1. Gratitude
Many mindfulness exercises or practitioners focus on the concept of gratitude. This often involves remaining focused on the positives.
This helps you to avoid dwelling too much on the negatives in the moment, but it also trains you to being more open to seeing the positive things in your life.
This can enhance your mood, but it can also make you more successful in relationships and carries a number of other benefits.
2. Being In The Moment
Mindfulness is very much about being in the moment. This can be a calming but also a very practical mindset to develop. The past is out of your control and the future is unpredictable.
Focusing on the present as part of a mindfulness outlook isn’t about ignoring the past or the future – it's more about realizing that the present is really the only time that you have any control over.
Look at it this way: suppose that there was a death or illness in the family, and you took time off of work and are now behind on bills. Focusing on the things that set you back won’t help you.
Worrying about what will happen if you can’t pay your bills won’t help you. Working and looking for solutions can help you and you can only do those things while focusing on the present.
3. Empathy
Mindfulness is about you. It’s about understanding yourself. However, by understanding yourself, you may find that you are gaining a better understanding of other people.
As you learn to understand the sources of your own emotions and why you handle them the way that you do, you may start to think more about why other people act the way that they do and what might be going on in their minds.
This understanding doesn’t always make your situation easier when dealing with a difficult person, but it can help you to understand that the way that someone else treats you may not be your fault.
If you can help the other person to understand this, it just might make things easier for you.
4. The Mind-Body Connection
Another important mindful attitude that you can develop through regular mindfulness practice is what’s called the “mind body connection.” All mindfulness practices involve listening to your body and even controlling it through mental attention and will.
Many of us take our bodies for granted and have lost the ability to listen to and understand them. Paying attention to signals from your body can help you to give it what it needs, from sleep, to water, to a stretch.
Being more comfortable by listening to your body won’t make all of your problems go away but it will improve your mood, clear your head, and may even make you more able to face the challenges of the day.
5. Mindfulness
Mindfulness isn’t just the name of the practice, it’s also the name of what may be the most important attitude that you can foster through mindfulness practice.
As an attitude, mindfulness means being aware of your own thoughts and feelings. This can help you to act on feelings that deserve action and to release and move on from feelings that aren’t.
Sometimes when you are angry or stressed it is because of a situation that deserves your action and attention.
Sometimes, however, these emotions come up because of something that you have no control over, something that happened a long time ago, or something that you worry about but that isn’t actually likely to happen.
Knowing the difference can help you to direct your energies in constructive ways.
Sometimes the attitudes that we learn by practicing mindfulness have practical applications. Other times, they may just help us by changing the way that we understand the world as it is.
Either way, sticking with mindfulness practices that work for you may help you to live a less stressful life.
