I saved my post about the resolutions I made for 2017 until I was sure I could keep them for at least a month! Nothing makes you want to hide under a rock quite like telling the world all of the amazing things you’re going to do and then falling behind less than 30 days in so I decided to take another approach…
I was initially inspired by The Everygirl. They often host 30 Day Challenges aimed at building positive habits for yourself by focusing on one element at a time. Once the 30 days are up you can either continue the challenge or drop it and move on to something better suited.
As a self-diagnosed, stage-4, chronic over-thinker I rarely have a moment where my mind isn’t running a mile a minute. It’s as if I am trying to solve the world’s problems, my blog’s malfunctions, my relationship issues and trying to figure out what’s for dinner. To be honest I never find the solution to anyways and I most often end up microwaving something – it’s exhausting! My brain more or less feels like a dog chasing its tail sometimes so this January I chose to focus on meditating at least once a day to calm it.
At first I looked into “Transcendental Meditation” because their targeted ads were appearing in my Instagram feed for about a week (anyone else?) and Tamron on the Today Show raved about her practices 2x a day for 20 min. After a bit of research, I decided learning transcendental might be too much of an upfront investment to start my mediation journey on. I needed something a little more “entry level”. I needed to find the gateway drug to meditation and lucky for me it was free in the app store!
Stop, Breathe & Think teaches and makes meditating easy in a few different ways. First, they offer a place for users to check in with their emotions. Different emotions might call for different meditations after all. Second, there are almost 30 FREE meditation tracks for everything ranging from mindful walking, falling asleep, joy, suffering, change, pregnancy, even yoga for kids – it’s a rather extensive list. Plus you can buy a premium membership and get even more track and times (really contemplating it…)! Third, most of the tracks are between 3-7 minutes and you can choose which voice you like better. Personally I like to listen to Jamie before bed and Grecco in the mornings!
So far I have meditated for a total of 3 hours with Stop, Breathe & Think this 2017 which is three hours more than I ever did in 2016! My life hasn’t changed drastically (yet), but if anything I am able to fall asleep easier and I have a little more confidence in my decisions and about what my gut is telling me.
This was a good change for me so far and I plan on pursuing it! Now on to February’s resolution – stay tuned 🙂
