Self-Care All-in-One For Dummies

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• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781119875055
• eBook ISBN: 9781119875079
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Nutrition, Dietics & Bariatrics
• Index: Psychology

Take charge of your personal health and well-being with this trusted, all-in-one guide to self-care

There's an old saying that goes, "You can't pour from an empty cup." It means that you can't take care of others unless you take care of yourself. And it's never been truer than it is today.

In Self-Care All-in-One For Dummies, you'll master the fundamentals of making sure that your cup is always full, so you can give to others without draining your reserves of energy and health. From mindfulness to resilience, fitness, and clean eating, this comprehensive resource takes a holistic look at what it means to take care of yourself and offers you a how-to guide to healthy and fulfilling behaviors.

In this book, you'll find:

• Concrete strategies for incorporating self-care practices into your busy, everyday life
• Discussions of how to manage stress and maintain a mindful and calm demeanor and attitude in the face of modern challenges
• An emphasis on being kind and gentle with yourself, ensuring that you don't hold yourself to an impossible or unrealistic standard

We're all looking to improve our lives, lift our spirits, and increase our well-being. Self-Care All-in-One For Dummies proves that, while perfection may be out of reach for all of us, you can make meaningful progress toward happiness and fulfilment by taking small, manageable steps towards a calmer, more grounded you.

Book 1

Being Present through Mindfulness

Contents at a Glance

1. Chapter 1: Discovering Mindfulness
   1. Understanding the Meaning of Mindfulness
   2. Looking at Mindfulness Meditation
   3. Using Mindfulness to Help You
2. Chapter 2: Enjoying the Benefits of Mindfulness
   1. Relaxing the Body
   2. Calming the Mind
   3. Soothing Your Emotions
   4. Uplifting Your Spirit
   5. Knowing Thyself: Discovering Your Observer Self
3. Chapter 3: Making Mindfulness a Daily Habit
   1. Discovering the Secret to Change
   2. Exploring Your Intentions
4. Chapter 4: Humans Being Versus Humans Doing
   1. Delving into the Doing Mode of Mind
   2. Embracing the Being Mode of Mind
   3. Combining Being and Doing
   4. Being in the Zone: The Psychology of Flow
   5. Encouraging a Being Mode of Mind
5. Chapter 5: Using Mindfulness for Yourself
   1. Using a Mini Mindful Exercise
   2. Using Mindfulness to Look After Yourself
6. Chapter 6: Using Mindfulness in Your Daily Life
   1. Using Mindfulness at Work
   2. Using Mindfulness on the Move
   3. Using Mindfulness in the Home

Chapter 1

Discovering Mindfulness

IN THIS CHAPTER

Defining mindfulness

Exploring mindfulness meditation

Discovering the benefits of mindfulness

Mindfulness means flexibly paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, infused with qualities such as kindness, curiosity, acceptance, and openness.

Through being mindful, you discover how to live in the present moment in an enjoyable way rather than worrying about the past or being concerned about the future. The past has already gone and can’t be changed. The future is yet to arrive and is completely unknown. The present moment, this very moment now, is ultimately the only moment you have. Mindfulness shows you how to live in this moment in a harmonious way. You find out how to make the present moment a more wonderful moment to be in — the only place in which you can create, decide, listen, think, smile, act, or live.

You can develop and deepen mindfulness through doing mindfulness meditation on a daily basis, from a few minutes to as long as you want. This chapter introduces you to mindfulness and mindfulness meditation and welcomes you aboard a fascinating journey.

Understanding the Meaning of Mindfulness

Mindfulness was originally developed in ancient times, and can be found in Eastern and Western cultures. Mindfulness is a translation of the ancient Indian word Sati, which means awareness, attention, and remembering.

• Awareness: This is an aspect of being human that makes you conscious of your experiences. Without awareness, nothing would exist for you.
• Attention: Attention is a focused awareness; mindfulness training develops your ability to move and sustain your attention wherever and however you choose.
• Remembering: This aspect of mindfulness is about remembering to pay attention to your experience from moment to moment. Being mindful is easy to forget. The word “remember” originally comes from the Latin re (“again”) and memorari (“be mindful of”).

Say that you want to practice mindfulness to help you cope with stress. At work, you think about your forthcoming presentation and begin to feel stressed and nervous. By becoming aware of this, you remember to focus your mindful attention to your own breathing rather than constantly worrying. Feeling your breath with a sense of warmth and gentleness helps slowly to calm you down.

Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who first developed mindfulness in a therapeutic setting, says: “Mindfulness can be cultivated by paying attention in a specific way, that is, in the present moment, and as non-reactively, non-judgmentally and openheartedly as possible.”

