7 Days Mindfulness Journey

In this 7 Days of Mindfulness Journey, we will learn how to set intentions in your life which will decrease anxiety and increase acceptance.

 

Day1: Intention Setting
 

 

To consciously work on something means we’re slowing down and aligning on what we think, feel, and do.

When we’re under tremendous amounts of stress, or even new stress, we can be left feeling out of sorts and out of alignment with ourselves. To be intentional means we’re putting focus and priority on achieving a goal. In this case, it’s the goal of healing, of gaining back a sense of alignment, of feeling better, of building back a sense of emotional and mental stability.
 

• Research indicates that the power of intention has the ability to open up new neural pathways, paving the way for healthier thoughts and behaviors.
  
• Taking the time to be here today means you are showing up for yourself, and intentionally working on your mental and emotional well-being.
  
• When we make space and time for healing, transformation can begin.

 

 

Day2: Physical & practical building blocks to wellness
 

Research shows that our physical health and mental health operate in tandem. Therefore, any trouble we currently have with sleep difficulties, not exercising, or eating a balanced diet can put us at risk for a lower quality of life and can put us at risk of developing mental health challenges or worsening current symptoms.

Secondly, as humans, we’re wired for connection. We crave the feeling of being supported and valued. We know that feeling socially connected to even one other person lowers levels of stress, anxiety, and depression.

 

Diagram of Human Needs

 

 

Based on the above diagram, start with asking yourself these questions:
 

• Am I sleeping ok?
• Am I eating foods that fuel me?
• Am I regularly getting outside and breathing fresh air?
• Am I feeling connected to at least one other person?

 

If one of these basic building blocks of health and healing is not being met, I encourage you to prioritise taking action on starting this today. For example, if you’ve been feeling so anxious that you can’t sleep properly — and wake up feeling exhausted — what’s one action you can take today to move toward sleeping soundly? Can you put your phone away 20 minutes before you go to sleep?
 

What strategies can you use to focus on getting adequate rest, eating nutritious food, incorporating physical activity, spending time outside, and connecting to others?

 

 

Day3: We have to feel it to heal it.

 

The Only Way Out is Through. (running away from / avoiding a mental health issue only escalates it.)

 

Acknowledgement & acceptance

 

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is a therapeutic intervention developed in response to research that indicates embracing our thoughts and feelings — rather than fighting them — is effective in increasing psychological flexibility and managing mental health.

 

• Acknowledging where we are now - and accepting how we got here essentially opens the doors to healing.
• To heal, we have to acknowledge the wound.
• We can begin by acknowledging, or thinking about, all we have been through.
• Just sit with that for a moment. Accept that whatever you have been through.
• And acceptance doesn’t necessarily mean you approve of everything that happened, or how you reacted. Acceptance is simply stating “This is what happened.” Once we can say “This is where I’ve been, and this is where I am,” only then can we move forward and create change. 

 

It’s a skill to learn to sit with our feelings. Learning to do this facilitates healing, and it’s something you’ll use over and over again as you navigate life and move through your emotions rather than getting stuck in them.
 

Managing our emotions is like learning to surf and riding the waves. Feelings are not permanent. Emotions come and go, just like waves on the shore.

 

Riding the waves & deep breathing

 

Skill building takes practice — we need to develop muscles for riding the wave of our emotions. When we feel extremely overwhelmed, angry, or scared, and want to “turn the volume down” slightly, these two practices can help do just that:
 

Riding The Waves of Emotions

 

This is a helpful skill from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) that helps us regulate our emotions when we’re trying to calm ourselves down. Knowing that our feelings don’t last forever, and remembering that we won’t always feel this way, lets us practice how to experience the changing intensity of our feelings — like surfing a wave in the ocean. Give it a try with the prompts below:

 

• Notice and name what you are feeling. (“I notice feelings of anxiety.”)
• Accept that feeling. (“I have anxious feelings and that’s okay.”)
• Notice where you feel that emotion in your body. (“My head hurts and my palms are sweaty.”)
• Sit with that emotion and consciously pay attention to your breathing. Breathe through it.
• Notice how you feel. Ask yourself what this emotion is trying to tell you. (“I need to slow down and ask for support.”)

