How to Calm and Focus Your Mind
Plus: Ways to be a better person, and why you should get out of your comfort zone now.
Welcome back to Age Wise, exploring the science of improving physical health and mental wellness at every stage of life.
The Simple Joy of Being a Better Person
We work hard at many things in life: work, sports, parenting, making money, to name a few. And while it’s common to think “I want to be a better person,” how much do we actually work on that? Yes, it’s hard, and hard things require effort and… this is what we miss: strategy. I wrote in detail how to develop a strategy for this. There are two ways:
If you’re pretty good at self-eval, you might consider an approach psychologists call the “change model,” which can help you create a plan to make change at a pace that works for you. The stages:
Precontemplation: Ignore the problem (this is the easy part!)
Contemplation: Become aware of the problem (the 2nd hardest part)
Preparation: Get ready to change (this is not a race!)
Action: Taking direct action toward the goal (the hardest part)
Maintenance: Maintaining new behavior (okay, maybe the actual hardest part)
Relapse: Getting back on track (after the inevitable failures)
Or, if like me you’re not so good at self-eval, you can try mindfulness meditation. Check out the ful article for how mindefulness can be incredibly helpful—as it has been for me—along with 6 specific improvements you might consider.
A Stupid-Simple Way to Calm and Focus Your Mind
Speaking of mindfulness, if you have not tried it, and even if you’re super skeptical as I was, I’d like to try and change your mind. Mindfulness meditation is right up there with exercise and diet for its ability to remedy physical and mental ills, most notably to help us chill out, be in the moment, focus on important things and let other stuff go, and ultimately find greater contentment and even more happiness.
My experience, after a year of researching mindfulness and six months practicing it:
Mindfulness now helps me deal with the stress of real challenges and the anxiety of unidentified worries. It’s making me less judgmental, more aware and accepting of my own flaws, more attentive to the good things in life, and it’s reminding me to be a better listener (I’m told) and a better friend and partner (I think).
I invite you to read about my journey and learn how you can get started. As I note, it’s stupid-simple, but that doesn’t mean easy. You’ll have to try, and you will fail, and you’ll be encouraged to just begin again, until you gradually become more mindful of your own thoughts and how you react to them.
Why You Need to ‘Climb a Mountain’ and How
Folks, we have to keep moving forward in life. And I don’t mean just slogging through another day of work, parenting or doomscrolling. We need challenges, especially physical ones, that take us out of our comfort zone.
And as with any worthwhile challenge in life, the prospect of succeeding at something hard promises short-term elation and a long-lasting sense of capability and possibility. That, of course, is why we climb mountains — real or otherwise. Or why we used to, anyway.
Modern society has engineered movement out of our lives by removing age-old motivational stressors, argues Michael Easter, author of The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self.
In this article, I lay out 9 steps for choosing and conquering your own mountain. Plus you’ll learn about the crazy mountains I’ve been climbing.
Feedback
Reader reactions to my article on mindfulness, A Stupid-Simple Way to Calm and Focus Your Mind:
“Exactly right, Robert. Meditation is stupidly simple but not always easy. But the good thing is that even when difficult, there is no failure. I look at a meditation session as receiving a weather report on my mind. If viewed that way, there is no way you can fail at meditation.”
—Gary Buzzard
“I have been practicing for the last 20-25 years and teaching mindfulness for the last 10 years. People tend to believe in the hype and the myth, but don't actually realise - like you said ‘Mindfulness is stupid-simple.’”
—Trisha Dunbar
“Thanks for the great article. I'm a meditation dropout. I took a great course, but just could not stay with it. I'll try your method.”
—Geri Spieler
Parting Thought