A Daily Dose of Mindful Moments

By Barbara Larrivee

What does it mean to live a mindful life? It may surprise you to learn that it takes more than a meditation practice to act mindfully—you need to develop skills and strategies to intentionally practice what matters most to you. A daily dose of mindful moments is pausing regularly to take mindful action for yourself or others. The good news

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shoreline Publications
• Release date: Jan 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9780965178013

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Praise for

A Daily Dose of Mindful Moments

"A Daily Dose of Mindful Moments weaves together the rigor of science and the wisdom of reflection to offer us a wealth of ideas and practices to live a happier more mindful life. This excellent book has the power to transform our individual and collective lives."

–Shauna Shapiro, Ph.D., author of The Art and Science of Mindfulness

From an expert in education, Larrivee brings the practice of mindfulness into the practical activities of everyday life. She provides a menu of tools—along with scientific support when available—to lean toward greater happiness, health and connections at work and home.

–Susan Smalley, Ph.D., Founder, UCLA Mindful Awareness

Research Center and co-author of Fully Present:

The Science, Art and Practice of Mindfulness

Filled with simple and easy practices, this book is a roadmap to leading a happier, less stress-filled life. Highly researched, this book provides a proven recipe to have more love, kindness, compassion, and mindfulness in your life.

–Arielle Ford, author of Turn Your Mate into Your Soulmate: A Practical Guide to Happily Ever After

How refreshing to find a book which is honest and straightforward about the difficulties, as well as the benefits, of incorporating mindfulness into everyday life. Instead of relying on mindfulness as a vague cure-all, Barbara Larrivee shares her personal struggles and strategies for making mindfulness real. The result is a book which gets into the concrete details of making mindfulness a continuous practice; it will benefit anyone seeking skillful means for integrating mindfulness into daily life.

–Robert Rosenbaum, Ph.D., author of Zen and the Heart of Psychotherapy and co-editor of What’s Wrong with Mindfulness (And What Isn’t): Zen Perspectives

"A Daily Dose of Mindful Moments is just what the doctor ordered. This book is a string of pearls, each mindful moment an invitation to integrating compassionate presence into our lives in beautiful and accessible ways. Barbara Larrivee has mixed a perfect blend of science and poetic guidance towards weaving mindfulness into our daily lives."

–Daniel Rechtschaffen, author of The Mindful Education Workbook and The Way of Mindful Education

This book skillfully combines research and practice to offer useful strategies for nurturing mindfulness. The many ways to practice mindful moments are readily adaptable to classrooms for promoting mindful, kind and compassionate actions.

–Christopher Willard, Psy.D., author of Growing Up Mindful and Raising Resilience: The Wisdom and Science of Happy Families and Thriving Children

"A Daily Dose of Mindful Moments is a thoroughly researched and practical guide to enhancing mindfulness. It is full of useful tips—based on high-quality, scientific research—that can help anyone fill their life with more wellbeing and happiness."

–Alex Korb, Ph.D, author of The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time

"This tremendous book offers a thorough summary of current research on mindfulness and a highly practical program for developing greater mindfulness in daily life. Sensible, balanced, and so clearly written, readers will gain a deep understanding of why to be mindful as well as how to do it."

–Rick Hanson, author of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

"A rigorously-researched book which sorts through all the hype to tell us what a mindfulness meditation practice does and doesn’t do. A Daily Dose of Mindful Moments provides an abundant supply of brief, research-based practices to develop the skills to actually be mindful."

–Mark Waldman, Executive MBA Faculty, Loyola Marymount University and author of NeuroWisdom: The New Brain Science of Money, Happiness, and Success

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Copyright © 2018 by Barbara Larrivee

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Larrivee, Barbara, author.

Title: A daily dose of mindful moments: applying the science of mindfulness and happiness / Barbara Larrivee.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Santa Barbara, CA: Shoreline Publications, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017961997 | ISBN 978-0-9651780-0-6 (pbk.) |

978-0-9651780-1-3 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mindfulness (Psychology). | Positive psychology. | Happiness. | Meditation. | Attention. | Awareness. | BISAC: BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Mindfulness & Meditation |

Classification: LCC BF637.M4 L37 2018 | DDC 158.1/2—dc23

Cover and Interior Design by Constellation Book Services

ISBN: 978-0-9651780-0-6

First edition: 2018

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Printed in the United States of America

To my parents

Table of Contents

Part 1

Background and Related Research

Introduction

Chapter 1: My Journey to a Daily Mindful Moment Practice

What is a Mindful Moment Practice?

The Mindful Moments Path to Mindfulness

Merging a Mindful Moment Practice and a Mindfulness Meditation Practice

Chapter 2: Mindfulness and Its Promise

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness Has Multiple Layers

The Promise of Practicing Mindfulness

Chapter 3: What Do We Know about Mindfulness Meditation?

