How To Stop The Doomscrolling- Mindful Consumption of News and Negative Media

Have you found yourself droomscrolling a lot lately?

All of us have been stuck in that negative loop our fair share this year. Doomscrolling is the name that has been given to the compulsion to scroll through and consume negative news on social media.

When you keep refreshing and going through your feed to see what other bad news pops up, it becomes a behaviour that we reactively want to repeat even though it negatively impacts our feelings of well-being through leading to a greater risk of anxiety and depression.

So what can we do about it?

Here are some ways that we can stop the doomscrolling and work on consuming the news on social media in a way that won’t have such a negative impact on us.

Stopping the Doomscrolling

First off, it’s important to recognize the problem. When COVID-19 first hit back in the spring and as all the certainty in the world started to shift, I found myself constantly watching the news for updates and refreshing my Facebook feed. I didn’t realize it at first, you never do, but this was leading me to a heightened state of anxiety and generally not feeling very good.

When I finally came to the realization of what I had been doing, I decided to distance myself from the news and take steps to stay off of social media regularly throughout the day. I figured if there was some urgent information that I needed to know, someone would tell me about it, or I could gather all the info I needed in half an hour or so twice a day.

Almost instantly, I was able to focus better again and felt a lot less of that mental tension.

Recognizing that you’re doomscrolling is a great first step to getting it under control and reducing that stress and tension on yourself.

Now, let’s look at some of the ways we can more appropriately use our digital devices and have them work for us by reducing the temptation to doomscroll.

Time Blocking

The first step will work well if you like to stick to an agenda and have a calendar in place for your day. Time Blocking means deciding ahead of time what you will be doing at certain times throughout the day, usually in blocks of anywhere from 30-120 minutes. During these blocks of time, you focus on a single task that has been predetermined.

To avoid constant doomscrolling throughout the day you would set up time blocks where you allow yourself to check the news and get on social media. I like to do this for myself at 10:30 am and 4:30 pm for half an hour at most.

Time blocking requires a good amount of self-discipline to stick to on its own which is why it helps to combine it with additional restraints.

Set Up Your Time Limits

Just about every device out there now has an app that can notify you when you reach a time limit for access to certain social media apps or websites. With Screen Time on the iPhone for example, you can see exactly how much time is spent on entertainment apps or social media and then set up a Time Limit to block you out of the app at certain times throughout the day as well as after you’ve hit a certain time limit.

To avoid the negative effects of doomscrolling it’s a really good idea to take a few minutes to set this up for yourself. You can be liberal with your access at first and gradually reduce your time limit as you get more used to the constraints. You’ll be surprised how much more productive and happy you’ll feel by not constantly checking the news and social media.

Give Yourself Even More Freedom

You can still get through the barrier of the default time limit apps on phones and tablets with relative ease, so if that doesn’t hold back your desire to check social media, there’s more we can do. An additional step that takes it a bit further is to use software like Freedom, which completely blocks your internet access or locks you out of certain apps during set times that you easily program it for. If you know that you’re going to gloss over any reminder that your time limit is up with an app or website, the power of Freedom is well worth the small cost to buy this software.

I use Freedom to block me out of all email apps and social media sites in the morning so that I can focus on important tasks and projects without the distraction of inboxes. Since I know that there’s no way around Freedom’s block on my internet access, I have no choice but to focus on my work or sit there and twiddle my thumbs. It’s a great name for the software because it really does give you a greater sense of Freedom.

Newsfeed Eradicator

If the negativity of social media is really wearing you down these days, one of the best things you can do is avoid that doomscrolling altogether by eradicating it. With certain desktop browsers like Chrome, you can download extensions like the Facebook Newsfeed Eradicator which takes away your newsfeed and replaces it with an inspirational quote. You can still check your social media for messages and notifications directed towards you and look in on the groups and pages you like at your discretion but you won’t have a news feed compelling you to scroll through relentlessly.

Content Planning Apps

A lot of us use social media as a way to promote our businesses and other creative expressions and if this is important to you, using a content planner like Hootsuite, Buffer, Later, or Publer can help you to spend less time on social media while still sharing your message.

You can batch your content and schedule it to go out when you want so that you’re not needing to load up a social media app and possibly get caught in a doomscroll when you go to share something that you have created. This can save you tons of time and also make managing your social media usage much simpler.

Our brains are hardwired to doomscroll. It comes from a time where we had to be hyper-vigilant to threats in our environment and now that we partly exist in a virtual environment, that’s where our brains turn to seek out threats.

Recognize that this is a perfectly normal response to uncertainty and that there are steps you can take to mitigate the risk and the stress doomscrolling may be causing to your system. Use the apps and the strategies above to create some healthier boundaries with social media and news sites so that you can feel better.

Here's How To Make It Simple To Connect To Your Breath More Regularly Throughout The Day

Your boss just adds another stack of paperwork to your desk. Your phone buzzes with a news release that piles even more stress and anxiety on your plate.

Much of the world we live in today is completely stressing us out.

One of the simplest ways that we can feel better is through checking in with our breath more regularly throughout the day.

The reality is that most of us do not breathe well or check in on the status of our bodies regularly enough and it leads to a whole range of issues from higher stress and anxiety levels to compromising our immune system.

Training yourself to breathe differently from what you’re used to can be a great challenge. Something that we do 25,000 times per day is deeply ingrained and requires a lot of conscious effort to adjust.

How To Breathe Properly

It sounds silly to have to go over this until you realize that the majority of people have terrible breathing patterns that lead to issues like higher stress levels and weakened immune systems.

When we properly breathe we engage our diaphragm which allows us to breathe more deeply and counteract the sympathetic nervous system that stresses our body and makes us sick when chronically activated.

When we are tense or in an anxious state we breathe just into our upper chest, often taking the air in through our mouths. This activates the sympathetic nervous system and can keep us in a chronic state of stress, eventually leading to illness and burnout. 

A proper breath for calming our nervous system is taken in through our nose with the exhale being longer than the inhale. This allows for a more proper exchange of carbon dioxide to oxygen in our bodies. With the frequent practice of calm breathing, we become more effective at managing our stress levels. 

Calm breathing induces the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system for greater relaxation.

4-7-8 Breathing For a Calm State

Dr. Andrew Weil has come up with the 4-7-8 technique as an easy way to extend that exhale and drop you into a calm state. To use the 4-7-8 technique, focus on the following breathing pattern: 

• Empty the lungs of air, breathe in quietly through the nose for 4 seconds. 

• Hold the breath for a count of 7 seconds.

• Exhale forcefully through the mouth or nose for 8 seconds. 

• Repeat the cycle up to 4 times to significantly reduce anxiety levels.

So let’s talk about how we can connect with our breath more regularly throughout the day to create stronger patterns for healthy and calm breathing.

These practices are built around the habits that we already have in our lives which will simplify the process and make it highly intuitive and automatic to complete with no added effort.

1. Set Up a Phone Alarm

The first strategy that you can use is to set up trigger alarms in your phone, or if you have a smartwatch, use an app like Breathe to remind you multiple times per day to check in on your breath. It’s a good idea to start with at least 3 or 4 times per day. So you could have your alarms set for first thing in the morning or just after breakfast time, late morning or early afternoon, after work, and before bed. Experiment with whatever times of the day are most realistic for you to practice catching your breath and calming it down for a minute.

2. Anchor It To Other Habits

Another way to make checking in with your breath more automatic is to anchor it to habits that you already have. This is known as habit stacking. As an example, you can spend a minute slowing your breathing through your nose each time you finish washing your hands after going to the washroom.

Another habit to stack to is anytime you refill your water throughout the day.

We all have unique habits but think about what habits you have every day that can serve as a starting point for checking in on your breath.

3. Certain Times of Day

Just like creating a trigger alarm for your breathing, the other strategy around the time of day is to simply create a hard set rule for yourself that you will check in on your breath at certain times of the day so that it becomes ingrained as automatically when you will practice. This could include times like during your morning commute, at your lunch break, or before you get out of your car and head back into the house after work.

4. Phone Wallpaper

The closest thing to getting the word “breathe” tattooed on your wrist without having to go that far is to create a wallpaper for your phone that has the word on there as a reminder. This little trick can help in addition to the other strategies above but is not as salient so I would suggest that you add this in addition to the other ones instead of depending fully on it.

It can serve as a nice little trick reminder for you though and once you’ve already started working on the habit, every time you see the note on your phone it may help you to also question what purpose you are checking your phone for so that you’re also approaching your devices with more mindfulness.

It Takes Time To Make The Change

Just as you’ve been breathing in your current pattern for a very long time, you won’t automatically start breathing like a meditation guru overnight so be patient with yourself and work on this consistently for a couple of months. You’ll slowly start to see changes in how calm you are and your overall stress levels.

