This week’s article is a special guest post written by Colyn Emery.
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Adjusting to working from home can be difficult, especially if you’re a parent without access to childcare. Because of school closings, parents have to entertain their children, homeschool, and complete work at the same time. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by all of these additional responsibilities, particularly when you can’t get a moment to yourself.
If you’re in this boat, you should try not to panic. Breathe deeply and do your best to relax.
Although this situation is difficult, you can relieve anxiety symptoms and strengthen your coping skills if you make mindfulness a part of your day-to-day life. Our clinicians have some suggestions that will help every member of your household adopt mindful practices.
Mindfulness can be easy
What is mindfulness? It’s just what it sounds like. When you’re mindful, your goal is to pay attention to the moment. You want to pay close attention to your locations and feelings at any given time. You shouldn’t worry about what’s happened in the last few days or what’s going to happen in the future. Instead, you should focus on the present.
This may sound easy, but it will take some effort, particularly during this time, when the future feels very uncertain. Practising activities that promote mindfulness can help you to adjust.
According tohealth and wellness experts at Energy Healing Massage, “nurturing mindfulness deep into our consciousness empowers us to interrupt automatic, reflexive fight, flight, or freeze reactions—reactions that can lead to anxiety, foreboding, fear, and worry.” And to do that, here are a few easy activities they suggest.
Meditating: Find a comfortable and quiet place to sit. Focus on something specific, such as your breathing. If you catch your thoughts drifting off, you should return your attention to your breathing.
Breath from Your Stomach: Place a hand over your belly and put your other hand on your chest. Breathe in slowly from your belly. You’ll feel your stomach expand as though it was a balloon being filled with air. From there, you’ll want to breathe out slowly, as if the balloon was being deflated.
Squeeze All Your Muscles: Beginning with your toes, focus on one muscle in your body and give it a good squeeze. Hold for five seconds. From there, release your hold and pay attention to the changes in your body. Continue this exercise, moving upwards throughout your body.
Mindfulness During Mealtime: Don’t try to multitask when you eat. Instead, pay attention to how your meal looks before you start eating. Once you dig in, you should pay attention to the smells and tastes of the food you’re eating.
Enjoy Some Music: Instead of letting the music play in the background, you should pay close attention to the details of the song. For example, you might want to focus your attention on the singer or one of the instruments.
Playing with Bubbles: Grab a wand and blow some bubbles! Focus on the colours and shapes that you create.
Have Fun with a Colouring Book: Colouring isn’t just for children. If you pay close attention to the pictures you’re colouring and the shades you’re using, it can be an excellent mindful activity.
Always make time for mindful activities
Now that many people are staying at home, they can no longer enjoy the personal time that they had when they commuted, went out to the store, or were home alone. Because of this, it’s particularly important to set aside time for mindfulness.
Mindfulness company Mindset Mastery NLPreports that, “meditation can be so helpful because it can put us in touch with our stress and anxiety. It’s important that we explore how mindfulness and meditation can help soften feelings of anxiousness, reduce stress, and calm a panic attack in our new mindful guide to meditation for anxiety.”
You can schedule some time for mindfulness every single day. For example, you could wake up early in the morning, before the rest of the household gets out of bed. Beginning your day with mindfulness can help you get your day off to the right start. During this time, you can focus on meditation, workouts, breathing exercises, or other activities that promote mindfulness.
You don’t need a lot of time to be mindful, and you don’t have to do anything complicated. For example, you could try to be mindful while you enjoy your morning cup of tea. To practice mindfulness, all you need to do is focus on the present. If you can do that for just five minutes at the start of the day, you’ll feel a big difference. This is particularly important now when many people have been thrust out of their usual routines.
Have the whole family involved
Another clinical psychologist that works at the Child Mind Institute, David Anderson, PhD, says that mindfulness can help people come together. You’ll want to set aside time for your family to practise mindful activities that will allow them to stay in the moment and slow things down. This can do a lot to reduce anxiety levels.
For example, you could all go out for a walk in a quiet place, paying close attention to the sights and sounds around you. Listen to the birds chirping. Take the time to smell the flowers. You could also try doing yoga as a family or practising mindful activities during mealtimes, like suggesting that everyone brings up something good that happened that day.
Stay away from multitasking
It’s easy to feel as though you won’t get anything accomplished if you don’t do several things at once. You might be trying to distract your child, prepare a meal, clean your home, and take a work call all at the same time.
However, emotional health counsellor lona Nichterleinsays “multi-tasking is damaging. Other than the obvious dangers like ‘texting while driving,’ multi-tasking plays a significant role in the anxiety and depression levels their research group experienced. Obviously, we feel good when a squirt of dopamine is released when we accomplish one of the items on our multi-tasking list. Eventually we continue doing more short-term tasks that give us this dopamine shot, and soon we’re caught up in quantity over quality. We actually work harder, not smarter—and we don’t really focus. We assume we’re doing more and better, but in reality we trade in value for speed and volume.”
The concept of multitasking isnothing but amyth, Nichterlein added. Shesuggests setting goals you can achieve every day, while aiming to devote your attention to just one thing at a time. As an example, you could schedule your work calls during times when your children are napping. If you need to cook a meal, you could give your kids some screentime so that you won’t need to entertain them. If you have lots of chores to do, you could assign some of those chores to your older children.
Accept and learn to live with uncertainty
The future right now is very uncertain. It’s difficult to predict how long the quarantine will continue or when things will go back to normal. However, there’s one thing that can be said: worrying won’t fix anything. Instead, you should try to adapt to uncertainty. This is a coping skill that can help you at any time, even when there’s not a pandemic going on.
According to healthcare professionals at Expect Me Wellness, “we should allow ourselves to feel the uncertainty. Instead of engaging in futile efforts to gain control over the uncontrollable, we should allow ourselves to experience the discomfort of uncertainty.”
As with any other emotions, if we allow ourselves to feel fear and uncertainty, they will eventually pass. Instead, we can focus on the now and the present moment and our breathing and allow ourselves to simply feel and observe the uncertainty that we are experiencing. Take a few slow, deep breaths, or a meditation technique we know to keep us anchored in the present.