Mindfulness is the practice of remaining aware and observant of your surroundings at all times, even in the most stressful situations. Increasing and improving mindfulness is a way to find freedom from stress, anxiety, and mental anguish that is often triggered by outside sources and external factors in everyday life.

Simple Daily Meditation

Meditation does not have to involve fancy clothing or special spaces in the home. In fact, daily meditation only requires 10 minutes each day and a comfortable place to sit. Integrating a 10-minute meditation session into your daily routine is a way to learn to cherish silence and being alone with your thoughts. Use meditation to deflect negativity while overcoming self-defeating thought patterns.

Breathing Exercises

Are you always aware of your breathing? Most people are not. With hectic and busy lives, breathing properly often gets left on the backburner, which adds to stress and feelings of being overwhelmed. Each day while meditating, practice breathing in slowly through your nose and exhaling deeply through your mouth. Simple breathing exercises drastically affect the physiological aspect of the nervous system in the body, instantly providing a calming sensation.

Spend Time in Nature

Spending time in nature is not just a cliché. It is extremely beneficial to ground yourself and to feel less weight on your shoulders. Go for a walk and leave your phone or music player behind to truly disconnect from a busy and at times, overbearing lifestyle. Nature helps to alleviate stress while also providing you with the opportunity to clear your thoughts and solve problems that are otherwise contributing to the stress and anxiety you experience each day.

Create Lists

When life becomes busy and your schedule is full, keeping lists can help to maintain your sanity. Create shopping lists and tasks for each week to prevent yourself from feeling discombobulated or overwhelmed at the thought of simply managing all of your to-dos in your head.

Take Pride in Household Chores

While chores do not always sound appealing when you are stressed and burnt out, they can become a source of joy and fulfillment. Remain mindful with each chore you complete to gain a sense of accomplishment rather than holding onto feelings of dread typically associated with chores. Maximize the effort you put into completing household chores to maintain a healthy and clean living environment. A home that is organized, clean, and welcoming is much easier to live in while remaining calm and stress-free.

Improve Your Food Choices

Remain mindful each time you create a meal or choose to eat. Learn more about diet and nutrition to ensure your body is receiving proper vitamins, minerals, and nutrients at each meal. Spend time diving into cooking and baking to relax your mind while focusing on fueling your body and providing it with the healthiest and heartiest ingredients possible.

Mindfulness is extremely beneficial in all aspects of life, whether you are struggling with your career or juggling an entire household of children. With the right mindfulness exercises and tools, rediscover how to listen to and respond to your mind without feeling defeated each day.

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6 Ways Fitness Improves Your Life

Most people want to improve their lives, but they don’t know how to start. Physical fitness may not be at the top of the agenda, but it should be. Deciding to exercise can improve your life in more ways than just being physically fit. Fitness improves physical, mental, and emotional health, and it can lay the foundation for better relationships with others and with you.

1. Physical Health

Most people start exercising to better their physical health, and it works. People can maintain their mobility and vitality for longer by exercising a few times a week. Exercise boosts immunity, so those who exercise regularly also have lower risk of diseases like diabetes and heart disease. While physical health is a primary concern, when people exercise they see their overall health improve.

2. Stress

Stress is necessary, but excess stress can be a destructive force. Exercising regularly minimizes anxiety; those who exercise also have lower reaction to stressful situations. They are also more likely to kick the bad habits that cause their stress. Stress has mental and emotional impacts as well as the obvious physical ones, so it would be wise to channel ill-managed stress through exercise.

3. Emotional Health

Exercise will helps with improving body image, and while this may be a physical benefit, people are emotionally attached to their bodies as well as physically. Improved body image does wonders for confidence. Additionally, exercise releases endorphins (feel-good chemicals); exercise boosts mood, and it wards off depression. Exercise lessens negative emotions, so for those who find negative feelings overcoming, they should implement an exercise routine.

4. Mental Vitality

Regular exercise helps to counteract the deterioration of the brain over time. When people exercise, blood flow to the brain increases. Physical activity (particularly aerobic activity) improves cognitive function. Regular exercise can strengthen memory and decrease odds of developing dementia (like Alzheimer’s). Mental fitness is as much a concern as the physical, so accomplishing fitness goals first thing in the morning aids your thinking throughout the day.

5. Sleep

Issues with sleep are prevalent, particularly for people who live more sedentary lifestyles. Exercise is a natural remedy for insomnia, and quality of sleep is increased with regular exercise. Exercise decreases the need for sleep aids and the time it takes to fall asleep. The quality of sleep affects the quality of the day ahead. Sleep time should be respected, just like the time it takes to exercise.

6. Relationships

Problems in relationships, not just romantic ones, could result from any of the more personal issues listed above. People get stressed, in bad moods, in poor health; they get caught making bad decisions day after day, and these decisions affect our relationships. In intimate relationships, regular exercise can make sex feel better (and more possible). Exercise makes the body stronger and increases stamina. (Additionally, for men, exercise helps with erectile dysfunction.) In all relationships, exercise can help by putting you in a better mood and changing the way you think.