 

Deep Breathing

 

Mindful breathing is a helpful tool to manage and regulate our emotions. Deep breathing activates our parasympathetic nervous system response, which calms our bodies into a “rest and digest” state.

Being in a calmer place — as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system response of “fight or flight” — helps us not let strong feelings overpower our decision-making.
 

Try the breathing exercises below and practice them throughout the day as part of your routine. If you’re sitting in traffic or have a few minutes before a meeting starts, take time for a few mindful breaths.

 

• Breathe in for a count of 4
• Hold for a count of 4
• Breathe out for a count of 4
• Hold for a count of 4
• Repeat 3x (please ensure you adapt this to your own body and whatever feels right for you) Or if a video works best for you, please see a breathing exercise video here: 4-minute Breathing Exercise

 

 

Day4: Identifying Triggers and Challenging Emotions
 

How are you doing today? I hope you’re finding this guide helpful. Healing is a journey, with lots of ups and downs. We’re building on what we learned yesterday how feeling our feelings is a crucial component of healing, even if it can be difficult at times. If we don’t take time to feel our feelings now — but rather “sweep them under the rug” they run the risk of building up and coming out of us reactively. This can cause more problems. Addressing the moment with intention is the healthiest route. It’s neither pain-free nor easy, but will serve you well in the long run. Let’s dive deeper today into these skills, as we learn how to identify triggers or overwhelming emotions.

 

Identifying triggers or overwhelming emotions

 

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a psychology theory that teaches us how thoughts impact feelings, which impact our behaviors. Often, when we’re having particularly strong feelings, they started from a specific thought. For example, you might have received an upsetting text, or gotten off a difficult phone call, and are triggered in a way that can lead to a negative thoughts-feelings-actions chain of events.

When it comes to healing, identifying triggers that keep us from making emotional progress toward our goals is crucial. It’s a key preventive strategy. When we feel triggered, our natural stress response is a bodily release of adrenaline and cortisol to ‘fight, flight, freeze, or flee’, in a physiological and hard-wired way to escape threat. Although this is our automatic and biologically-normal response to a trigger, it’s helpful to know how to calm ourselves down once we feel triggered with overwhelming emotions if this stress response is not serving us. One way is by practicing some alternate thoughts — and some grounding exercises — to bring our minds and bodies into a state of ‘rest and digest’.

Research shows that if we don’t manage our stress responses, over time this chronic stress can put us at risk for developing a variety of mental health issues, like anxiety and depression. Let’s learn more about activating this relaxation response when we feel triggered into a stress response.
 

Replace your thoughts

 

It’s helpful to practice calming our minds and bodies when we feel triggered. Remember the CBT thoughts-feelings-actions chain of events? Next time you notice you’re triggered, replace any unhelpful thoughts by talking to yourself in a more supportive, kind way to reframe the trigger into a resilient mindset.

Example: Instead of the automatic thought: “I really screwed up that presentation, I’m such an idiot,” say to yourself something simple, kind, and believable, like: “I can rise above this challenge.”

 

What’s an automatic thought you had today that didn’t feel helpful? Write it down, and then write an alternate thought. Use this alternate thought like a mantra next time you notice a stress-based, unhelpful automatic thought. Over time, using resilient, supportive mantras will become our default way of thinking and speaking to ourselves.
 

Change your feelings to promote the relaxation response

 

To cope with triggers or distress, grounding exercises are an effective tool. These are strategies to help you reconnect with your senses and bring you back to the present moment.

Grounding is a practice that can help you pull away from flashbacks, unwanted memories, and negative or challenging emotions. These techniques may help distract you from what you're experiencing and refocus on what's happening in the present moment.

Practice this exercise below.