What Don’t We Know Yet about Mindfulness Meditation?

What Does the Research Say about Mindfulness Meditation?

What Challenges Does Mindfulness Meditation Research Face?

Chapter 4: Times They Are A-Changing

The Benefits of Brief Mindful Breaks

Taking Regular Breaks Improves Concentration and Productivity

How Low Can We Go?

Chapter 5: Three Key Ingredients in the Recipe for Well-Being

1. Counteract the Brain’s Negativity Bias by Increasing Positive Emotions and Experiences

2. Interrupt the Body’s Stress Response throughout the Day

3. Infuse Daily Mindfulnesss Practices with Variety and Novelty

Chapter 6: Sustaining Authentic Happiness and Positive Emotions

How Happy Are We?

From Authentic Happiness to Flourishing

Happiness Is the Key to Success

Positive Emotions Build Resilience for Coping with Stress

Positive Emotions Lead to a Healthier and Longer Life

Chapter 7: The Emergence of Positive Psychology and Positive Psychology Activities

Supporting Character Virtues and Strengths

Evidenced-Based Positive Psychology Activities

Variety Is the Spice of Happiness

Part 2

Applying Mindful Moments to Live a More Mindful, Less Stressed and Happier Life

Chapter 8: Seizing Opportunities for Mindful Moments

Getting Started

Making Mindful Moments a Habit

How Long Does It Take to Create a New Habit?

Chapter 9: How to Launch a Mindful Moment Practice

50 Ways to Pause for a Mindful Moment

The Daily Plan

A Daily Sample Practice of 10 Mindful Moments

10 Mindful Moment Daily Practices

10 Intention-for-a-Day Mindful Moment Practices

10 Morning and Evening Daily Ritual Mindful Moments

Chapter 10: Optimism and Gratitude: Essential Outlooks for Living Mindfully

Why Be an Optimist?

Optimism Can Be Learned

The Gift of Gratitude

Gratitude Practices

10 Mindful Moments for Enriching Your Life with Gratitude

Chapter 11: The Many Benefits of Kindness

Kindness Is in Our Genes

Giving of Time and Money

Never Underestimate the Ripple Effect of One Kind Act

10 Mindful Moments for Boosting Your Kindness Quotient

Chapter 12: The Power of Compassion and Self-Compassion

Compassion Meditation Training

Does Compassion Meditation Lead to Compassionate Behavior?

Why We Need Self-Compassion

The Benefits of Practicing Self-Compassion

10 Mindful Moments When You’re Feeling Blue or Need Self-Compassion

Chapter 13: Stress: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

How Stress Affects Health

Short-Term Stress Can Be Productive

Can We Learn to Manage Stress from Stressed-Out Lab Rats?

Building Up Your Defenses against Stress

10 Mindful Moments when Stress Hits: Instant Stress Busters

Chapter 14: The Mind-Body Connection is a Two-Way Street

The Benefits of Touch

Smile and the World Will Smile with You

10 Mindful Moments to Get More Smiles into Your Day

Last Words

Appendix: Comparison of Evidence Chart

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Introduction

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The search for greater mindfulness is afoot with everyone jumping on the mindfulness meditation bandwagon as the promised path. There’s no doubt that mindfulness meditation is good for you. The simple act of allocating time for yourself, doing nothing, and noticing what’s on your mind is in itself worthwhile. It’s just not the magic pill some enthusiasts are pushing as the solution to all our problems.

While mindfulness meditation may be the premier route to mindfulness, it takes time. There are other options for enhancing mindfulness. The path I’m advocating is practicing daily mindful moments, which is essentially spreading out your mindful practice throughout your day with purposeful, momentary acts.

While others are recommending brief mindful breaks, they typically offer no strategies beyond a pause to become present. No matter how much you tell yourself to be mindful, it won’t happen in a vacuum. You’ll need to have tools, strategies, and skills to grow mindfulness. What sets this book apart from the many, many books on mindfulness is taking it beyond present-moment awareness to engagement and action to develop skills for living more mindfully.

There’s no one-size-fits-all way to cultivate mindfulness. The best fit for each individual will depend on what challenges life is bringing and what results are most important. If your goal is to slow down, not get carried away by life in the fast lane, and live more in the present moment, a mindfulness meditation practice is your answer. If you’re having trouble focusing and concentrating, jumping from one thing to the next, mindfulness meditation is your best choice. If you have a lot of anxiety or tend to get depressed, mindfulness meditation can be a helpful practice. If you’re dealing with chronic pain, mindfulness meditation is a good choice to try to get some relief.

