 How can you use mindful moments to help you manage on a difficult day? Now this is a really simple technique that you can either use yourself or you can teach it to someone that you're supporting. The idea is based on the idea of mindfulness but instead of using big long mindfulness type approaches we're instead thinking about how we can introduce small moments of mindfulness into our normal day to day life. Now the reason why I think this is helpful is that because for many of us we're managing difficult thoughts, feelings and experiences on an ongoing basis throughout the day particularly if we struggle with things like anxiety. And if we're able to find ways to have mindful moments during the course of the normal day then we can take those anxious feelings and try and bring ourselves back down to a slightly better baseline. So this is about finding ways to build those mindful moments into our normal day to day activities. So what do I mean by a mindful moment? Basically we're taking a normal day to day activity that you can really easily incorporate into your day or that might already be a part of your day and making it into an opportunity to bring our thoughts and feelings back to a sort of grounded, mindful way. So a perfect example would be for me how I would have a mindful cup of coffee. So I'd have my cup of coffee and instead of just drinking it whilst doing other things I'd give myself five minutes to have a mindful cup of coffee. And what does a mindful cup of coffee look like? It's a cup of coffee where I have thought about how the coffee feels in my hands. I think about the smell of the coffee and the taste of the coffee. And whilst I'm drinking that cup of coffee for five minutes I give myself a break from all the other thoughts, feelings, experiences going on and I allow those thoughts to pass through my mind non-judgmentally. I'm just focused on the coffee, allowing things to happen, allowing myself to reach a state of calm again. Now it doesn't have to be a cup of coffee, it can really be anything. You can take a mindful shower, have a think about the smell of the shower, the feel of the foam on your body. You can brush your teeth mindfully. You might write really mindfully, you might doodle, you know, even just kind of scribble or write meaningless words on the page and think about the feel of the pen on the paper. Really you can choose absolutely any activity that's really open and available to you that you can do for just a few minutes and just really focus in on doing that activity. So I guess the key thing here to create these mindful moments is to give yourself a few moments respite from the rest of your day. So we're moving ourselves away from that and then we're engaging in an activity, almost any activity and we're giving it our full attention. We're thinking about how it feels, about the way it smells. If there's a smell, the way it tastes, if there's a taste, we're really, really losing ourselves in that activity. It gives our brains a bit of a break, helps us to bring those anxieties back down a little bit and brings us to a better baseline from which we can then begin to carry on with the rest of our day. Simple strategy, try it, see if it works for you and maybe try it with the people that you work with or support. Let me know which mindful activities you give a go. I look forward to hearing how you get on. Good luck.