[Mindfulness Week 7]: All work and no play?

Hi, and welcome to the seventh week of the Mindfulness Program!

This week we'll explore ways to nourish ourselves when we're under a lot of stress and pressure in our busy lives.

Please note that all exercises and meditations are from the book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World by professor Mark Williams and journalist Danny Penman.

Let's dive in!

Overview: Week 7 Mindfulness

Week Seven explores the close connection between our daily routines, activities, behaviour and moods. When we are stressed and exhausted, we often give up the things that "nourish" us to make time for the more "pressing" and "important" things. We try to clear the decks.

Week Seven focuses on using meditation to help you make more skilful choices so that you can do more of the things that nourish you, and limit the downsides of those things that drain and deplete your inner resources.

This will help you to enter a virtuous cycle that leads to greater creativity, resilience and the ability to enjoy life spontaneously as it is, rather than how you wish it to be. Anxieties, stresses and worries will still come, but they are more likely to melt away as you learn to meet them with kindness.

Main idea: Rebalancing your life

Some activities are more than just relaxing or enjoyable; they actually nourish us at a far deeper level too. They help us build up resilience to life's daily stresses and strains.

Other activities deplete us. They drain away our energy, making us weaker and more vulnerable to the dips in life's rollercoaster ride.

They also eat away at our capacity to enjoy life fully. Very quickly, these depleting activities can begin monopolising our lives. And if we're under pressure, the things that nourish us are gradually abandoned, almost without notice, driving us into the exhaustion funnel.

The Exhaustion Funnel – Professor Marie Åsberg of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm

Take this little test for yourself to see how much of your life is devoted to activities that nourish you and how much to those that deplete you.

First, mentally run through the different activities that you do in a typical day. Feel free to close your eyes for a few moments to help bring these to mind.

If you spend much of your day apparently doing the same thing, try breaking the activitivies down into smaller pieces, such as talking to colleagues, making coffee, answering email, and eating lunch. And what sort of things do you find yourself doing in a typical evening or weekend?

Now, write it all down, listing maybe ten and fifteen activities of a typical day in a column on the left-hand side of your page.

Activities you do in a typical day	N/D
___	_____
___	_____
___	_____

When you have a list in front of you, ask yourself these questions:

Of the things you have written, which nourish you? What lifts your mood, energises you, and makes you feel calm and centred? What increases your sense of actually being alive and present, rather than merely existing? These are nourishing activities.
Of the things that you have written, which deplete you? What pulls you down, drains away your energy, makes you feel tense and fragmented? What decreases your sense of actually being alive and present, what makes you feel that you are merely existing, or worse? These are depleting activities.

Now, complete the exercise by putting an N for Nourishing and a D for depleting in the right-hand side, corresponding to each activity.

If an activity is both, put down your first reaction, and if you simply can't choose, put N/D or D/N. You may find that you want to say "It depends", and if so, it may be useful to notice what it depends on.

The aim of the exercise is not to shock or unsettle you, but to give you an idea of the balance in your life between the things that nourish and those that deplete you.

The balance does not have to be perfect, as one nourishing activity that you love might easily outweigh any number of depleting ones.

Nevertheless, it is wise to have at least a handful of nourishing activities (and preferably do at least one each day) to balance the depleting ones.

This may be as simple as taking a long bath, reading a book, going for a brisk walk, or indulging in your favourite hobby. The old saying, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" contains more than a grain of truth. In some cultures, doctors don’t ask, "When did you start to feel depressed?" but "When did you stop dancing?"

Learning to dance again

Understanding how much of your life is devoted to depleting activities is one thing, but it’s also important to take action to spend less time doing them or to devote more effort to nourishing pasttimes.

A central focus for this week is to take action to redress the balance between the things that nourish and those that deplete you.

I will alter the balance between nourishing and depleting activities by:____________.

A word of encouragement

People give a lot of reasons for not rebalancing their lives. According to research, here are a few of the most common ones:

There are things in life that I don't have a choice over, like going to work.
If I don't keep up, I fall behind.
It's shameful to show weakness at work.
I wasn't raised to take time for myself.
I can only do something that I enjoy once my obligations to others, my work, have been completely satisfied.
I have so many caring responsibilities. It would be wrong to put myself first.

If any of these reasons, and countless others like them, chime with you then perhaps you are now in a position to see how many of them depend on old habits of black-and-white thinking in which there seems to be no middle way.

Mindfulness helps you to get beyond the extremes, to see how you can find creative ways of helping to nourish yourself in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Like me, you might find gaps in your day. And, in the long term, it's best for everyone, including yourself, to find a balance between nourishing and depleting actitivies.

Spend a few minutes reflecting on how you can begin to redress the balance between the nourishing and depleting activities that you listed in the table earlier. Perhaps you can do this together with someone with whom you share your life, a family member or trusted work colleague, for example? Feel free to share it with me :)

Practices for Week 7: Meditation

Mindfulness meditations (all tracks) — Mindfulness mediations: All tracks on Soundcloud.

This week, you choose two meditations that you want to practice.

Choose one of the meditations because they gave you some appreciable nourishing benefit, such as helping you to relax or simply making you feel good about the world.

Choose the other because you felt that you didn’t fully get to grips with it first time around, because it was difficult in some way or because you feel that you'd benefit from repeating it.

Devote about 20 to 30 minutes to the two combined meditations. As with the previous ones, you could carry them out in sequence while listening to the appropriate tracks, or do them at different times of the day.

The order in which you do the two meditations isn’t important. It might be worth setting up a playlist for the two meditations on your phone or computer.

Write down the two meditations you plan to do (you can mull this decision over for a while if you wish). Feel free to reply if you want some input from me.

The three-minute Breathing Space meditation twice a day at set times and when needed.

Outro

Tiny actions can alter your relationship to the world for the better.

Everyday life offers endless opportumnities for you to stop, focus, to remind yourself to be fully awake and present to what is happening right now.

Which nourishing actitivies will you do in the coming week? I'll be taking walks around the lake, basking in the Swedish sun. (Spring is here, and we haven't seen the sun for months!)

Have a great, nourishing week!

Let me know how you're doing, or just say hello. I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,
Olle

Olle Lindholm