On the other hand, if you get caught up in negativity cycles, aren’t able to look on the bright side, or just want more enjoyment in your life, practicing brief mood-enhancing activities is a better choice. If you’re often stressed-out or overwhelmed, you may benefit most from quick stress-relieving strategies used throughout the day to keep stress from escalating. If you can’t seem to stay motivated or thrive on constant variety, pausing for new and different short mindful breaks may work better for you. If what gives purpose to your life is helping others, then frequent, deliberate acts of kindness and generosity can be part of your daily mindful moment practice. If these areas of your life are what’s important to you, then adding a mindful moment practice may be the preferred path, as an alternative, or complement, to a mindfulness meditation practice. Practices that serve these purposes can be embedded in your mindful moment practice.

Short of spending hours in meditation and in silent retreat, a daily mindful moment practice offers a way to align with the origins of Buddhist teachings of mindfulness built on the foundation of acting in accordance with our supreme virtues such as kindness, generosity, love, and compassion. Taking frequent mindful moments, designating practices to follow for a day, setting daily intentions, and establishing daily rituals that strengthen your vision of your ideal self can bring you closer to living that vision. When you target some of your mindful moments to support your highest values, the practice can serve a greater purpose and give more meaning to your life. Rather than just being something you think you should do, it can ignite what matters most to you.

Mindfulness meditation is about noticing—noticing your breath, noticing your bodily sensations, noticing when your emotions are bubbling up. But merely noticing doesn’t automatically translate into more constructive behavior. If you want mindfulness to be a way of life, it will take simultaneously developing other tools and skills. A daily mindful moment practice is a way to put into practice brief evidence-based strategies coming out of decades of research in positive, cognitive, behavioral, and social psychology, and most currently, in the neurosciences.

How This Book Is Organized

After years of doing research on mindfulness, when I started to put all the pieces together to figure out what a mindfulness meditation practice does and doesn’t do for you, I discovered a daily mindful moment practice could fill in the gaps. To make my case, I provide an extensive review of the abundant research related to building a mindful moment practice. The research and resulting practices presented in this book span the science accumulating in many fields. To paint a complete picture of the relevant issues and the range of resources that can be tapped, I draw together the latest scientific research from over the past fifty years. Given my research training, I try to separate the hype from the evidence to offer an accurate assessment of the research findings so readers can benefit from my delving deeper and deeper into the research and make their own conclusions.

The topics of positive psychology, happiness, optimism, gratitude, kindness, compassion and self-compassion all have extensive research bases that provide evidence supporting the importance of cultivating practices related to each of these areas. Enhancing positive emotions, building up defenses against stress, and integrating mind-body pathways are all areas that offer proven practices that can readily be integrated into a mindful moment practice.

This book is organized to present the research necessary to provide the rationale for a mindful moment practice. There are separate chapters for each of the content areas where the research provides relevant background. Because a mindful moment practice encompasses multiple areas, there is a wealth of research. In the format of the book, much of the related research is covered before mapping out the specifics of how to establish a daily mindful moment practice because all of this background and research lay down the foundation for the book.

While I realize there may be way too much research for those interested in practicing mindfulness, I felt compelled to provide a comprehensive review of what we know and don’t know to counteract what’s being propagated about mindfulness meditation through the mainstream media. To make the research more readable for the average reader, I have summarized the research in a brief statement at the end of each section. The section labeled Research Recap offers just a sentence or two highlighting the essence of what the research says. Throughout the book wherever there is extensive research cited, I have compiled and presented much of the research at the back of the chapter in a separate section under the heading, The Research Findings. (For Chapters 10 and 12 covering two topics, The Research Findings follow each topic.) In some instances, where it has particular relevance to the points being made, I discuss the research in more detail within the chapter.

At the crux of the book are the very practical lists of mindful moment practices. Each of the chapters in Part 2 have lists of practices gleaned from the research. In order to have these lists be brief, they just include the strategies unencumbered with the research. The substantiating research is discussed separately in the relevant sections.

So for those who want to see the data, it’s all reported in The Research Findings sections for your own analysis and conclusions. And for those who don’t need to be convinced with the research, but may want to just get a sense of the research, you have the Research Recaps available. For those of you who may want to get right to the core of a mindful moment practice, you can skip right to the skill-building chapters in the second half of the book.

What’s at the heart of my message is that you can find time to build a daily mindful moment practice regardless of how busy your schedule may be. And when you do, you create the possibility of living a more mindful, less stressed, and happier life.

Based on the many years spent researching and preparing this book, and the compelling research now available, being more mindful and intentional will enrich your life in every arena. It is my hope that this book will inspire you to take action to start creating your own daily mindful moment practice as your path to living more mindfully. Making mindful moments a daily practice can help bridge the gap between doing mindfulness and being mindful.

