How to hack meditation
EXPERTS estimate the average person has between 60,000 and 80,000 thoughts per day. That’s up to 3300 thoughts per hour, every single hour. If you imagine a freeway with that sort of traffic on it, it would be bumper-to-bumper chaos, right?
And that’s where meditation, or mindfulness, steps in. That doesn’t mean you need to go and find a rock in the forest to sit on with your legs crossed. It just means taking a moment to slow your mind and focus on your thoughts, which is especially important at a time like this, when there is so much change and uncertainty in the air.
So I’m going to walk you through some simple meditation techniques the entire family can use. You don’t need any equipment or even a special place to do it.
Retrain your brain
Remember all those thousands of thoughts I mentioned earlier? Here’s the scary part; up to 90 per cent of them are negative.
It’s human nature to hang on to negative thoughts and emotions longer than positive ones – back in our earliest history, it paid to remember which berries were poisonous, or which rock the lion was sleeping under. But that doesn’t mean we can’t retrain our brains to focus on the positive.
A simple game I play with my kids every night is the gratitude quiz. At dinner, I ask each of my little ones to tell me the one thing they loved the most about the day, and the one thing they are most looking forward to tomorrow.
It seems a tiny thing, I know, but it teaches them to look to the past and the future with a positive lens.
Making mindfulness fun
If your kids are anything like mine, you’d have more chance of winning the lottery than you would getting them to sit still and focus on their breathing. But meditation comes in all shapes and sizes, and one of the most effective ways to drown out excess noise in the brain is to focus it on a simple task.
You might have seen people building those towers of stones in rivers, focusing the mind entirely on the task in front of them. Sure, you might not have a river flowing through your suburban backyard, but tackling a colouring-in book or a puzzle has the exact same effect.
Counting cars
A lot of people walk away from mindfulness activities because they think they’re failing when they can’t clear their mind, but that’s not actually the point.
If you think of your mind as that busy freeway, you don’t need to remove all the cars, you just want to be aware of them, as though you’re standing on the footpath watching them fly past.
Just being aware of how busy your mind is the first step to slowing it down.
A mindful minute
You don’t need to dedicate hours to meditation. Because let’s be honest, who has the time? And besides, studies have found that just 60 seconds can be enough to have a significant impact on your mental health.
One of my favourite exercises is called four, seven, eight breathing. You simply breathe in for four seconds, hold your breath for seven seconds, then slowly breathe out through your mouth for eight seconds.
Continue for 60 seconds and you’ll feel calmer and more focused.