Simple Trick to Be More Mindful

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about mindfulness and living in the moment. I think one of the ways that I measure success in my life when I look back and I think, did I win the day? One of the metrics I use is, how much time did I spend in flow? How much time did I spend in the moment? Those two things are actually intricately linked. But interestingly, the flow state is one of the interesting characteristics of it is this thing that happens. I can’t remember exactly what the word is. It’s like transfrontal hyperschemia. That’s not right. But effectively, what happens is portions of your brain activate that decouple your sense of self from time.

And so when you go into a state of flow, you have this feeling of timelessness, where you’re just decoupled from the past, the present, the future, and you just are. And in that moment, you are creating. And it is amazing. It’s an amazing feeling. I think the flow state is one of the most pleasurable states that a human can experience. And in hindsight, after having been in flow, you just feel this glow. So the more time that you can spend in flow, that’s a good sign for the day. Now, the other side of this is you can only spend so much time in flow in a particular day.

It’s a stressful state of being for your body. It requires a lot of energy expenditure for your brain in particular. So what do we are to do with the rest of our time? If maybe you can get 2 hours, 3 hours of good flow a day, what are you supposed to do with the rest of your time to maximize that? And what I’ve been thinking about recently is just mindfulness and being Present in the singular moment that is now. But how do we do that? Because so often it’s easy to think like, oh, I should be mindful right now and pay attention. And then as quickly as you start paying attention, your mind starts drifting back to the past, to the Present, to the future, and you’re wandering mentally. That’s why meditation is such a great practice. It’s like mental weightlifting. It’s going to the mental gym and doing the exercises that are strengthening your ability to stay present in the moment.

I think that’s a great exercise. But here’s an idea that I’ve been thinking about that served me very, very well for activating this sense of mindfulness in the moment. There’s two aspects of this that I call details and peripherals. So details the easiest way that I know to be present in the moment if I want to activate it on command, is to simply be aware of the details around me, to be where my feet are underneath of me. And to do this, all you need to do is grab something in your environment and then focus on the details of it. For instance, if right now I wanted to be mindful, I might look at this can of bubbly water that’s on my desk, and I might zoom in now and start focusing on the details of this little polar bear and the fact that he has this eyeball, the tiny little dot on the top of his head, it’s actually quite tiny. I never would have noticed that. Or the fact that he has three toenails here that are also very tiny.

Or that he has this little fluff on his chest where he has, like, this mohawk of hair that I never would have noticed if I hadn’t zoomed in to the details. It’s very hard to think about the past, the present, the future, anything else, anything other than where you are in the current moment when you’re focused on the details. So that’s number one, focus on the details. Now, the second thing is your peripherals. 90% of the time, you go through your life with blinders on, focused on what’s directly in front of you, and you’re not even aware of all the stimuli and everything that’s being filtered out extraneously around you in your field of vision. And yet there is richness that’s occurring out here. Just take a second, soften your gaze and allow the peripherals to come in and take note of what you see out the corner of your eyes, and you’ll start to realize there’s actually a lot of information over here. And then when you focus in on the detail of something, you lose it all.

Now, often what happens is we’re not focusing necessarily on the details and we’re not focusing on the peripherals. We’re just focusing on a cone of attention that’s roughly a tunnel in front of us. If you want to be present in the moment and activate it on an instant, you can do the focus and detail trick that I just showed you, or you can do the soft gaze and become aware of what’s happening out here. Just take a second, take a breath, let your gaze soften, and bring in all this stimuli and see what you can notice happening over there. Like, I have a bag right here. The light on in my closet is on. There’s a book on my chair. My calendar is up on my computer.

I have a pen here on the table. There’s so much information that’s occurring out here and it’s hard to be anywhere but in the present when you’re trying to focus on what’s in your peripherals. So those are two tricks for activating this mindfulness and being in the moment. It’s an exercise, I think, that’s worth doing a couple of times throughout the day, is just saying I’m going to go into the details and then the peripherals, details, peripherals and do that and start working on that. And that will start to help you maximize how much time that you’re spending in that mindful state throughout the day. Because the truth is you’re not going to find yourself falling into the state of mindfulness by accident. It will only happen with intention and ironically, mindfulness. So hopefully this brings you some value.

As always, thank you for being here. We’ll appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I’ll see you back here tomorrow, guys.