 

 

 

Day5: Managing Expectations
 

 

Adjusting our expectations is crucial to healing. We have expectations for everything — what our day will look like, what the weather will be, how our friend/parent/worker might react to the news. But the most important expectations to pay attention to are the ones we have about ourselves. We have so many personal expectations — how we should eat, sleep, achieve, be a friend, partner, work, live. What do we say to ourselves if we fall short of those?

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, especially with so much happening that’s out of our control. Today we’ll focus on what we can control — how we regulate our expectations and the self-talk we practice about them.
 

Best practices for reframing internal dialogue

 

• Avoid absolutes and all or nothing thinking
• Challenge your thoughts
• Use forward-focused language and stay focused on what you can do, rather than what you can’t
• Speak to yourself like you would a friend
• Get curious. Notice when you go down a negative self-talk rabbit hole

 

Positive Replacement Thoughts worksheet

 

Taking back control of our thoughts allows us to change how we feel, so that we can improve our mood.

Becoming more aware of our self-critical or negative thoughts is the first step in building that self-awareness. This worksheet is designed to help you identify the positive in events and people, then make a habit out of doing so.

Instructions:

Make a 2-column chart and write any Automatic Negative Thoughts that you can think of in the left column.

Next, consider each in turn and see if you can challenge it with a Positive Replacement Thought in the right-hand column.

This exercise has no time limit. To get better at finding the positive in situations and people, you may want to set aside some quiet time each day or week to turn from ANTs into Positive Replacement Thoughts.

 

 

Day6: Support Systems & Reaching Out
 

Staying connected to our loved ones is vital to our mental health and well-being. Here we’ll learn how connection can decrease our feelings of loneliness and isolation - two prominent feelings most of us have at some point or another. Let’s learn more about our support systems, who they are, and how they can help us.
 

Support systems

 

We have a hard-wired need as humans to be social and to feel a sense of belonging to a group. Research shows that feeling socially connected improves our longevity and strengthens our immune system. Conversely, a lack of social connectedness puts us at risk of developing mental and physical health issues.

The 2020 pandemic has shown us we can stay connected to our support systems while social distancing. In fact, many people have preferred using the term physical distancing instead of social distancing as a reminder that we can absolutely stay socially connected even from afar.

It's important to remember that there’s a difference between feeling lonely and being socially isolated. Remembering you’re not alone - that you have a whole circle of people around you that you care about, and can count on - can be crucial to our healing. So if you’ve ever felt alone or lonely during the pandemic, today’s practice is for you.

Who do you count as part of your support system? Maybe it’s one confidant or an organization. It’s important to note that it’s normal and healthy to have different people in our lives that offer support in different ways.

 

How do we know our support system is healthy?

 

Ask yourself:

• Do I feel good after spending time with them?
• Do I feel trust, safety and security in their company and fellowship?
• For supports with shared interest; do I have a good time? Is there healthy competition rather than critical self comparison?
• When I’m with them, can I laugh easily and cry just as easily without feeling judged?

 

Support Systems — how do they help us?

 

We’re all part of so many systems - whether you interact with 7 Cups communities, colleagues, professional organizations, your kid’s school system, or your neighborhood. When we’re by ourselves — or at home with just our thoughts — it’s easy to lose that feeling of connection to all those places that bring us a sense of belonging. When we bring them into our conscious thought, they become accessible. It’s a reminder that you are, in fact, integrated into systems of people and purpose outside of yourself.

 

Today I’ll ask you to take a moment to reflect on who’s in your social support circle. To start today's practice, feel free to take a page in your journal and draw four circles, like the ones you see here. Mapping out all of the people and organizations around you helps to build resilience and increase feelings of gratitude. Expressing and feeling thankful for who we have in our lives has been shown to improve our mental and physical health by enhancing our sleep, and decreasing stress.
 

 

Home

Beginning with the innermost circle, representing what is closest to you, those in your home.

Family

In the next circle, write the names of everyone in your family.‍

Friends

In this next circle, write the names of all of your friends.‍

Community

In this last circle, write the names of all of the communities and people within those communities you are part of. Think of your groups that you are part of offline and online. Are you part of a sub-community at 7 Cups? You can include this!

