Tips for Building Your Own Mindfulness Practice
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EmailLearn how to incorporate mindfulness concepts and practices into your daily routine to improve your overall health and well-being.
Practicing mindfulness has a wide range of benefits. There is solid research evidence indicating that practicing mindfulness improves physical, mental, and emotional health, as well as overall life satisfaction. However, putting mindfulness concepts into daily practice may be challenging, especially if mindfulness is new to you. Some common barriers that may prevent someone from making healthy behavior changes include not having a specific plan and not engaging with resources to learn more and expand your practice.
SMARTER goals
Regardless of the change you want to make, creating a specific action or practice plan can help. Consider using the SMARTER Goals framework when making your plan:
- S - Specific: The goal should be clear and detailed, answering what you want to achieve, why it's important, and how you’ll accomplish it.
- M - Measurable: The goal should have criteria to track progress and measure success.
- A - Achievable: The goal needs to be realistic and attainable based on your available resources and abilities.
- R - Relevant: The goal should align with your broader objectives and values.
- T - Time-bound: The goal should have a deadline or timeframe to create urgency.
- E - Engaged: Regularly review your progress and adjust your plan if necessary.
- R - Revisit: Update or refine the goal as needed to ensure it remains meaningful and achievable.
Remember that your plan should be designed to work for you. Set yourself up for success by making changes to your plan along the way to solve problems and overcome barriers. If you don’t know where to start, one tip is to begin by incorporating the new behavior into existing routines. For example, you could perform a mindful body scan before bed or focused attention practice while brushing your teeth.
The mindfulness mindset
Mindfulness can be defined as a general way of navigating life that focuses our attention on the present moment in a nonjudgmental way. To help build this mindset, there are many different types of mindfulness practices that you can incorporate into your daily routines. The Mindfulness for Better Living Platform from Michigan State University Extension provides many different types of guided mindfulness practices covering topics that include mindfulness basics, breathing, body awareness, awareness of thoughts, awareness of emotions and more.
It is important to explore different types of practices to not only expand your knowledge and understanding of mindfulness, but also to learn which practices you like best! Some practices may work better than others for you and may even work differently depending on the time and location you practice from throughout the day. You can always adjust and make changes to practices to make them work better for you. Guided practices from different sources may vary in length, topic, narrator, background sounds, overall style and many other factors. Remember, the “best” practice is whichever one works best for you.
Mindfulness for Better Living
The Mindfulness for Better Living Platform was created to help you explore mindfulness topics and build your own practice. You can find more information about our resources and sign up for mindfulness programs we offer at the links below:
