Recalibrate Your Mental Health with Mindfulness

Recalibrate Your Mental Health with Mindfulness

Learn how a few mindful minutes per day can reconnect you with your inner strength and transform your mental health.

This blog is authored by mindfulness expert & CEO Dorsey Standish.

Read more about Dorsey Standish at the end of the blog.

In the spring of 2015, I found myself burned out and overwhelmed. My stressful job as a corporate engineer, coupled with a complete lack of self-care (and sleep!), had pushed me toward an acute mental health crisis. 

As I began my recovery, I had physicians and experts coming at me with recommendations about what I should take and what I should do to feel stable again. As I fielded all those external voices, I also heard another voice – my own. It was encouraging me to come back home to myself. 

I knew that the only way to move forward was not to ignore those outside voices – believe me, I needed that help! – but to learn how to hear and trust my own again. To do this, I began to practice mindfulness for just a few minutes per day, every day. 

Those daily mindful minutes catalyzed a mental wellness journey and a more intimate relationship with myself that still continues to this day. Even as I navigate the ups and downs of business ownership, marriage, and motherhood, mindfulness practice remains my foundation and keeps me connected to my own inner strength.

And, it’s not just me – decades of mindfulness research support this idea that regular mindfulness practice can result in mental health benefits like reduced stress, better mood, and decreased symptoms of anxiety and depression.

How could daily mindful minutes support your own mental health journey?

If you’re ready to , here are some simple tips to make the practice work within the real constraints of your life:

• Demystify Mindfulness: Mindfulness doesn’t mean being perfectly calm or clearing your mind. It means paying attention with curiosity and kindness to the present moment, even if you’re overwhelmed or distracted. When you notice challenging emotions and swirling thoughts, that’s actually mindfulness practice! Your only job is to notice what’s happening, not to fix or change it.
  
• Start Small: Consistently practicing mindfulness of breath, body, and sensory inputs for short periods of time is more powerful than occasional long practices. Experiment with adding 1-5 minutes of daily mindfulness into your routine. Try a 1-Minute Work Break to get you started
• Bundle Your Healthy Habits: Bundle your new present moment awareness practice before or after an existing habit like drinking coffee, reading, or walking your dog. From a neuroscience perspective, bundling a new habit with an existing habit makes it “stickier.”
• Share Your Practice: Tell your family, friends and colleagues about your interest in mindfulness and how your practice may benefit them. Sharing your practice will deepen your commitment to practice and inspire others to support you (and maybe even join you!). We can’t force other people to be more mindful, but we can spark them to begin their own journey through our actions and transformation.
• Practice In Community: Meditating in a group can be extremely powerful. To solidify and inspire your practice, start a weekly or monthly workplace or community meetup (virtual or in-person) where you come together to do a short, guided meditation and discuss how your mindfulness practice is going. Better yet, hire an expert like Mastermind to deliver regular live sessions for you and your team!

Thank you for your commitment to personal mental health and wellness, to hearing your own voice so you can better connect with others and do the work you’re meant to do in this world. 

If you’d like to share your own story or get more support with your practice, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us to offer your experience, ask a question or explore working with Mastermind to build your own mindful community in your workplace, school, or organization.

Learn about Dorsey Standish