You can break down the meaning even further:

• Paying attention: To be mindful, you need to pay attention, whatever you choose to attend to.
• Present moment: The reality of being in the here and now means you just need to be aware of the way things are, as they are now. Your experience is valid and correct just as it is.
• Non-reactively: Normally, when you experience something, you automatically react to that experience according to your past conditioning. For example, if you think, “I still haven’t finished my work,” you react with thoughts, words, and actions in some shape or form.
  Mindfulness encourages you to respond to your experience rather than react to thoughts. A reaction is automatic and gives you no choice; a response is deliberate and considered action.
• Non-judgmentally: The temptation is to judge experience as good or bad, something you like or dislike. You want to feel bliss; you don’t like feeling afraid. Letting go of judgments helps you to see things as they are rather than through the filter of your personal judgments based on past conditioning.
• Openheartedly: Mindfulness isn’t just an aspect of mind. Mindfulness is of the heart as well. To be open-hearted is to bring a quality of kindness, compassion, warmth, and friendliness to your experience. For example, if you notice yourself thinking, “I’m useless at meditation,” you discover how to let go of this critical thought and gently turn your attention back to the focus of your meditation, whatever that may be.

World-renowned monk Ajahn Brahm says the word mindfulness doesn’t capture the importance of kindness in the practice. So what word does he recommend? Kindfulness. This term can help remind you to bring a warm, friendly awareness when practicing mindfulness — and it just may make you smile too! Be sure to practice being kindful, not just mindful.

Looking at Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness meditation is a particular type of meditation that’s been well researched and tested in clinical settings.

Meditation isn’t thinking about nothing. Meditation is kindly paying attention in a systematic way to whatever you decide to focus on, which can include awareness of your thoughts. By listening to your thoughts, you discover their habitual patterns. Your thoughts have a massive impact on your emotions and the decisions you make, so being more aware of them is helpful.

In mindfulness meditation, you typically focus on one, or a combination, of the following:

• The feeling of your own breathing
• Any one of your senses
• Your body
• Your thoughts or emotions
• Your intentions
• Whatever is most predominant in your awareness

Mindfulness meditation comes in two distinct types:

• Formal meditation: This meditation is where you intentionally take time in your day to embark on a meditative practice. Time gives you an opportunity to deepen your mindfulness practice and understand more about your mind, its habitual tendencies, and how to be mindful for a sustained period of time, with a sense of kindness and curiosity toward yourself and your experience. Formal meditation is mind training.
• Informal meditation: This is where you go into a focused and meditative state of mind as you go about your daily activities such as cooking, cleaning, walking to work, talking to a friend, driving — anything at all. Think of it as everyday mindfulness. In this way, you continue to deepen your ability to be mindful, and train your mind to stay in the present moment more often rather than habitually straying into the past or future. Informal mindfulness meditation means you can rest in a mindful awareness at any time of day, whatever you’re doing. See Chapter 6 in Book 1 for more ways to be mindful informally.

To practice meditation means to engage in the meditation exercise — not practicing in the sense of aiming one day to get the meditation perfect. You don’t need to judge your meditation or perfect it in any way. Your experience is your experience. In this instance, practice doesn’t mean rehearsal.

Mindfulness is not just about having your attention caught — it’s about cultivating a flexible attention. Flexible attention means you can choose where to focus your attention. For example, when a child (or adult!) is playing a computer game, they may have their full attention on the game, but the attention is usually not flexible. Their attention is caught by the game. That’s not mindfulness. As you become more mindful, you’re able to move your attention from one place to the other more in a flexible way.

Using Mindfulness to Help You

You know how you get lost in thought? Most of the day, as you go about your daily activities, your mind is left to think whatever it wants. You’re operating on “automatic pilot” (explained more fully in Chapter 4 of Book 1). But some of your automatic thoughts may be unhelpful to you, or perhaps you’re so stuck in those thoughts that you don’t actually experience the world around you. For example, you go for a walk in the park to relax, but your mind is lost in thoughts about your next project. First, you’re not really living in the present moment, and second, you’re making yourself more stressed, anxious, or depressed if your thoughts are unhelpful.

Mindfulness isn’t focused on fixing problems. Mindfulness emphasizes acceptance first, and change may or may not come later. So if you suffer from anxiety, mindfulness shows you how to accept the feeling of anxiety rather than denying or fighting the feeling, and through this approach change naturally comes about. Consider this idea: “What you resist, persists. What you accept, transforms.”

This section explores the many ways in which mindfulness can help you.

In mindfulness, acceptance means to acknowledge your present-moment experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, is already here. You’re discovering how to “make peace” with your present-moment experience...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Book 1: Being Present through Mindfulness
• Book 2: Treating Yourself with Compassion
• Book 3: Facing Challenges with Resilience
• Book 4: Feeling Better with a Bit of Fitness
• Book 5: Providing Your Body with Top-Notch Nutrition
• Book 6: Scaling Back the Stress in Your Life
• Book 7: Reining In Online Activities
• Index
• About the Authors
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement