Your new years resolution: happiness

New years resolutions are a funny thing - we make a plan for getting fit, saving money or taking up a new hobby. But we tend not to think about our happiness, which is strange - the purpose of taking up a new hobby or getting fit is ultimately that it makes us happy. Why not cut out the middleman and make our aim for the year to be happy? 

 Practising mindfulness can help us to do this and it’s simple to learn. Mindfulness is about focusing 100% of your awareness on whatever you’re doing, whether that’s walking, eating or just breathing. That process of training yourself to be aware allows you to start to let go about worries about the future and regrets from the past. Its easy to pick up, but it does need some patience and persistence to develop your practice and see the benefits. Being in the present moment calms us, and lets us focus on the good things right in front of us. When we’re grateful and present we improve our mood. 

 This seems like a bunch of easy answers, and mindfulness is often accused of this. If you read some news articles it’ll tell you that mindfulness is either a right wing conspiracy to keep us all placid or a left wing conspiracy to brain wash peoples beliefs and values! But at it’s most fundamental level mindfulness isn’t anything more than being present with your experience, meaning that your head is in the here an now. That will lead you to make different choices - better choices - for your wellbeing and mental health, but those choices will be more authentic to your true self. 

 The key to mindfulness is not to try and achieve a particular state - just practice a little every day and notice the change over the next few weeks as it happen, its about the experience rather than learning a philosophical framework. Jon Kabat Zinn says that when you start to learn mindfulness, rather than talking about it, just get your butt on the cushion and he’s right. Mindfulness is about practice and experience rather than knowledge.