In today’s society, we are expected to be switched on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s normal to live surrounded by noise, voices, busyness and a ton of distractions. We can feel that withdrawing and getting away from things for a few days is the solution, yet we can re-enter our lives feeling just as tired and overwhelmed as when we left - why?

Even though we cut out the external noise, our minds can remain busy and noisy. It’s exhausting to run through the same cycles of thought and anxiety. Most of us run on empty, and even though we may grab a quick pause, a constant loop of thinking and doing keeps on going.

Meditation and mindfulness can be a great way of circuit-breaking that constant loop, and dipping your toes into full rest and being aware of the present. Mindfulness isn’t about changing yourself, but about understanding yourself and how you tick. In doing so, it helps to change your perspective and has a knock on effect to how you deal with things.

Mindfulness needs to be an ongoing practice - we wouldn’t expect to do physical exercise and have rock-hard abs first time! It’s training yourself; little and often is better than one big dash expecting miracles.

Be patient and invest in yourself.

Having a mindfulness practice encourages us to make the choice to step out of automatic pilot and break that loop of chaos and busyness in our heads, to bring our full attention back to here and now. If we are so set on thinking of past events or planning for future needs, we can miss out on the beautiful things that exist in the here and now. And they DO exist.

Life is complicated, and we need to NOT view mindfulness as yet another thing to add to our crammed list of things to do. We can gently integrate it into how we live our everyday, to bring those much needed pauses that make us live in a more fulfilling and effective way.