Conclusion

Fitness isn’t a top priority for everyone, but exercising regularly leads to making better decisions in your everyday lives. Improving your fitness doesn’t just improve your physical, mental, and emotional health; being fit isn’t just about having less stress and better sleep. Fitness improves your relationships with others, but most importantly, it improves the relationship you have with yourself.

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Mindfulness started out as something only experienced meditators were familiar with and wasn’t really a mainstream way of approaching your thoughts and cognition for a long time. Recently, however, mindfulness has reached the mainstream, for good reasons. There are a huge number of benefits of practicing mindfulness in your daily life. Here are 4 good reasons to focus on mindfulness and incorporate it into your daily life.

Mindfulness Lowers Stress Levels

Mindfulness meditation and mindfulness cognitive behavioral therapy has, in many different studies, been clinically shown to reduce stress levels in those who practice it. In one study there was a direct correlation between a subject’s level of mindfulness and a lowering of cortisol levels.

Cortisol is a hormone that is produced when you are stressed out, and this link indicates that practicing mindfulness reducing the levels of cortisol in the body due to less stress levels across the board. Part of the reason mindfulness reduces stress is due to learning to r-perceive your thoughts and develop a different relationship with them.

Mindfulness Boosts Your Working Memory

Mindfulness has been shown to boost working memory and increases the ability to learn. Mindfulness physically changes the brain by increasing the amount of grey matter in the hippocampus, the brain area that is responsible for both these things. In one study, people who went through 8-week intensive mindfulness meditation training showed significant increases in the grey matter in their hippocampi.

Mindfulness Calms Anxiety-Causing Ruminations

One way that mindfulness can improve your life is by changing how you relate to your thoughts, your ability to control your thoughts and your emotional responses. These tools help to reduce anxiety causes ruminations that lead to mental distress and spiked anxiety. Focusing on past decisions, too much on the future or just rushing thoughts in general feeds into rumination and causes high levels of anxiety. Learning to be mindful helps you better cope with thoughts that might cause anxiety. In one study, a group of medical students who underwent mindfulness training showed markedly less levels of anxiety and depression after 9 weeks in contrast to the control group, who saw increased or stable levels of the same emotions.

Mindfulness Increases Day-to-Day Focus

Mindfulness has been shown to increase a person’s ability to focus and improve their overall attention span. In one study, a group of experienced mindfulness meditators had their attention tested against those who had never practiced mindfulness before. The experienced group had much higher levels of attention and focus than the non-practicing control group. It is postulated that this is due to the fact that mindfulness mediation actually helps create and strengthen different neural networks that are involved with attention and focus.

Mindfulness is a simple habit that can radically change your life. Mindfulness has not only been shown to improve mental health but to also make helpful physical changes in the brain and different hormone levels. Give it a try and reap the benefits of this simple, effective technique.

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5 Ways to Boost Your Fitness Levels

There are many ways to boost physical health without ever hitting the gym. Sure, the gym is a great place to lose weight, tone muscle, and even meet new friends; however, with a little motivation, anyone should be able to transition into a healthier lifestyle without ever stepping foot inside a gym.

Excluding the gym, there is still a plethora of ways to live a healthier lifestyle. Below you will find just five ways to improve your physical health.

1. Workout from Home

Purchase a treadmill and some free weights. This is honestly all you need to get started with home workouts. You can move on to some other tools at a later date, but starting with the basics is a good way to get into the groove of things. If you are hesitant to purchase equipment, you can find a variety of different exercises that do not require equipment. Jumping jacks, push-ups, and sit-ups aren’t quite as effective as other forms of training, but they will get the job done in a pinch.

2. Become more active around the House

If you really want to improve your physical health you can take on more household responsibilities. This includes mowing the lawn, fixing appliances, or even doing major renovations. Being active doesn’t mean you have to actually workout; doing actual labor can be a great way to increase your fitness levels.

3. Transportation

If the place you live in makes it possible, riding a bike to work can be a great way shed some calories. If you live in a major metropolitan area, you may even find that you get places faster on bike than in a car. Riding a bike isn’t only good for your own health; it is good for the Earth.

4. Change your Diet

There are literally hundreds of healthy diets out there. Having a well-balanced intake of food groups is important to positive physical health. Don’t make the mistake of cutting out certain food groups completely. While this is a great idea to see results, it isn’t always healthy to limit the type of foods you eat.

5. Set real goals

Do you want to improve your cholesterol? Lose weight? Or do you just want to look better? Figure out exactly what you want and write it down. Use a journal to record your progress and write down ideas. You will be able to come up with your own ways to stay busy, improve physical health, and feel better.

 Conclusion

You could always get a gym membership, but don’t make the mistake that most people make: not using it. If you get a gym membership, set one day a week aside for gym activity and stick to. If gyms aren’t for you, you will surely find inspiration from the list above.

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