Blog Posts Tagged "Positive Psychology".

Want to join me in a 30 day mindfulness meditation project?

Who it’s for.

- People who have never done mindfulness meditation before.

- People who have dabbled with mindfulness meditation but never had a regular practice.

You might like to join in if ANY of the following apply to you

- You’re prone to over-thinking

- You’re prone to anxiety

- You want to reduce your stress

- You’re scared or frustrated that your life seems to be passing in a blur

- You want to become more selective about which action impulses you follow (e.g. you’d like to spend less time clicking links on the internet)

- You use doing, doing, doing, as a way of distracting yourself from yourself

- You hold tension in your body

- You want to have more self acceptance

- You want to feel more relaxed and calm

- You miss out on opportunities to fully experience the current moment because you are mentally somewhere else

- You want to see things as they really are rather than seeing everything through the filter of your preexisting thoughts.

What’s the plan?

I’m committing to a personal goal of daily practice of mindfulness meditation for 30 days. You’re welcome to join me! If you only want to dabble rather than do daily practice then that’s completely cool.

I’ll post a daily update of what mindfulness meditation practice I did that day. If you feel like it, you can post a comment to report what you did for your practice.

Please note that for legal reasons I don’t offer advice on Facebook. But hopefully despite this limitation it will feel nice to know that you are going on your journey at the same time I am going on mine.

I’ve done quite a bit of mindfulness meditation before but have never had a daily practice so this is an experiment for me to see what impact daily mindfulness meditation has.

This is not a course on mindfulness.

You might want to try the practice and just see what effects it has for you, or you might get really into learning about mindfulness meditation and read up heaps, or anything between.

There is a massive amount of info about mindfulness meditation online, in both written and video/audio form, so I’m confident that whatever you want to know is out there for you to read/watch/listen to.

Tip: Prioritize doing the practice ahead of learning about doing the practice.

Tip: Just about any instructional materials about mindfulness meditation will tell you that you are likely to get lost in your thoughts a lot of the time and that this doesn’t mean you’re screwing up. This applies to YOU, not just everybody else.

To get started, all you’ll need is a timer e.g. on your cell phone. Or in a pinch you could even use free online stopwatch.

Here we go folks…

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Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction

The mp3 file below can be used to do a 15 min mindfulness meditation for Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (or 30 min, or any multiples of 15 by just copying the file more than once to your playlist) .

Download file here (right click and choose ‘save link as’ on a PC)

Good for when you don’t want someone to jabber at you but need a gentle reminder to come back to the moment if you drift off into thoughts.

Its mostly 15 minutes of silence but has 10 seconds of wind chime sound at 3 min, 6:10, 9:20 etc. It starts with 3 mins of silence and ends with 10 sec of chime.

Where did I get the wind chime sound?

It’s sampled from windspiel-hell.wav by Wutzl.

Why did I choose wind chimes?

As an alternative to bells, gongs, and singing bowls which all remind me of churches, temples, and time.

To me, wind chimes connote indoor/outdoor flow.

Mindfulness for Beginners

You can get a free download of “Fully Present,” a book about the science and art (practice) of mindfulness, using the free trial offer from Audible below (audible are owned by Amazon).

Try Audible Now and Get A Free Audiobook Download with a 14 Day Trial. Choose from over 85,000 Titles.

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An emerging trend is people using methods similar to those used in psychology research to study themselves.

A MAJOR COOL THING about studies of self – your options for what you can study are almost endless. And, you’re completely in control.

Another MAJOR COOL THING – people’s perceptions of cause and effect in their lives (e.g. what determines their emotions or what determines aspects of their behaviour) tend to be skewed from reality. Using studies of self you can can rely more on reality and less on your perceptions (which might be distorted/inaccurate).

If you actively do things in your life because you think they are helpful to you, you can determine if what you do really is helpful and is the effect big, small or medium? What really makes a difference?

What’s to Come?

I’m going to provide detailed tips and instructions for how people can do their own studies of self. But for now, let’s look at 2 basic varieties of self study, as well as a combined option. Which type is best will depend on your purposes.

Option 1: The A – B – A – B Design

Let’s say you have an idea that doing 30 minutes of vigorous exercise in the evenings, leads to increased energy the following day.

However, sometimes you cannot be bothered exercising so you want to see how helpful exercising really is.

In an A-B-A-B design

“A” refers to a period of time when you are NOT DOING the behaviour that you think might cause a difference in some aspect of your life (i.e. not exercising).

“B” refers to a period of time when you are doing the behaviour (i.e. exercising) EVERY DAY.

So, in an A-B-A-B design you would

first do A = not exercise. Let’s say for 2 weeks.

Each day you monitor your energy on a 0 – 10 scale

0 = feeling no energy at all, 10 = feeling extremely energetic. You might do recordings at 9am, noon, 4pm, and 9pm. Put an alarm on your phone and carry a piece of paper to jot down your ratings or input them into your phone.

B = Do two weeks of exercising every night. Continue recording your energy.

A = Return to NOT exercising for two weeks, but keep recording your energy.

B = Exercise every day for two final weeks and record your energy.

Option 2: The Correlation Design

Each day you do the same energy ratings as above and also record how many minutes of vigorous exercise you did the day before (e.g. 0 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes).

- You then use very simple statistics called a correlation (I’ll show you how – in upcoming posts) to figure out if statistically you had more energy on days when you did more exercise the night before i.e. if you exercised more, your energy was higher the next day.

- To visualize your data, you can also put it on a scatterplot.

- For correlation designs, the longer you collect your data for, the more reliable your self study will be and the more chance you have of detecting real effects if these exist (even small effects might be important to you in your life and to detect these you need enough data).

As a ballpark, a minimum of about 20 days or ideally 30.

Option 3: The Combined Option.

Do a baseline period. Let’s say 2 weeks of not exercising but recording your energy.

Then proceed with the correlation design.

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