My calm demeanor is no happy accident. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to remain happy and harmonious. Watch this video for the one tool that helps manage my mood more than anything else.
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/lmcalm.)
Lovesac website: http://www.lovesac.com
Muse Headset- http://bit.ly/lm1muse
Headspace- http://bit.ly/headspace7
Insight Timer- https://insighttimer.com/
Hi, I’m organizing and lifestyle expert Lorie Marrero. I’m coming to you from my comfortable favorite chair. This is a love sack and I just sink into it and get all comfy. This is where I sit to do my important reading and I also sit here when I practice my secret weapon tool of choice for reducing my stress and for remaining calm under pressure and staying really happy. People always ask me how I do all of that. This is the secret. It is meditation.
Now before you click away and you think meditation is not for you, believe me, I used to think that too. I had a picture in my head of this person right here, that you see on the screen, which is someone who’s burning incense and they’re sitting this very special way and you have to be a hippie or you have to believe this kind of religion or some spiritual belief to do meditation. None of those things are true. What we know now about meditation is that it is a scientific practice that is literally training your brain.
Think about when do we ever train our brain? We work out with weights for our body. We run and we eat right and we do all kinds of other training for other things we do in our life, but our brains we don’t pay attention to. However, our brain is running the whole show. So what I like about meditation is this. When I’m going through the day I have various stimuli that are happening to me. Something happens in my business, or the phone rings, or someone asks me a question, or the doorbell rings, whatever those different stimuli are, I in the past just like everyone else would react to that like a reflex, like if you hit your knee and it kicks, right? Just a reflex, something that you don’t think about. You might actually get angry. You might say something you regret. What if you had practice in pausing a moment before you respond? What if you respond versus react?
When you mediate you learn that you are the observer of your thoughts and you do have the choice of which thoughts you’re going to have. This is a wonderful practice. And if you don’t believe me about the science just google science on meditation and you’re going to find a lot of studies about stress reduction, anxiety reduction, immune system response. There’s a lot of actual body benefits, not just mind benefits. I would encourage you to look that up.
But I want to give you a few resources to make this easier for you. You do have time. It doesn’t take any more than 5 minutes, 7 minutes, 12 minutes. Sometimes I practice for 20 most often. But it just takes very few minutes to exercise this muscle and work on this to improve your response during the day. There’s an app called Headspace that you can get on your phone. That’s how I got started. I really like Headspace. The meditation narrator is called Andy and he’s very pleasant to listen to. There’s another app called Insight Timer that a lot of people enjoy.
I practiced with those until I developed the habit. Once I did that I rewarded myself with this really cool gadget that’s called the Muse. You do not need one of these to meditate. In fact, you don’t even need an app. You can meditate anytime anywhere by yourself and you don’t have to do it any special way. You’re not doing it wrong. But if you have one of these it’s pretty cool.
This is sort of like a heart rate monitor for your brain. You put it on and you have it across your forehead here, and you can see on the screen here the kind of readout that you get for your brain waves. It lets you know when your brain is in calm state, neutral state, or active state, and you get auditory feedback in your headphones so that you know what state your brain is in and you can listen and immediately change it and you start to learn how to adjust your pattern so that you get to be in calm state more percentage of the time.
It’s a really great tool. You don’t have to have it but it sure is a lot of fun. I would love to hear in the comments if you’ve tried meditation, what you find challenging about it, what kind of myths you have dispelled about that personally, and how it’s helped you in your life. I love it. I’m sure you can tell I’m very enthusiastic about that. Let me know what you think and I will see you next time. May you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
FTC Disclosure: Occasionally I publish links to products which may provide me with a commission if you purchase from my link. I feature only products here that I absolutely believe in and getting a commission on them is just a smart bonus if I happen to have a link available to me. I am at all times looking out for what is best for my viewers and my reputation. These videos are free, so any small percentage I make here helps make it possible for me to continue producing content.
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