Getting Started With Meditation: A Beginner's Guide to Finding Peace and Relieving Stress

Mindfulness is one of those words of wellness that means so much but mystifies so many.

At the essence of it though mindfulness simply means being where your feet are at. You are here in the present moment and fully engaged in what is happening within you or around you.

Sounds simple right?

For some of us, it is and for others, it takes some time to get to a state of being more mindful.

Our minds are awash with ancient instincts that were developed for simpler times. We didn’t have four thousand advertising messages exposed to our nervous systems each day along with ongoing triggers of our stress and rewards systems with the blips and pings of notifications.

Mindfulness has been practiced for thousands of years so if it did the people well in simpler times where stress was activated by life-threatening situations, might it also do us good today when our stress systems are on high alert most of the time due to stress we’ve imposed upon ourselves?

So let’s talk now about how we can get started with a mindfulness practice. Whether you’re looking to get started for the very first time or reboot a past practice, this article will guide you through the process.

It Starts With Change

Before we get into specific recommendations, it’s important to recognize that any new behaviour starts with the desire to change. In the realm of coaching and psychology, this field is known as Change Psychology.

Readiness to change is the biggest predictor of success in any goal that you set for yourself so take this part of the process seriously.

If you’re reading this article and you’ve made it this far, the good news is you’re likely ready to make a change and start a new mindfulness meditation practice!

Now let’s make it easier for you to get started.

There are only two things that drive us towards making a lasting change in our lives:

• Getting away from pain

• Moving towards pleasure

Pain is two times more salient than pleasure so as we’re talking about change, we’re also talking about what specific goal you are setting for yourself. You want to gain something of pleasure in making the change but you also want to acknowledge what you’re looking to get rid of that is hurting you in some way.

Take some time to think about this and even write it down for yourself. Be as specific as you can for why you are making this change.

“I am committing over the next 30 days to a daily practice of meditating for at least 10 minutes as a way to help with my anxiety and bring me calmer in my life.”

The Many Benefits of Mindfulness

You get to mix and match the myriad benefits of mindfulness in whatever way you like to come up with your purposeful goal. As a refresher here are some of the benefits that mindfulness and meditation can bring to you or negative things that it helps to take away:

• Increased focus and attention

• Greater empathy

• Reduced blood pressure

• Reduced stress

• Lowers anxiety

• May have a positive effect on depression

• Improved sports performance

• More resilient against adversity

• Increased discipline and mental toughness

• A greater sense of calm and peace

• Aiding in overcoming trauma

Forming the Habit

Now that you’ve got your specific meditation or mindfulness goal set, it’s time to form it into a lasting change in your life. We do that through habits. Despite your best intentions, if something is not ingrained as an automatic response in the form of a habit, it’s not likely going to get done when things blow up in your life and get difficult. The key to forming habits is enough consistency over time that it becomes an automatic response.

What doesn’t get scheduled doesn’t get done, so make sure that you’ve got your meditation planned out each day in your calendar.

I recently completed a challenge of exercising for 60 days straight and reflected upon the experience in this video here: 7 Lessons Learned from Exercising for 60 Days Straight.

I talk about habits a lot in that video because it was clear that after a certain point, the task of exercise became a habit to my brain as a day no longer felt complete without that exercise routine. There are many factors that affect how long it takes to form a habit which is why somewhere between thirty and sixty days is smart to start with when it comes to the mindfulness goal you set for yourself.

We most often approach these positive changes in our lives with a short-term goal to get started but deep down at its core we are making the change because we recognize that it’s going to positively impact our lives if we continue it long-term and indefinitely.

So now, let’s talk about making the choice of meditation that works best for you because if it doesn’t resonate with you, discipline will only take you so far in terms of keeping you going.

The Many Options To Choose From

There is no one-size-fits-all to meditation and while I do recommend that everyone try to start with some form of seated mindfulness-based meditation practice, it might not be the right practice for everyone long-term.

Meditation Apps For Getting Started

Sitting meditations are a great place to start though for learning the basic skills in a controlled setting.

There are countless apps that help you to learn meditation. Some of my favourites include the Waking Up app by Sam Harris, Headspace, Oak, and Insight Timer.

Waking Up and Headspace have free trials to get started with and you can learn much of the basics of meditation just with the trial, and then they offer subscriptions to continue on with. This can sometimes give you just enough of an investment to want to take your practice more seriously.

Oak and Insight Timer offers free options for guided meditations or calming music to help keep you relaxed while practicing unguided.

The Basic Practice of Mindfulness

(You can download a free meditation track here)

1. Get into a comfortable position in a quiet and calm place where you won’t be distracted. There’s no right way to position yourself, you can cross your legs if it’ll be comfortable, keep them bent in a chair, or even lie down on the floor or your bed.

2. We usually start out practicing meditation with eyes closed but you can also leave your eyes open and soften your gaze.

3. It starts by bringing more attention to your breath and where you are directing it. It can help to place a hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen to feel where the air is going. Work on letting the belly expand and fall with each breath and keeping the chest relatively still.

4. We want to place most of our attention on our breathing. It can help to focus on the sensation of air passing the tip of your nose or that feeling of the belly rising and falling.

5. Thoughts will come into your head. A common misconception of mindfulness is that you are failing or not good at it because you cannot clear the thoughts from your head. This isn’t true though. We use meditation to detach ourselves from the thoughts by letting them pass by as if they were floating past us down a stream or like clouds passing by. The strengthening practice of mindfulness is in letting the thoughts go by while acknowledging them without holding on to them.

6. The work of meditation is in noticing when thoughts come to mind. You simply want to return to the breath each time you are distracted.

7. It can help to count your breaths or count the cadence of each breath as a way to occupy your mind a little more.

That’s all there is to the basic meditation practice! You can set a timer for keeping you to your goal time or just continue meditating as long as it feels good and gradually increase your time.

What Time of Day Should You Meditate?

It’s important to mention that timing during the day can make a big difference. We generally see it beneficial to practice meditation first thing in the morning to start your day off right but I’ve often found that I fall asleep or can’t focus well enough if I’m not fully awake, so for me mid-day or the evenings is when I meditate.

Right before bed may not be the best time either because if you’re getting sleepy, it’s once again hard to maintain the adequate focus needed for strengthening the mindfulness practice.

If you start this seated meditation practice for a few days and it doesn’t jive with you, consider a more active form of meditation like walking meditation, forest bathing, or qigong and Tai Chi. These practices can be equally mindful but helpful for those who spend a lot of their time sitting at work and need to expend some physical energy to restore balance.

Now you’ve got all that you need to get started with a mindfulness practice. Write down the intention for why you want to make this change, schedule your meditation for each day, and start practicing with whatever app or method you find easiest to follow.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or specific concerns with your meditation practice.

What Can We Learn and Apply from Silent Meditation Retreats to Our Everyday Life?

I recently had my friend Tony Francis on the FlowCast where we went in-depth on the story of a virtual silent meditation retreat that he attended during the COVID-19 quarantine. Not only was this a unique style of a meditation retreat, but it also got me thinking about how we all could apply those lessons to our everyday lives. Instead of endlessly flicking through social media what if we paused to listen to the birds chirping and just watch the clouds drifting by us?

Instead of seeing meditation as a bandaid solution to a tightening in our chest what if we made it a part of our daily routine just because?

What would our life be like then?

Today, let's look at what we can learn from the experience of others who have attended silent meditation retreats and see how we can live a little more mindfully by following their lead.

We're Always Chasing The Next Mountain

We face an immense issue in our modern world that is driven by our primitive brains in this hyperstimulated setting. We are so driven and focused by the next milestone or next objective that we never stop to appreciate what's in front of us. You've probably experienced this yourself before. You go on a beautiful hike, seeking out the highest point in the area. You are so focused on reaching that zenith too far away to even see in the distance that you don't take in the forest around you. Or maybe you're on vacation on the Mediterranean coast, and instead of appreciating the breathtaking scenery, you're only thinking about what you're going to have for dinner and where you're going to eat.

Our agendas are meant to guide us towards living more purposefully, not to own us and our every thought.

Silent Retreats Give Us Access To Experiences No Other Humans Have

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist who has found his purpose in teaching meditation, primarily through his Waking Up app where he teaches daily meditations, brings on guest instructors, and has deep discussions with long time practitioners. In his book of the same name, *Waking Up*, Sam talks about his first silent meditation retreat experience which happened when he was only sixteen. Sam talked about the misery of the experience, as part of the retreat included a multi-day fast in the woods alone. Chasing his metaphorical mountain, Sam spent the first few days journaling about all the foods he would eat when he was back home. Despite the challenge of the initial phase of the retreat, over the years Sam has reflected that he believes silent retreats give us access to experiences that no other humans have. There's a transcendence of the primal chase when we exact our willpower to retreat into silence for days at a time. It strips away all the distractions from what is known as "the wound of existence." We recognize that life is entirely made up of NOW. Unlike a prophecy, whatever comes next has not come into existence yet and whatever has already passed may have left a scar but is equally nonexistent in the present moment.

While I have not attended a silent meditation retreat, I am deeply curious about what this exclusive experience Sam Harris talks about might be...

Unlocking Peak Experiences and Flow

Perhaps one part of the silent retreat experience that Sam Harris talked about is what Abraham Maslow called peak experiences and we more intimately know as the flow state. Flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness, one where performance goes through the roof, and we are forced into the present moment.

The conditions of flow are most commonly met in activities with clearly defined goals and a degree of challenge that is ever-so-slightly above your skill level (4% above to be exact). But what happens when we find flow in situations without a definite outcome?

There is no goal of meditation and that's what most people new to the practice get tripped up over.

Am I meditating correctly?

Am I doing it right?

I'm sure that you've had these thoughts before.

To paraphrase what Tony said so eloquently in the podcast, "we often meditate when we are already anxious as a way to try to relieve that anxiety." One thing that he took away from the experience of the silent retreat when meditating for upwards of three hours every day was the feeling of meditation solely the sake of meditating without needing to do so because one is anxious is a profoundly different experience.

When you let yourself meditate for the sake of meditation, you learn to derive joy from the experience itself rather than some expected outcome of your actions, in other words, it becomes autotelic, another keystone of flow. Then there is the action of mindfulness which is like doing bicep curls for your brain, as each fleeting thought gets flexed away to bring yourself back to open awareness. You experience progress in real-time which when you do for the pure pleasure of the act, keeps you perfectly aligned in that flow channel where challenge meets skill.

All of this culminates in one of the most intoxicating effects of flow; we experience time differently as it becomes distorted. This is very common in the float tank where the dials on all sensory inputs are turned way down. It feels like forever and then it's over. When meditating for prolonged periods and stripping away all temptations of distraction, we come to experience it in a very similar way in finding flow.

Can a Digital Detox Be an Entry Point to a Silent Retreat?

Maybe like me, you are left a little more curious about what experiences are invited into your being when you set out on a silent meditation retreat so I want to leave you with an idea of how we can incorporate some of this mindfulness into our lives.

Within 24 hours we are hit with over 4,000 advertising messages in our environment. Because a silent retreat is all about stripping away all those distractions, I have a hypothesis that a digital detox could be a great entry point to the experience if you're hesitant to dive in or not at liberty to do so at this point in your life.

A digital detox allows you to get some clarity through turning off all of your devices for a period of freedom. While you can do a 30-day social media fast, as Cal Newport suggests in his book Digital Minimalism, a more realistic starting point for you may be starting with a digital Shabbath as Tiffany Shlain describes in 24/6. Having a "screen off Saturday" makes it very easy to unplug without an overwhelming amount of stress and anxiety around feeling like your work life may be falling apart while you step away.

By turning off your devices for 24 hours on the weekend, you can take a step back and look at your life a little more clearly from a vantage point that is away from the frontline of battle.

So what are you waiting for? I encourage you to figure out a way to make this happen right away because you just don't know the depth of experience that is waiting on the other side for you.

Whether you want to venture out into the wilderness on a silent meditation retreat to explore the nature of your reality deeply or take an afternoon to hike through the local woods without tech pinging and binging around you, you are bound to discover the wonder that waits for you when you learn to take a pause and breathe.

5 Steps To Improving Your Mindset During Quarantine

How many times have you heard someone lament over what a challenge it is to get off the couch and get work done in the past several months while being stuck at home? It’s so easy to get lost binge-watching shows and trying to forget the world around us for a bit but we all know deep down that it doesn’t feel good to do this. It leaves us in a shroud of a perpetual hangover. Let’s look at a few steps that you can take to drastically improve your mindset and how you are feeling during the quarantine.

Even if the restrictions have lifted wherever you are, using these tips will still help to enhance your mindset and your experience of life.

So read on and take note of what you need to improve upon. 

5 Ways To Improve Your Mindset During Quarantine

1. USE your bliss station. 👩‍💻

A lot of us are struggling in part because productivity has bottomed out during the quarantine. It's difficult to get work done at home if you're not used to doing so and to add fuel to the fire, we're working online a lot more right now which is also a struggle if you don't have the right systems in place to master digital distractions.

A bliss station is your temple for deep work. It's a secluded place where you can be most productive. It should inspire creativity and focus.

Some people love the local coffee shop or library for this but as that's not an option for most of us still at this time, we have to manufacture our bliss stations at home. Download coffee shop sounds or play a movie with no sound in the background if you like to feel the company of other people around you. Or if your house is feeling too full right now, you can turn inward by repurposing a closet or using noise-cancelling headphones.

Creativity is a habit that we all can tap into if we create the right rituals and routines to produce more of it in our lives.

2. Keep a clean environment for focus. 🧹

If you're feeling frazzled in getting work done or just from feeling cooped up, a clean physical environment is linked to a clean mental space. To break through that ennui, tidy up your house or at least start with your work station to create more inspiration.  

And if you hate cleaning, it only takes about 60 seconds of cleaning before your brain and body shift gears and it starts to lift your mood. So set your timer and start moving and you’ll be amazed at the shift in your mindset.

3. Get outside 🌲

Nature is incredibly refreshing physically, mentally, and emotionally. Fresh air and the chemicals in plants that produce fragrances have a calming effect and reduce stress and blood pressure.

Try to get outside every single day and you'll immensely change the way you are feeling very quickly.

Even going barefoot outside of wherever you are living for a few minutes will help to ground you more.

If you need music or a podcast to get you out the door and into the woods, I suggest at some point turning it off and just tuning in to the sounds of nature around you.

4. Start a mindfulness practice 🧘‍♂️

Now is the perfect time to start a mindfulness practice. Being at home and maybe secluded from other people makes it important to turn inward and tune into your feelings and emotions.

Learning how to meditate is the closest thing that we have to a superpower as humans. You can tie this into your daily walks outside or your gratitude practice if the idea of trying to clear your head of all thoughts is daunting. The real magic comes around 10 minutes per day of practice but consistency is much more important than outright length, so if all you can muster is four deep breaths to start, that's still great!

If you need a place to start with meditation, the Flow Academy free Challenge Week for Staying Healthy, Happy, and Stress-Free at-home includes several great meditations for getting started and getting through these tough times.

5. 3-Step Gratitude 🙏

Practicing gratitude is incredibly powerful for living more positively and generating optimism.

Now more than ever, we should be writing down our experiences and so I strongly encourage you to start a daily journal and just jot down some of your ideas or experiences through this pandemic.

While you don't need to write down the things you are grateful for, it can be a useful way to embody the feelings of gratitude deeper.

I find that doing a 3-step gratitude is the best way to create balance with the practice. A lot of the time if we do the same gratitude every time it will lose some of its emotional charge. Some people like to just think of their life's highlight reel, others treat gratitude as mindfulness and just focus on the present while a third group tends to visualize the future first and foremost and is always chasing a perceived endpoint instead of balancing the appreciation of the journey.

Combining Past, Present, and Future into your gratitude practice is a way to create more balance.

1. Start by pulling on a past peak experience. Let it fill you up with happiness and gratitude. 

2. Use that energy to bring yourself into the present and focus on something small in your immediate environment that you can be grateful for. 

3. Now visualize a future event or goal that you are looking forward to. You can even envision it having already been accomplished or experienced. 

Using these mindset strategies can start to shift you towards more positivity and optimism. If it seems like a lot to ask for in one go, just start with whichever tip appeals to you the most and work on doing that one for a week or two. Once it feels easy to keep that one change in your routine, add in another step.

Remember that building a more resilient mindset doesn’t happen overnight and that this is about the long journey and not quick hacks. Take your time and be patient and wonderful things will start to happen for you.

Ready to take your performance to the next level? Register for the free webinar on How Will Peak Performance Change in “The New Normal?”

How Teachers Can Benefit From Float Therapy

Back to school time in the fall is a challenging transition for students and teachers alike. Momentum shifts and that sense of the grind through to Christmas as the weather gets colder imposes upon our psyche. The stress of the new school year is also compounded by the new germs being passed around which often leads to an uptick in colds shortly after the summer break. Having a strategy to incorporate mental and physical wellness into your weekly and monthly routine is essential for maintaining good health year-round but becomes critical at these transitional times. 

