Anne Truitt Zelenka

What is mindfulness? Living in the present moment, keeping an open awareness, and maintaining a nonjudging stance. The more mindful you are, the less reactive and stressed you will be. The more mindful you are, the more you can experience the little and big joys your everyday life offers you.

David Allen’s GTD seeks mind like water through eliminating all the open loops in your life. But you don’t have to get your to dos under control before you can have a peaceful mind. There’s no doubt it’s easier to feel calm if your desk is neat and your weekly review done, but you can free your awareness right now.

Here are five quick ways to become more mindful without first tackling those piles of paperwork or getting to zero in your email inbox:

1. Consider the opposite. Mindfulness is based upon nonjudgment, but most people can’t stop their initial judgments. You read a blog post and you decide whether you agree or don’t and whether you think it’s good or bad. You hear something on the news and filter it through your existing set of beliefs. You review some work from a colleague or subordinate and critique it in your mind.

Whatever your first reaction is, consider how the opposite could be the case. This starts to put a space between you and your immediate reactions. Even if you ultimately go with your first judgment, you’ll be more mindful in the future, by being more aware of what exists outside your normal ways of thinking.

2. Label your emotions. Using words to name your feelings calms your brain by switching you from emotional reactivity via the amygdala to higher-level cognitive processing using your prefrontal cortex. Cognitive-behavioral therapy uses a similar mechanism of labeling emotions and identifying negative thought patterns to retrain the mind towards healthier processing of experience. And labeling thoughts, like considering the opposite, puts a space between you and your river of thoughts, helping you achieve an awareness that’s not captive to those thoughts.

3. Imagine switching places with someone. Your thinking gets distorted when you put yourself at the center of everything, take what happens too personally, and protect your ego at all costs. To break out of the rut of self-centeredness, try imagining you are someone else.

If you are upset with someone, try exchanging places with them and understand where they’re coming from. If you are down on yourself, imagine what someone who loves you would think of your situation. Feel the care and gentleness they would send your way. If you are worried about the future, change places with someone who has much more to fear than you, to put your own concerns into perspective.

4. Do a ten-breath mini-meditation. You don’t have to sit on a cushion or even leave your desk chair. Just sit up straight, close your eyes if you want, and breathe slowly in and out for ten breaths. Pay attention to the sensations you feel as your breath goes in and out of your body. As your mind is distracted, label what it’s doing (e.g., “thinking” or “worrying”) and then gently guide it back to your breath.

There. You just meditated! That’s all it involves: attending to the present moment, often by paying close attention to the breath.

5. Think of three things you are grateful for. When you’re not mindful, you may go galloping off into the future, thinking of all the great things that await you there. Or, if you’re worried about something, you might fear the future instead of wishing for it to come as soon as it can.

You can get trapped in the past too. If you’re upset about something that’s happened, you think of the past and how it might have been different. Or, if you’ve suffered losses, you might find yourself wishing to go back in time to re-experience what you loved.

Get yourself back in the present by remembering what you are happy about right now. You are breathing. You have some level of health. Maybe it’s a beautiful summer day and your lilies are blooming (mine are). Being grateful for what you have at this very moment is a great way to get your mind back into this moment.

And now, take your peaceful awareness and go file those documents!