and give yourself a break from your phone. If that’s too daunting, Nina suggests picking one day a month to truly go offline and chill.
Create physical boundaries. When you get home from work, try leaving your phone somewhere you won’t be tempted to look at it 24/7. Leave it in your car, charge it in your basement, or put it somewhere that’s out of site, out of mind.
Turn off your notifications. Turning off all notifications puts you in control of when you need to check your phone.
Take work off your phone. Does that 10:00pm email really need to be answered right away? Assuming it’s not a 911 emergency, taking your work email off your phone helps create a healthy boundary between work and personal life.
Notice what makes you feel good. Take inventory of the types of people and accounts that you follow on social media and how they make you feel.
How can we incorporate mindfulness in our busy lives?
It’s hard to actually practice mindfulness IRL, when you’re balancing work, your personal life, and day to day stresses that come up. So how can you realistically incorporate more mindfulness?
Implement a gratitude practice. Nina suggests thinking of five things you’re grateful for each morning when you wake up to stop negative thoughts in their tracks. You can go big picture or get super granular with your gratitudes, from recognizing the awesome people and opportunities you’re surrounded by, to the daily details we take for granted like shelter and running water.
Match your train of thought with your actions. Nina learned this technique from one of her meditation teachers in California, who suggested matching the thoughts in your head with the actions that you are doing. So, if you’re washing the dishes, you would think to yourself: “I am now washing a pot. Now I'm putting soap on the sponge. Now I’m rinsing the pot,” and so on. It might feel a bit crazy at first, but this allows you to practise bringing yourself back into the present moment.
Lean into breath. Taking deep breaths can help alleviate feelings of stress, anxiety and anger. The more shallow our breathing is, the more panic we feel.
Have mindful triggers throughout your day. Nina recommends picking a small activity that you do daily (think: brushing your teeth, making a coffee, showering, etc.) that acts as a consistent trigger to bring you back into the present moment.
Meditate. Whether you have five minutes, or half an hour, carve out some time to sit in silence and let your thoughts flow. Try different kinds of meditation, from breathwork to mantras to visualizations, and see what works best for you.
If you’re feeling a little lost right now, get some comfort from the advice Nina’s meditation teacher in California shared: “If you get to a point where you don’t know who you are, that’s a good thing. It just means that you are taking off all of the layers, and building yourself back up.”
We hope that this episode inspires you to start (or continue!) a mindfulness and meditation practice. If you liked this episode it would mean the world to us if you would rate the podcast and share it with your friends!
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See you next week! xo