Teachers can benefit from floating through:

• Powerful stress reduction.

• A chance to get away to a quiet oasis without having to travel.

• Joint and muscle pain relief.

Float therapy is a wonderful way to reduce pain and stress naturally. Being supported in Epsom salt water that is denser than the Dead Sea allows your body to completely relax to relieve tension. The unique stimuli-reduced environment of a float pod or float cabin also allows your mind to let go of stress and anxiety. 

Stress Reduction

Teaching is a challenging and demanding job with all of the different factors that go into commanding the attention of a classroom full of students, all with their unique personalities. Combined with the tight timelines of grading work, and countless other factors, teaching can be very stressful. Float tanks may be the best technology we have to combat stress. Research has shown a significant reduction in cortisol levels come about from just one hour of floating. Anxiety is also significantly reduced and the “post-float glow” feeling of complete relaxation you get while not having a care in the world is extremely helpful when needing to unwind after a long day or a long week. 

A Quiet Oasis

The float therapy experience is incomparable. Customers leave saying that they’ve never experienced anything quite like it because we are never in an environment with no external stimuli. While some new floaters opt to leave the lights on or music playing, the benefits of the experience are compounded when you immerse yourself in the stimulus reduction through turning off the lights and letting the music fade out. This gives your brain the chance to bask in complete silence and darkness which extraordinarily refreshing in the overstimulated world that we live in. 

Pain Relief

Repeated strain from grading papers and desk work can lead to a lot of tight muscles and pain in the body.

There’s over 1,000 lb. of Epsom salt in each float tank, making it denser than the human body and allowing you to float completely without effort. Research shows this decompression is beneficial for back and neck pain, and ongoing studies are working towards validating the benefits that we’ve seen at Flow Spa with clients suffering from chronic conditions like arthritis and fibromyalgia. 

Needless to say, teachers who came into Flow Spa during the final grading and exams before school was out for the summer found their float experience to be exactly what they needed in terms of a reset between grading tests and papers. 

Developing different strategies to incorporate a reset into your routine will help to ensure that you are prepared through it all. At Flow Spa, we help in providing guidance with meditation and some of the various techniques you can use to consistently reduce stress and anxiety. Restorative exercise is also essential to maintaining balance and overall well-being. And when you need that time to get away from everything and decompress, float tanks offer an unrivalled experience. 

Use This Gratitude Practice To Make Your Outlook Immediately Brighter

As we are approaching the first six months of doors-open business for this burgeoning start-up that is Flow Spa, like any business, getting the momentum rolling forward hasn’t been without its hitches.

Throughout it all, I have had an unwavering sense of gratitude for the business and the support in my life that has allowed me to push forward with this vision.

We often forget the little things that have a profound impact on our sense of well-being. Without a habit being ingrained in your routine, it will fall by the wayside when life gets in the way or you feel you are too busy to take less than five minutes out of your day.

Gratitude is one of those things.

It often sounds so simple and doesn’t take much time to incorporate into your daily routine but seems to be a lost art to many people. That is gratitude journaling or just showing gratitude daily.

Starting your day off with a dose of gratitude makes a world of difference in your outlook and how you feel about the day.

While some people like to kick off the day with their gratitude practice, others prefer to wait until before bed to reflect on the day while looking forward to the next one or the bigger things at hand that you are grateful for.

I suggest trying both methods and finding what works better for you.

People often approach the idea of taking those precious moments to be grateful or to write it down as a waste of time because they are naturally pessimistic or feel like they don’t have a lot to be grateful for in their current situation. A lot of people get confused about practicing gratitude and think that it has to be things that are immediately present and make your world seem like it’s all sunshine and rainbows.

It can be beneficial when working towards a goal to have gratitude for that bigger goal at hand. Recognize that you are working towards something that will better you and you can be grateful for how far you’ve come already or if you’re just getting started, be grateful for the path ahead of you because having a goal and a mission to accomplish brings us a deeper meaning.

To balance this goal-oriented gratitude I have found that the way Tony Robbins practices gratitude has a lot of power to it.

Balanced Gratitude Practise for Optimism

The gratitude practise takes all of three minutes a day and consists of:

1. Something relatively goal-oriented, the type of gratitude that we typically see as we look forward to some expected outcome.

2. Something immediate and relatively mundane. Look around you on a macro setting- it could be the feeling and warmth of the rising (or setting) sun on your skin, it could be the sounds of the birds around you, the smell of summer, the colours of the vibrant flowers in your field of vision. Get specific and take a moment to deeply embrace that feeling.

3. The final type of daily gratitude is to reflect on a past relationship or experience with another person (or place) and relive the lessons that you have learned that you are grateful for because of that person or place.

By breaking up your gratitude practice into three distinct pieces, you won’t always write down or contemplate the same things. This is why writing down your daily gratitude list can help you to catch yourself from running on autopilot and make the practice more potent if you tend to always think of the same answers. Writing it down also forces both hemispheres of your brain to work in concert to actualize the gratitude more deeply. Priming the nervous system in this way is powerful so I do recommend writing your gratitude lists down in a journal, on a notepad, or even in a note on your phone or computer.

Try it out for yourself.

Start with one week and do the practice every day at the same time. Prime your day in the morning or set your mind at ease before bed with a nighttime practice. Get it done and see how you feel after one week. I’m certain that it will help to bring more optimism into your life and you’ll realize that this is a valuable practice to incorporate for life.

Do This To Conquer Boredom

It's ok to be bored sometimes.

We are driven. Doers.

Every minute planned; every to-do list spewing out to the margins.

And when we have a moment to come up for air, we choose to hold our breath and take another dopamine hit from the social media slot machine. Who’s doing what that’s more exciting than our reality? Who liked our selfie?

At the end of it all we are so run into the dirt that we can no longer choose for ourselves - take our binge watching of The Office, yet again, as case-in-point. The never-ending slump into ‘blah.’ Over time we lose our spark. Our uniqueness is dissolved into the technological soup of humanity and the vicious cycle keeps turning round and round. Our health suffers. Our lives suffers. Our relationships suffer. We suffer. 

Every moment of every day we have a choice. Many of those choices may seem to be pre-filled - eight hours here for sleep, another eight for work there, but that still leaves eight hours - not to mention the number of opportunities most of us have at work to make the right choice when on break or switching between tasks. 

The choice we have in front of us is that of choosing boredom and then conquering it. We are becoming less human because we give ourselves no chance to just BE anymore. 

We come to find our true selves in boredom. We remember. Everyone is so desperate to be someone on social media but we already are somebody in the real world. 

People are showing signs of withdrawal symptoms when they are unplugged for too long today. Our smartphones and the apps we use daily have been engineered to be addictive. That constant dopamine drip when unplugged will leave us itching for another hit.

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For the sake of your self, your health, and your peace of mind, you must resist regularly. 

Conquering boredom is easier said than done. You’ll feel like you’re missing out on something when you look around and see everyone else plugged into a digital landscape and completely unaware of what’s right in front of them. You’ll seem strange, in fact, to choose yourself over your digital avatar. 

You’ve been convinced that you’ll miss out on something but you won’t; not really. You’ll actually be receiving so much more in return. 

The next time you’re waiting in line at the grocery store or waiting for your friend to arrive for dinner at the restaurant resist the urge to immediately pull out your phone and swipe mindlessly. Because the urge will come immediately - take note of that. And instead take a deep breath - focus intensely on that breath. It feels good to breathe deep. Much better in fact than looking through your Instagram feed like a mindless zombie.

 It may feel boring, true, but overtime your overstimulated nervous system will relearn to settle down. It wasn’t very long ago that our world wasn’t like this. Only 15 years ago we didn’t have the same fidgety issues at such an epidemic scale and a generation ago we were content to sit quietly or allow our imagination to wander without intervening. 

Think about the simple pleasures a dog gets from sitting and waiting. The depth that comes to the world from the sounds, smells, and sights that are ever-present when we let them just come to us. 

So return to your breath or just let your thoughts process for a change. What you call boredom isn’t always as it seems. You’ve just unlearned what to do with your own thoughts as you constantly have the inputs of other consciousnesses bombarding your own. 

Overtime it will become easier to embrace the boredom and to allow the stillness to settle in. 

And in this stillness, in this silence, you will realize that it’s all ok. 

Digital Minimalism - A Podcast Prologue

This week we’ve got a big and important podcast episode for you and I wanted to clear some the thoughts in my head for it prior to the recording because it’s a topic that I’m passionate about and have been studying a lot about in the past few years.

So before I go off rambling on the podcast I wanted to refine my thoughts and target the conversation to be actionable as well as perhaps eye-opening to some of our audience.

The topic is Digital Minimalism.

Who’s In Control?

Several books in the last few years have started to rally towards the need for more control when it comes to all the great and powerful technologies we have in our lives today. At the heart of digital minimalism is the realization that we are becoming slaves to our digital devices in many ways.

This sounds like some sort of sci-fi dystopian scare tactic but it isn’t. Not yet at least.

Technologies do a lot of great things for us but we are evolutionary beings with incredible susceptibility to the shiny object that stimulates the reward centres in our brains the most. This is what technologies like smartphones and social media apps do best, and not by accident. There are many scientists and engineers behind these technologies while their sole job being to make them as addicting as possible. The same people who design slot machines in casinos are working for companies like Facebook or inspiring the work of their software engineers.

Social media sites want you to stay on them longer, because as the whistleblowers and people making cautionary statements about social media say, we the consumer are the commodity being sold to the real customers who are the big companies and ad agencies buying ad space on the likes of social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Furthermore, these companies are taking ownership of the data of our lives - where we live, where we travel to, what we do every day, and the questions that we are Googling. These data points are refining our digital experience and also being sold for big bucks to the highest bidder wanting our personal data.

It sounds a little scary and it can be if you are an unwitting subject to this reality without making informed decisions and operating with some restraint and forewarning.

Is Social Media Really An Issue, Or Something We Need To Accept?

Many people on the opposite end of the spectrum say that there’s nothing wrong with this and it’s just the way the world works today but that’s not entirely accurate to say. Not only because it’s exploitation on our susceptible biology that we want the easy and immediate rewards in our lives - delayed gratification is a product of our consciousness and insatiable need for growth as human beings and not what we as animals have evolved to want to do. (Have you ever seen a dog pass up a treat in exchange for TWO treats later? NO! And not just because the dog will beg for more treats later).

But this delayed gratification is something that we can and often do as humans to achieve greater meaning. You can have your cake and eat it too but you’ve got to use moderation in the short-term to achieve those bigger goals.

The other reason that the argument that we just have to accept the way the world is today is missing the point is that excessive use of social media, which is ubiquitous, is harmful to our health. Social media has been correlated with an exponential increase in anxiety on college campuses. Social media researchers are showing that the ease of access to social media is making us feel more lonely and socially isolated. When it’s easier to jump on Instagram and double-tap that photo of your friend’s food rather than meeting to go out for dinner together and turn your phones off to have a deep and undistracted conversation or binge-watch Netflix instead of getting together with friends to go hiking when you feel a little “blah” it becomes a real problem for our ability to have those conversations and truly live as a tribe.

It’s true that we’ve far-surpassed our tribal connection which Dunbar’s number considers being 150 people and we may use that in a very empowering way to expand our reach and opportunities in this world but how many of those people would really be there for you if you needed them? That’s one of the issues and the dichotomy between having stable social relationships and those superficial relationships that “Liking” and “Retweeting” online give us.

So what can we do about it?

The Solution For Social Media Addiction

First, recognize.

Recognize that feeling of malaise that you get when you’ve glued yourself to the couch binge-watching Game of Thrones (not to mention the sobbing uncontrollably when another of your favourite characters gets his or her head lopped off).

Recognize that you’ve swiped through all of the latest photos from your friends and all of their Stories are just pictures directing you to check out their feed post on their bio.

Recognize that there’s more to the world than what’s happening on the five-inch piece of glass glowing so bright that it affects your melatonin production and sleep quality.

And once you recognize, take small steps (or big ones) to make a change.

Digital Detox

Digital Detoxes like the one Cal Newport suggests in his book Digital Minimalism are the best way to completely reset and pull the tentacles of addiction out of your skull for good. Small steps are less impactful but you’ll see pretty quickly how out of control of your brain you are when you try to check your social media profiles less than for the over 60 minutes a day we are on Facebook out of the 80 times per day we check our phones on average or reduce frantic email checking to one to two blocks per day.

We all lose our ways over and over again. Recognize that as well. There is no final solution, other than becoming a hermit and moving off the grid and into a cabin in the woods. You will get sucked back into the digital spiral again and again.

But just start again.

Do another Digital Detox, reduce your screen time. Turn your phone off at the dinner table. Check your screen time - all phones do it now - and reduce it by 10 minutes per day for a week. Then push that number a little further. Fill that time with something worthwhile to reduce the temptation.

Whatever strategy you choose to go with, your non-digital brain and body will thank you for it and you’ll be living with more meaning again.

Getting The Most Out Of Your Float | 1

At Flow Spa, we choose not to belabour the point of what to expect in the float tank because the experience is unique to each individual. There are far too many factors to take into account to be able to say “this is what you’re going to experience,” especially in the first few sessions as you learn how to relax deeper into the float. 

This isn’t to say that there aren’t tips you can use to get the most out of your float and bask in that “post-float glow.” 

Far from being comprehensive, today let’s look at some of the tips that you can work on applying when you come in to float to take the experience to the next level. 

Remaining Still

I include this as the first tip because I think it can be the more important one for many people looking to elevate their float experience. Part of the benefit of floating is that your body is given a chance to decompress and dissolve in relation to the environment around you. We’ve calibrated the temperature in our float tanks to be perfectly neutral to skin temperature and have made adjustments in the first few weeks to be sure that it is at the perfect comfortable temperature for virtually everyone coming in to float. This means that you’re not supposed to be able to FEEL that you are in water across most of your body or even be able to tell the difference between the air temperature and water temperature. After some thought and experimentation with this, I’ve come to realize that a very important step in nurturing this physical sensation dissolution is to practice remaining perfectly still once you set into your most comfortable position. 

Movement means that part of your brain is firing, whether you’re feeling restless or just fidgeting. 

The other reason to limit movement is that movement has a convective effect in the water, which will draw heat out of your core quicker and temporarily give you a cooling sensation at your skin as that heat is pulled away from your body. When you remain still everything in the float tank system, including your body, is in a perfect balance. Movement in the water is much like the cooling effect that standing in front of a fan while sweating in the summer heat has. The water draws heat out of the body and cuts through that vapour barrier that our bodies possess.

Slowing Your Breathing

The float tank is conducive to slowing down your breathing already because you are letting everything in your body relax deeply, which frees the diaphragm to take in fuller and deeper breaths and also allows you to hyper-oxygenate because all of your muscles are relaxed and not requiring copious amounts of oxygen for any demanding work. 

Many people never take full and deep breaths though so it can be a new and different experience the first few times in the float tank to allow your body and your breath to fully relax and deepen. 

I often advise starting with a box breathing style of 4-4-4-4 where you:

-breathe in for a count of four

-hold your breath for a count of four

-breath out for a count of four

-hold the bottom of the breath for a count of four

The Japanese Society for Hypertension has shown that even 1-minute of deep breathing (5-6 breaths depending on the cadence and method you’re using) can significantly reduce blood pressure. Spending an hour like this in the float tank, therefore, has a dramatic impact not just on mental wellbeing but on many physical markers of health as well. 

Some people prefer to count their breaths. When doing this style of deep breathing and meditation I like counting up to ten and then starting over. Holding any larger numbers in the mind can take away from the peace of mind you are looking for and if you’re deeply relaxed, even counting to 10 can become a challenge without losing track but whenever that happens you just start over. 

Come in with permission to relax

We all lead busy and distracted lives. It’s become a pervasive issue for many people which is why I believe the reset of floating first and foremost teaches all of us the value in practicing mindfulness in whatever way comes naturally to you daily. It’s not realistic for everyone to float more than once a month but trying to go 30-days with only one hour of mental peace of mind is also not a good strategy. 

When you do come in to float though you want to pamper yourself with the experience as much as possible. 

Turn off your phone or put it in airplane mode so that you can reap the most benefits of not letting your mind instantly get distracted again. Make a day out of it or at least a few hours by hanging out in our lounge before heading back out into the wild or schedule your float for a day where you do have to immediately get busy again after you are done. The more you can float on that cloud for a while afterwards, the more at peace you will be and the more you will realize the value in cherishing the present moment regularly in your life.

World Sleep Day and Recovery

This week’s blog features an audio companion for anyone who prefers to listen - check out this week’s FlowCast here.

Today is world sleep day and with daylight savings time just passed last week, it’s an important time to think about sleep and getting yourself reset this weekend.

Daylight savings time has become a hotly debated issue because it forces us all to accept a lost hour of sleep when we spring forward and for many of us with already full schedules this means we end up losing that hour altogether.

It may not seem like a big deal but from Matthew Walker’s research which is covered in-depth in his masterpiece on sleep science “Why We Sleep” we don’t properly catch up when we’ve accumulated a sleep debt by sleeping more later.

Sleep is an essential part of the circadian rhythm and as such requires diligent daily, not weekly, attention. Something astounding that Walker talks about in his book is that the incidence of heart attacks skyrockets the Monday following the spring forward in DST and plummets when we get an extra hour of sleep when we fall back an hour.

This doesn’t automatically mean that you’re going to have a heart attack because you lost an hour of sleep last weekend but from many people I’ve talked to this week, the change affects us all in subtle ways. The sudden shift in when the sun rises and sets, the sense of feeling the need to catch up all week, it’s kind of a funny feeling.

So what can we do about it?

Matthew Walker might suggest that we can’t make up for a sleep debt but getting an extra hour of sleep or recovery time for World Sleep Day or anytime this weekend can help to get you back on track still in my mind. Take a nap, spend an hour recharging in a float tank, get outside for a quiet walk in nature, turn off all of your devices and go to bed an hour early.

The quick transition of Daylight Saving’s Time is additional stress on all of us. Life is a constant balance of stress and recovery, sympathetic and parasympathetic - yin and yang. Out of respect for World Sleep Day, if you didn’t spend the March Break somewhere relaxing, take an extra hour to do something rejuvenating this weekend and perhaps start to make it a routine - but that’s a whole other topic for another day.

Are Sports a Suitable Replacement for Your Daily Mindfulness Practice?

Do Sports = Mindfulness?

I recently heard a debate from a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher that caught my attention as it related to the question of whether playing sports or participating in physical activity can substitute a mindfulness practice.

The argument was that people who claim they get everything they need out of their physical practice are missing an inherently valuable component of more traditional mindfulness practices and that playing sports won’t carry over any benefit into an everyday situation. One of the primary concerns of the author was that the sport you are most passionate about because a vehicle of escape over time.

I look at it as a situation where there is a complementary value of participating in a physical challenge along with taking the time out to find regular stillness in your week.

The mindful value of sport primarily comes when operating a peak performance, when everything depends on your mind and body working in harmony and you reach the flow state. By meditating, you help to strengthen the mind-body connection, allowing yourself to avoid distractions to reach and maintain the flow state more often, whether in competition or casual sports practice. Vice versa, most people gravitate towards a physical practice that they have enjoyment and passion for which is another critical factor for producing a state of flow.

Playing sports and practicing mindfulness have some of the same qualities to them but they are not exactly the same thing. The statement cannot be made that all sports are mindfulness practices just as much as you cannot say that all mindfulness practices are sports. But are people who say that their meditation or mindfulness practice is found in the gym or on the field or court wrong? I think that if in their own mind they feel a mindfulness benefit from their preferred physical activity, it’s good that it is helping them, at least in the short-term.

Former Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink talks about how the gym and training Jiu Jitsu is his mindfulness practice and it helps to serve him well. Some people really struggle with sitting still to find mindfulness and so maybe you will need to find a balance between the physical and resting types of mindfulness.

One of the statements the MBSR teacher made that cuts through the differences between sports and a more calming mindfulness practice is that many people who gravitate towards sports as their mindfulness practice end up having it as a crutch that cannot help them as much in real life or when they are injured and can’t keep playing.

This is why you don’t want to just practice sports, because you may be missing out on a valuable part of the everyday practice of mindfulness and meditation for helping you to cope with other stressors.

Physical activity is a stress in and of itself, albeit a beneficial one. By getting your blood pumping and releasing beneficial endorphins, you are also activating the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the fight or flight response in emergency situations. On the other hand, meditation and mindfulness practices turn up the parasympathetic nervous system, enhancing calm and relaxation.

The Mind-Muscle Connection and Flow

Many people gravitate towards more traditional mindfulness practices only after having found a passion for a particular sport or physical activity because there is that excitement and passion that comes with doing something that gets your heart rate up and produces endorphins. This also seems to be an entry point to mindfulness as the inherent challenge in sport, whether competing against yourself or others, is a powerful driver of flow. Once people find an activity that reliably produces the flow state, it’s hard to get them to want to stop. Flow is the ultimate destination of practicing mindfulness - finding peak present moment awareness to push the body and mind to its limit.

But it can be very difficult to maintain a flow state even when pushing yourself in a sporting environment because of the intense focus it requires. To strengthen this focus on the present moment I believe that it is absolutely essential to have a daily mindfulness practice. It’s like lifting weights - you can’t expect to get stronger by lifting weights just once; it has to be done consistently over many months and years to produce results.

Sweep The Floor

Or better yet, my favourite analogy for the need to practice consistently comes from the final chapter of Ryan Holiday’s Ego is the Enemy: you’ve got to sweep the floor.

You don’t just sweep a floor once, dust your hands off, and consider it done; you’ve got to sweep the floor regularly in order to keep it clean.

In Ego is the Enemy, Holiday is referring to practicing Stoicism when he talks about sweeping the floor but Stoicism and mindfulness have a lot in common and the analogy works well for either of the practices. Practicing mindfulness daily will bring more richness of experience to your world when playing sports or any other physical practice and that’s why you shouldn’t just do one or the other - they work better together for finding your flow.

An example of someone who fully embodies this dichotomy is Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you’ve listened to any interviews with him, particularly The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, or read his biography Total Recall, you might be familiar with how Arnold spent two intensive years practicing Transcendental Meditation to find peace of mind and hone the mind-muscle connection to improve as a bodybuilder. Arnold claims that he got everything he could out of his daily meditation practice and as a result was able to focus better in the gym and this was part of the practice that made him into the legendary bodybuilder that he was. After those two years Arnold treated meditation as a refresher that he did occasionally to reset himself.

It’s the same with floating regularly - some people love floating so much that they transform it into their weekly mindfulness practice but you still need to keep the daily mindfulness practice in place to get the most out of your float sessions.

So here’s my conclusion:

Physical activities and mindfulness might have a lot in common when it comes to present-state awareness but the similarities end there. The two practices are not the same but work synergistically to get you more deeply in touch with your mind and body and should both be incorporated regularly for living a rich life and finding your flow.

The Year of Living Mindfully

The start of a New Year always marks a time of introspection. While many high-achievers may balk at the need to have a specific time of year when you set goals and resolutions, any time is better than no time to do it. If you are looking towards 2019 as your year to accomplish more of the goals you set for yourself, or even just want to be happier, that’s great!

In consideration of what you want to accomplish this year, I have a challenge I would like you to consider joining me in.

Make this year your year for living mindfully.

Last year I kicked off the year by meditating for the first 100 days and it was transformational in that what had previously been something I tried to do daily but never properly formed the habit for, became a consistent part of my life as it was solidified as a habit. Now a day for me isn’t complete without some sort of mindfulness practice but I’ve come to learn that it doesn’t always have to be the traditional "sitting cross-legged" meditation practice in order to be valuable to you.

Mindfulness meditation is great to learn - it’s the closest thing to a superpower that we have as humans. It isn’t the only way to be mindful though because we still have a lot more living to do and we can’t just sit in silence all the time. Meditation should be treated like cleaning your room - you do a deep clean of your room once per week but then keep up the daily routines required for your room to be neat and tidy at all times.

Another analogy I love to compare it to comes from the end of Ryan Holiday’s book Ego Is The Enemy. You’ve got to sweep the floor. A floor doesn’t stay clean and dust-free without sweeping it, you regularly go back and sweep the floor to keep on top of it. Maybe you will meditate daily to keep your stress and anxiety under control. I certainly try to as much as possible. But maybe you will gravitate more to using meditation more like your deep cleaning day where you actually vacuum and mop the floor and the rest of your days you apply that skill to living mindfully in other ways. That’s the true purpose of meditation after all and will lead you to live a more fulfilling life, regardless of what you do.

So let’s make this the year of living mindfully. Each day, find a moment of silence in your life. Take 6 deep breaths and look around you. Really take in the environment around you. Pay attention. Listen. As the explorer Erling Kagge writes in his book Silence, the only true silence we can find is within us. Even with the world racing around you silence can be found. And when the stress metre gets maxed out, go back to your meditation practice and dig deeper into the silence.

Or if things get really out of control, go for a float. I have found that floating in a sensory deprivation tank offers a more complete escape from stress than meditation alone can offer me, even after extensive meditation practice. It’s wonderful. Nothing can phase you after a float. It’s named the post-float glow for a reason. You become like a beacon of lightness after coming out of an hour of floating. These more intensive mindfulness practices don’t have to be an everyday thing though if you keep up the daily practice of living mindfully. Keep that in mind, set a reminder for yourself each day if you need to, and make the most out of this year by becoming present on a daily basis.

Start using this mindfulness technique to combat stress and improve your wellbeing.

My heart begins to pound first. It’s the feeling of my body heating up - cooking from the inside. Then I can feel my eyelid twitch. Next, the blood vessels in my eye burst. Something is stressing me out and these are the physical signs of overwhelm which have become telltale to me.

Stress is one of the most insidious issues that plague us today. The devastating effects of chronic stress negatively impact the health of both your body and your mind.

Counteracting stress is easier said than done when there are a million tasks on your list and our world is no longer set up to simply allow you to clock out when you need to.

And it’s not going to get any easier.

The good news is that there are still effective ways in which you can combat stress in your life. They often take some conscious effort on your part to be most effective though.

Creating a mindfulness practice like meditation can become your secret weapon in your fight against stress and a whole host of other issues.

Meditation has become a buzzword that makes it seem like the barrier to entry is much higher than it actually is. By meditating you are simply applying one of the many ways of becoming mindful - another word that is full of mystique. Mindfulness means becoming focused on the present moment instead of letting your thoughts wander aimlessly between the past and the future, which is what most people do when they go on an out of control stress spiral and let either depressed or anxious thoughts dominate.

If you’ve ever gazed in wonder at the stars or sat in awe staring at a beautiful sunset then you’ve both practiced mindfulness and have what it takes to continue to build it into a habit that will benefit you even more from regular practice.

In the traditional sense, you meditate by sitting comfortably and then working to clear all thoughts from your head. Most people find it beneficial to focus on a single point which is why you will often be instructed to focus on your breath flowing in and out by noticing the movement of air past the tip of your nose or the rising and falling of your abdomen.

Another common meditation practice is the use of a mantra, which is repeated to keep other thoughts at bay - this is known as Transcendental Meditation or TM.

Many people fear that they cannot possibly meditate because they have too many thoughts in their head or that practicing meditation will fundamentally change some edge that they think they have and will mellow them out too much.

Rest assured that neither could be further from the truth. Meditation will help you reign in your emotions but it won’t change who you are. Also, there are many different ways to start meditating and guided meditation apps that can help you along the way no matter how scatter-brain you start out.

The other great thing is that you can keep your meditation as low key as you want it to be. There are no rules stating that you have to get into a cross-legged position on the floor if that is uncomfortable or just plain awkward for you. I usually sit on a chair or my bed and occasionally even lie down on the bed. You don’t even have to be seated or stationary — you can stand still or walk mindfully - although I will say that it makes it more difficult to get into a truly mindful state and you might be better off waiting until you’ve gathered some more experience while remaining seated.

Being able to better control your stress and emotional response to the world around you is well worth the small amount of time and effort it takes to get into the routine of meditating daily. And these benefits are not exclusive to the yogis who have been practicing mindfulness for years on end - research has shown that taking just six deep breaths is enough to reduce blood pressure and therefore impact your perception of stress.

So give it a shot. Schedule a time and start with even just a few minutes of closing your eyes and breathing deeply. Almost all of us have around seven to eight hours free each day outside of work and sleep and most of that time is wasted on television and social media. Blocking off 10 minutes for a daily meditation practice is insignificant.

If you need more convincing, we’ll go into more of the benefits and how you can implement a meditation practice another time. But for now, just try it out. Do it right now as you finish reading this.

Breathe in for 5 seconds.

Notice the stillness as you pause at the top of your breath.

Breathe out for 5 seconds.

Notice the similar stillness as all of your air is exhaled.

Repeat this 6 times and see how much clearer and calmer your mind is compared to one minute ago.

What Is Floating?

The world is a radically different place from what it was even a few decades ago.

Technologies that were once considered Orwellian fantasies have now become our reality and are more and more creeping into our psyche.

Most people see these technological advances as a boon to our society as they present us with new opportunities, but it is undeniable that our primitive brains have also become fodder to this new type of on-demand world that we live in.

With the advent of instantly accessible information and entertainment available in our pockets at any time and the constant blips and pings of notifications that come with it, our reactionary nervous systems and brains biased towards detecting environmental dangers have become overstressed.

The average adult attention span has decreased in recent years and symptoms of stress-induced health complications have skyrocketed leading not only to a decline in health but also productivity.

Dedicated researchers who are curious about how we can overcome these changes in our society have started to focus on these concerns and what to do about them in the past two decades. Ancient wisdom has returned to the forefront of much of this research as a means to quiet the mind and remove oneself from the constant bombardment of distractions that we are all so easy to fall prey to.

This is where float tanks enter the picture.

A float tank in its purest form is an enclosed bed of shallow water in which you lie down in a saltwater solution and float on the surface of the water due to the density of the solution. This sense of weightless floating is achieved by mixing 1,000 lbs. of Epsom salt in a foot of water. The tank was originally referred to as sensory deprivation because the lid blocks out the light and within the enclosure sound is blocked from the external environment. These features have since then been upgraded to allow both light and music to keep the beginner company during this novel experience. The temperature of the water also remains body temperature neutral to keep physical sensations to a minimum.

The sensory deprivation tank as we know it today in a pod or cabin form was invented by Dr. John C. Lily back in the seventies. At the time, the prohibitive cost to build a tank coupled with Dr. Lily’s unusual research into trying to figure out a way to listen to peoples’ thoughts and also communicate with dolphins led there to be no real consideration for any therapeutic uses for the float tank.

In the decades that followed its inception, the float tank was relegated to the world of psychedelic explorers looking to take a trip to another dimension.

It wasn’t until research into ancient practices like meditation and mindfulness started to validate the benefits of the quiet practice of doing nothing in the late ‘90s and early 2000s that people started looking for ways to promote and facilitate these ostensibly difficult to describe practices.

The more stressors that our society burdened upon us, the more communities revolted with wellness practices to counterbalance their health. Yoga became a billion dollar industry and everyone had their own preferred specialty fitness club for spin class or boot camps or weightlifting. Innovators started to turn their attention back to those salty solutions for peace and tranquillity and introduced float tanks to communities as a place to go and escape from the bustle to relax and recover.

Incredible case studies started to pop up about individuals who were benefitting from floating in myriad ways.

Palliative cancer patients were able to find relief and rest pain-free for the first time in months.

Athletes saw their performance increase through improved visualization as well as physical recovery.

People suffering from anxiety disorders could enjoy life more as their overactive stress-response systems were quelled.

Then scientists started to research floating as a therapy and increasingly we are seeing the validation that these claims hold merit; not only of incredible mental relaxation but also a reduction in pain and physical symptoms due to the decompressing nature of being weightless in the tank.

Dr. Justin Feinstein has created the Float Clinic and Clinicalfloatation.com to help consolidate and clarify the research for the float industry. The collection of publications in scientific journals on floatation is rapidly growing.

The summarized list of current research includes benefits for: “hypertension, chronic tension headaches, chronic muscle tension pain in the back and neck, and stress-related pain with “burnout depression.”

Several studies have also concluded that floatation is a safe and effective rapid treatment for:

“individuals with clinical anxiety, including generalized anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), panic disorder, agoraphobia, and social anxiety disorder, with many patients presenting with comorbid major depressive disorder.”

“Clinical trials are currently underway investigating the long-term impact of floating in patients with anxiety disorders, anorexia nervosa, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, and insomnia.”

Clearly, the surface of the water has barely been scratched in terms of just how deep the benefits of floating go (pardon the pun).

One of the most interesting and promising points is that not only is floating an effective treatment, but it is also extremely safe with minimal possible side effects. This one feature is unlike virtually every other treatment we currently have for anxiety, stress, and pain disorders and serves as no wonder why floating has become one of the fastest growing industries in North America.

At Flow Spa, we are dedicated to helping our community to relax and heal by creating the very best float therapy experience as well as bring education and awareness to you about the float industry and the wider world of wellness. If you’d like to enrich your life and learn ways to improve your well-being, stay updated with the latest information and exclusive content by subscribing to our newsletter.

You Can Use the Same Technique World-Class Athletes Do to Improve Performance. Here’s How.

I find a comfortable position and close my eyes. As I focus on my breathing, my attention becomes immersed in the present moment. Everything and nothing is within my awareness.

Now it’s time to perform. It’s time to visualize.

With my body and mind relaxed I turn my attention to my sport - strongman. We usually know ahead of the competition what the events are going to be. Just like football players watching tape of the opposing team, knowing what lifts we are going to do gives us time to prepare so that we can put on a better show and reduce the likelihood of injury.

I picture the setting - outside on the grass, hot, sunny day. There’s a good crowd cheering us on as we perform these odd feats of strength. I can see the ref’s face as he calls me up for my turn to lift. The picture is painted in vivid detail and when I go to pick up the stone into my lap my muscles and nervous system feel the strain as if I were actually doing the lift. An explosion of movement launches the stone onto the platform and I can see myself shuffling laterally to pick up the next stone and load it as well. This continues for the final two stones to complete the run.

