Reduce Your Stress With Mindfulness

Stress management is one of the most overlooked lifestyle factors of the Paleo AIP. Today I’ll teach you some of my best tips to Reduce Your Stress with Mindfulness.

Stress is something that everyone has and comes up in everyone’s daily life.  Some days are, of course, worse than others. In most cases we can handle our daily stressors, but when the stress keeps piling on it can be difficult to manage.

Mindfulness is one way you can manage your stress, recognize the triggers, and work through that stress to remove it from your life and move on with your day. If you aren’t sure how mindfulness (an important lifestyle factor of the Paleo Autoimmune Protocol) will reduce your stress, or even help with it at all, read on for a few things to consider.

Work Through What Matters

Stress can come from a variety of areas in your life, and many of those stresses don’t matter in the long run. That is to say that while they may matter in the moment, they are not priorities.

One way to reduce your stress with mindfulness is to focus on the items that are important and need your focus versus the things that do not. An example of this would be having your mind cluttered with what someone said about you or gossip that is affecting your day.

These are things that can and need to be reduced from your life because they are causing unnecessary stress. Once these are removed you can focus on the things that do matter like the appointments you have later in the week.

Take Time to Breathe

This may sound like a very basic concept, but taking time to breathe can help you reduce the stress in your life.

The trick to this is to actually learn breathing techniques that can help you reduce your heart rate and keep your body and emotions in check.

Once you learn a few breathing techniques, you can apply them at the appropriate times and help refocus yourself, reduce the stress, and deal with any fallout from that stress effectively.

Here are some other ways to look at life through the AIP lens to help with your mindset.

Changing Your Reaction

Often stress is caused from our immediate reaction to the stress or the thing causing the stress. We take in the immediate reaction and let it explode in our minds.

This causes a massive amount of panic over something that likely doesn’t need that sort of reaction. An example of this would be reacting to a new item on your to-do list that is unexpected. You may panic wondering how you will complete the task with the other tasks you have.

Instead, you can use mindfulness to refocus and realize that the task can be worked in with another task or handled quickly and moved to your completed list.

Tips for Adding Mindfulness to Your Daily Routine

Once you learn a little more about mindfulness and how it can help you, it is time to start putting it into action. This begins with adding it to your daily routine, so that you get accustomed to this new way of thinking. Below are some simple tips for adding mindfulness to your daily routine.

Try it During Regular Daily Activities

One of the easiest ways to add mindfulness to your daily routine is to focus on it during regular activities. These are things you do each and every day, when your mind tends to wander.

Inside my AIP Back to Basics DIY Program, I liken this to “attaching a habit to another habit.”

Think about what your thoughts were while taking a shower or brushing your teeth this morning. You were probably thinking of what you need to do that day, planning your meals, or even thinking about stressful situations you need to work out.

These daily tasks are perfect for being more mindful. Think about the act at hand, not anything else. Really focus on the feel of the warm water hitting your body in the shower, the smell of your toxin-free soap, and the sound of the water trickling down. This is what mindfulness is at its core.

Focus On Your Breathing

When you are busy being mindful during your daily activities, make sure you focus on your breathing. This is a good way to start out when you aren’t quite ready to do these small mindful meditation sessions.

Focus just on your breathing when your other thoughts try to creep into your mind.

Breathing can help your physical and mental state to relax and enter a different wavelength. It is the cornerstone of mindfulness and one of the best ways to let your mind calm a little bit.

Complete Just One Task at a Time

A common mistake people make when trying to be mindful and enter a more positive frame of mind during the day is focusing on too many things at once. Multi-tasking is not good for productivity and focus.

Stop trying to do everything at once, and just pick one task to work on. This allows you to focus on just that one task, which in turn leads your mind to only thinking about this one thing.

Even if you are working on a project for your job, you are being more mindful since you are not trying to think about all your other tasks on the to-do list, but just this one thing. It is a simple way to get used to mindfulness.

What is One Mindfulness Tip Can You Try Today?

Though mindfulness does take some time, it can help you with the stress in your life and reducing that stress into manageable categories or amounts. As you get into mindfulness you will start to find new ways it can help you and new methods to use.

Let me know in the comments which one of these tips you want to start today. I’d love to hear!