When you have completed filling in your social support circle, take a look. Smile with gratitude that you have so many people and communities around you to support you.

Refer to this when feeling lonely, and see if you might feel comforted by reaching out to someone in your circle. Remembering that we have an entire community of people and supports around us helps boost our resiliency, which is key for getting through challenging times.

 

 

Day7: Practising Self-Care and Compassion
 

Today we’ll build upon yesterday’s practice of looking externally at our support systems and how they can help us. We’ll also look internally, at prioritizing self care and compassion. Compassion is the process of expressing warmth, empathy, and understanding. Often it can be easier to express compassion than it is to express self-compassion. Self compassion applies that kindness and warmth to ourselves, especially when we’re going through a hard time, make a mistake, or generally feel frustrated with ourselves.

Contrary to what we might have been told — that we need to be tough on ourselves in order to gain strength and move on — research tells us that when we practice self compassion and self care, it makes us more productive and able to recover and move forward faster than if we speak to ourselves in an unkind, critical, or judgmental manner.
 

Redefining self-care

 

Self care no longer refers to just bubble baths and alone time.

Think about self-care as the choices you make each day that support your mental and emotional well-being in the long run. This can be difficult, as we all have varying levels of bandwidth and patience. But if we stop and think about what we know will feel best for us long term, it helps us sort out what is routine versus what we’re choosing because it supports what we ultimately want for ourselves.

Active self care can be hard. It looks like re-rescheduling, re-prioritizing, declining invites, and drawing new boundaries. You may need to speak up about things you’ve previously been able to ignore. Perhaps you don’t feel emotionally safe at work and need to address it. Maybe you need to have a tough conversation with your partner, or look at household dynamics that aren’t working. It may mean turning down an invite to something you can’t prioritize right now for or don’t feel safe attending. It may mean disappointing someone. Just make sure that someone is not you. Self care is self prioritization. In other words, it’s not about pampering ourselves. It’s about being an advocate for ourselves.

 

Pay attention to your self-talk

‍

This is where self compassion comes in. We want to acknowledge that we know you’re doing your best. Everyone is doing their best. Do you know you’re doing your best, and do you remind yourself of that regularly?

Practicing self compassion means you’re being as kind and empathic to yourself and your situation as you would with anyone else. It’s a change in attitude. Research tells us that compassion builds resilience and strength. Self criticism, on the other hand, leads to increasing despair and increased risk for mental illness. Self compassion in the face of our failures and life difficulties leads to mental well-being, happiness, and productivity. It’s the ultimate way we can practice self-care.

Just as we focused on in managing our expectations, over the course of the next day pay attention to what you’re saying to yourself.

 

Self Compassion Journal Exercise‍

 

At the end of the day, take a few minutes to journal (feel free to journal in either a written notebook, in your phone notes, or a phone audio recording). Reflect on one moment today where you felt frustrated, or acted out of anger, or noticed speaking to yourself in a criticizing way. What happened? Share the details of what happened. Now look over your journal entry, and add in the 3 components of self compassion outlined below:

 

Incorporate 3 components of self compassion

 

• Mindfulness (awareness of the emotion you felt, stating this in an objective, non-judgmental way)
• Common Humanity (“zoom out” to see how this one experience is also connected to humanity, and might be a common human reaction to what you experienced)
• Self-kindness (write something comforting and kind to yourself, much like how you would speak to a best friend, or a child)

 

Commit to self-care

 

What self-care practice can you commit to today to best support yourself in what you need today. Ask yourself: Was this a really tough experience? How can I comfort myself in this moment?

 

• Hand on heart, close your eyes
• Spend time doing something that brings you joy
• Give yourself a big hug, take a deep breath

 

Journaling and re-reading our journaling experiences when we were able to cope with a difficult experience boosts our resilience. It also fosters trust in ourselves that we have what we need within us to get through hard times.

 

 

 

Source: Lisa’s Mindfulness Journey