With intense concentration time becomes distorted but if I time it, it will all be over in less than 20 seconds in my mind. My actual time on the day of the competition - 18.2 seconds.

This is how visualization works and it’s a not-so-well-kept-secret performance technique used by almost every world-class athlete who has become a household name.

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Michael Phelps and the rest of the U.S. swim team practice visualization under the watchful eye of coach Bob Bowman. They do this not in place of but in addition to the monstrous metres they put into the actual pool. They know exactly how many strokes they will complete wall-to-wall and can get their visualized swim times down to within milliseconds of their actual race times.

Steph Curry regularly uses a float tank to visualize his three-point shots as the sensory deprived environment is the ideal space to quiet his mind and achieve complete focus on performance.

The human brain is wired with what are called mirror neurons - these are neurons that fire when seeing someone else perform an action as well as when you imagine yourself completing an action. Brain scanning techniques like EEG and fMRI have validated that our brains fire as if we physically performed a movement when we only just imagined it.

Scientists have helped people suffering from the phantom limb pain of amputated limbs get a release of their tension through visualization and athletes who visualize the performance of their sport see a statistically significant increase in performance compared with those who spend their recovery days laying around on the couch playing Xbox.

This all sounds fun in theory if you’re an athlete right? Here’s the cool part: visualization isn’t just for sports performance; anything that you can imagine yourself doing can be improved through focused visualization. Musicians can visualize the performance of their song, a chef can see their flawless knife work, and a lecturer giving a keynote speech can visualize the presentation going without a hitch. If you can visualize it, you can physically improve upon it. Albeit these everyday examples are not as strenuous as sports performance and so they can be practiced more frequently but taking the time to see yourself perfectly executing the action in your own mind can help to hone it further to perfection.

How do you get started with visualization?

• Pick a quiet, comfortable place to do your visualization practice. Your favourite meditation corner is perfect. Float tanks also work really well because you’ve given yourself permission to spend a distraction-free hour immersed in the present moment.

• Spend a few minutes focusing on your breathing. Relax and breath deeply.

• When you’re ready, start to imagine the scene around your activity in vivid detail like the example from the opening paragraph of this article. You may have to do some research if you’re performing in a setting you’re unfamiliar with but the more detail you can generate, the more realistic you can make your visualization practice.

• Picture yourself in minute detail going through the performance. If done with enough effort and focus, your muscles may tense and your heart rate may spike - particularly if it’s a physically intense performance that you are imagining.

• Repeat the practice as much as needed. Practice makes perfect and one of the reasons athletes like visualization so much is that they can continue to do the repetitive practice without putting the same physical strain on their bodies.

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Alex Honnold might be the best athlete in the world and yet most people have never heard his name and wouldn’t recognize what his physically unassuming body is capable of.

In the summer of 2017, Alex approached the base of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park with a pair of rock climbing shoes and a bag of chalk and began to free solo what is considered by many to be the most difficult sheer granite face to climb in the world.

Free soloing means there are no ropes and harness for if the climber happens to fall.

It takes most climbers 3 or 4 days to summit El Cap but that’s also out of the question for Alex climbing free solo since he has no way of taking a nap to recover. But Alex won’t need it.

In 3 hours and 56 minutes, Alex completed the climb to the summit of El Capitan. He was deep within the flow state to complete this performance and attests to the practice of visualizing the entire climb to getting his mindset right to complete this seemingly impossible feat.

Jump to 7:46 in the video below to hear Alex talking about his visualization practice.

Imagine being by yourself in the dead center of a 3,000-foot vertical cliff -- without a rope to catch you if you fall. For professional rock climber Alex Honnold, this dizzying scene marked the culmination of a decade-long dream.

Visualization is not just a practice in the realm of superhuman athletes, it has been used by people practicing skills across a wide range of industries and you can take advantage of it too for anything you hope to get better at.

The Four Factors of Well-being and Floating

We all face adversity. But what do you do when you receive that bad news? Do you accept your fate as it is or do you seek the opportunity that can be found within all obstacles? 

According to neuroscience research, there are four factors that contribute to our overall well-being and that are within our control. Knowing that these factors are controllable means that we don’t have to play victim to our hardships any longer. What we can control we can change for the better with practice and over time. 

Research from Richard J. Davidson shows that the four areas of mental functioning can be trained to significantly improve well-being; in this way, wellbeing is fundamentally seen as no different from riding a bike - the more we practice the better we will get. 

By incorporating these four factors into our routine and practicing them, we are able to improve our mental health and are better prepared to face hardships that come our way. 

The four factors are resilience, outlook, awareness, and generosity and this is how floating can directly impact these factors and lead to improving your wellbeing. 

Resilience

Resilience refers to how quickly we can adapt to obstacles in our way and the sense of adversity and negative emotions that come from those obstacles. Float therapy harnesses the essence of mindfulness meditation, which is one of the key ways that Davidson has found that you can improve your resiliency. By limiting all external distractions, the float tank facilitates a mindful state that helps to build resilience. When you are better able to practice mindfulness you can look at your situation for what it truly is and not what your automatic reactions are telling you. In this way, you can better address adversity from a calm and logical perspective, not reactionary and overly emotional. 

Awareness

Awareness is focusing on the present moment and there’s no better way to enhance that than through floating. It’s not easy by any means to stay anchored to the present moment, even in the isolated environment of the float tank but it definitely helps when we aren’t bombarded by external distractions. 

Enhancing awareness is how we stay immersed in the present moment without dwelling on the past or anxiously awaiting the future.

As you settle into your float, bring yourself more and more into the present moment by focusing on your breathing. It’s challenging to feel the rise and fall of your abdomen in the float tank, so focus on the breath moving past the tip of your nose. Let this be your single point of awareness for the full duration of breathing in and breathing out at your own pace. If you find your mind wandering, don’t fret, simply return your attention to your breathing. This is the practice of mindfulness. 

Outlook

Davidson uses the term outlook as what is often referred to as optimism or pessimism; outlook is the ability to see the positive in life and to savour those positive experiences. Coming out of a float therapy session being completely relaxed is a perfect time to savour a moment of tranquillity. At Flow Spa, we have designed our lounge to serve in this capacity so that you can continue to further enjoy your state of wellbeing as you transition back out of the float environment. 

Davidson’s research has also shown that practicing loving-kindness or compassion meditations can improve your outlook. Our float tanks offer audio input if you want to enhance your loving-kindness practice during your float session through a guided meditation. These guided meditations are also available after your float session in the lounge.

Generosity 

Generosity is the last of the four factors to be trained for wellbeing and is the least likely to be directly improved upon by floating. Generosity implies expressing compassion and doing good for others, like through volunteer work. Practicing compassion meditation while floating will only go so far to truly impact the factor of generosity. However, by floating and improving the other three factors of your wellbeing, you are going to be much more inclined to act generously and compassionately with others because you will already feel so much better and at ease with yourself. In this way, floating can help to guide you towards more generosity.

A Continuing Practice

While these four factors of mental training for wellbeing are not exclusive to the float tank environment, the additional relaxation and isolation of a float tank do help to turbocharge the process with these otherwise challenging practices to make time for.

Remember that to truly have an impact on your wellbeing, the factors of resilience, outlook, awareness, and generosity need to be practiced regularly - ideally daily. You can’t shovel the driveway once and expect it to stay clear of snow all winter. Whether you return to the float tank to recharge or start a regular meditation practice of your own, there’s always more to be done to keep your mind strong and ready for any obstacles that life throws your way. 

The Value of Stillness

“A moment of stillness makes all the difference”

How many unread emails do you have right now? How many event invitations and social media notifications?

The answer is approaching infinite if you’re anything like the average human being today. But that’s not how we were wired to function - always turned on and plugged into constant alerts. It’s stressful to the mind, body, and soul. It makes you less human and more like a cyborg.

Interesting, but frightening, fact - most humans today meet the definition of cyborg by being addicted and attached to our smartphones which we have on us at all times and cannot live without.

How do we get back to more human and less ‘being?’

By taking a step back and unplugging.

The more you give your body a chance to be free from all distractions and connect again to itself and to nature, the better you will feel.

Feeling grounded or connected to the real world around you isn’t some hippy practice. It’s been an essential part of the human condition since before the dawn of consciousness.

Just because we have the potential to accomplish so much more today than we could ten thousand years ago doesn’t mean that our bodies are any different. In fact, in many ways, our disconnect from our roots has been a detriment to our health and wellbeing.

Give yourself the chance to recognize what it means to be human again. Take a deep breath. Listen to the rain. Go for a walk outside. Float and listen closely to the inner workings of your brain.

Creating stillness is all part of enjoying life and recognizing that you’re human.