Pausing Several Times a Day Will Make You More Productive

Mindful pausing enables us to stabilise our monkey mind, make better decisions, and be calmer and more present.

“Many emotional disorders are characterised by a mind that gets highjacked — usually from thoughts that they are trying to address or repair. Meditation allows an individual to simply watch the mind and still the mind allowing it to do what it does, and you are able then to choose to follow it or not, and move to more wiser ways “ — Dr Zindel Segal

“Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. Source https://www.mindful.org/what-is-mindfulness/"

“This ancient Way of Mindfulness is as practisable today as it was 2,500 years ago. It is as applicable in the lands of the West as in the East; in the midst of life’s turmoil as well as in the peace of the Monk’s cell.” Nyanaponika Thera

Why be mindful?

Do you get so focused on a task that you forget to cook dinner or make an urgent phone call? And then it becomes a mad rush to do it all.

Mindfulness is a simple practice of being aware of what you are doing at this present moment and staying with that. That is, staying focused, not getting distracted, and concentrating on our breathing or what is around us. For example, if you are a passenger on a car journey, do you notice the sights and sounds of the landscape around you, or are you glued to your mobile phone?

Being mindful helps us be better to ourselves and others. We begin to understand who we are, what triggers us, and how we can calm down, and we begin to master ourselves. When we do this, we naturally become better with others.

Mindfulness is taking a breath, a pause, stopping, meditating and bringing ourselves back to being, being what? That is being you, a calm and peaceful human being, not the machine running around crazy.

Meditation is a form of mindfulness. It can be done sitting in a place or walking around. The point is to bring stillness into your day.

Benefits of Slowing Down.

When we slow down and put a pause into our life, we reduce stress, gain insight and awareness, understand our thoughts, and do our work better. We calm down, and we defer judgement and the need to overreact. We approach stressful tasks more calmly as we know we do them better in a calm state of mind. When we pause, we begin to understand ourselves, and as we calm down, and learn to master ourselves. We learn more about others and can be calmer and kind around them. We don’t get sucked into their agitation, and because we stay quiet, they automatically calm down too.

I meditate in the morning, evening, and day. I have been meditating for some time, which is a fantastic way to calm down and put things into perspective. When we feel hyper-stressed, and the world is tumbling around us, it calms our hearts and mind. It allows us to deal with what seems impossible.

“You know that our breathing is the inhaling and exhaling of air. The organ that serves for this is the lungs that lie around the heart so that the air passing through them thereby envelops the heart. Thus breathing is a natural way to the heart. And so, having collected your mind within you, lead it into the channel of breathing through which air reaches the heart and, together with this inhaled air, force your mind to descend into the heart and to remain there.” Nicephorus The Solitary

The place where I meditate from time to time has a practice called traffic control, where a bit of music is played for one minute or five minutes. We stop whatever we are doing, as if at a Traffic light(on red) and meditate for that time.

That single pause always made whatever task I was doing before much clearer and easier after the break. It makes the day go better and steady.

When I don’t do traffic control, and I don’t pause, I am utterly exhausted by the end of the day, I make errors, and I forget to make that urgent phone call or cook dinner.

Even when I practice traffic control, I can get home tired, but I am never on empty and feel like I have been in some hurricane. I still have some gas in my fuel tank, which I top up with my evening meditation.

Final thoughts …

I encourage you to pause multiple times daily to see how you feel. It will change your life for the better.

There is a great free app BEE ZONE, on Apple and Andriod you can try. It has a traffic control setting and much more * note this is not sponsored, just sharing the tools I use to put a pause in my day.

Try it and see — let me know how you get on with the experiment.