Chapter 1

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My Journey to a Daily

Mindful Moment Practice

The destination is to be and not to arrive somewhere else.

–Stephen Paul

For many years, my meditation practice consisted of a daily meditation as soon as I awoke, in fact, even before I got out of bed to make sure I did it before the day got crazy. I would prop myself up with pillows so my spine was straight and meditate for twenty minutes repeating a mantra. Some days, typically about two or three times a week, schedule permitting, I would meditate a second time in the evening.

A few years ago, I began questioning my daily meditation practice because I didn’t seem to be reaping the wondrous benefits I kept reading about. After practicing more than a decade, I had yet to experience a blissful state many meditators report experiencing. I never really zoned out to be in that space Deepak Chopra refers to as the gap. I did, however, sometimes fall asleep.

I started to experiment with my meditation practice. I first tried changing it from a mantra-based meditation practice to breath awareness, paying attention to and feeling my breath. I did notice a slight difference. I seemed to be able to stay focused a bit longer before my mind traipsed off to something. I also tried body scans, but I had trouble sensing and isolating specific body parts. I couldn’t seem to feel my ankles or other body parts. And when I was done, I didn’t feel a whole lot more relaxed.

I then moved to guided meditations, selecting ones that matched my mood or feelings, or the opposite, counteracted my mood or feelings. I also began targeting my guided meditations to align with a character quality I wanted to enhance, like kindness, forgiveness, or gratitude. I found I was enjoying my meditation practice more and looked forward to trying new meditations. As I subsequently learned, and will discuss later in the book, experiencing pleasure along with continuous new experiences is what the brain thrives on. The feeling generated from the kind of meditation practice I did carried into my day, but not for long. It soon dissipated.

While experimenting with guided meditations, I had tried a variety of compassion meditation scripts but none of them seemed to move me to actually feel compassion for myself or for others, or certainly not for all sentient beings. Somehow, it just didn’t resonate with me to wish that everyone on the planet be happy and live their lives with ease, a common phrase in many compassion meditations. In my research, I learned that my experience was consistent with what the research supports (see Chapter 12). Apparently, you first have to be moved to feel a positive emotion before the compassion meditation practice has a positive impact. There are substantial differences among individuals, pointing to the fact that a particular compassion meditation script will not work for everyone. It may take a lot of trial and error before finding one that moves you to actually feel compassion. I’m still searching for one.

Meanwhile, to try to figure out what I might be doing wrong and how I might improve my practice, I delved deeper into the mindfulness meditation research that I had been following and writing about for several years. With my training and experience in conducting, writing, and deciphering research, I was surprised to find that many of the benefits being touted everywhere were not really substantiated by rigorous research, and that the rewards were often not realized until a practice was in place for quite some time. I was averaging from about 180 to 200 minutes per week, or about three hours. Taking this out to my cumulative number of hours for a ten-year practice came to about 1500 to 1700 hours. I discovered this was a mere drop in the bucket compared to the amount of practice long-term meditators in many of the research studies had done. Often these long-term meditators had accumulated from 9-10,000 hours of practice. I was never going to see that in my lifetime. So I began thinking about other ways to practice.

Around the same time, I found that soon after my morning meditation, a sense of gloom often came over me. And I’m more often than not a look at the bright side/dig for the good in everyone kind of person. This also coincided with leaving my university teaching position after many years to concentrate on my writing. As I soon found out, writing can be a lonely venture when you’re used to being socially engaged most of the day. My meditation practice wasn’t translating into a calmer, sunnier, and gentler way of being. I felt constant angst. So I started to take little pleasure-inducing and stress-relieving breaks during my writing workday to try to shift my mood. I found the effects from a break typically lasted about an hour before I needed another one. And voilà—the birth of my revelation to write this book about getting a daily dose of mindful moments.

I was also trying out the many research-based practices I was learning about in my research to relieve stress and support a more positive outlook. Some of these included sprinting up and down a flight of stairs, stroking my palms and arms, savoring enjoyable experiences, appreciating my daily accomplishments, and expressing gratitude for the little things that usually fell under my radar.

It was also important to me that my practice go beyond my self-serving need to boost my spirits. And as the research clearly shows, acts of generosity, kindness, and compassion are a direct route to happiness, life satisfaction, and fulfillment. I wanted my mindful moment practice to align with what I held to be dear and the values I wanted to live by. For example, what seemed to work better for me than doing compassion meditations to actually feel compassion was to deliberately practice being more compassionate. I started with setting an intention for the day for my mindful moments to have a designated theme to be compassionate. But that wasn’t enough by itself to translate into action. It had to be coupled with a more specific check-in prompt. As a firm believer in it’s what you say to yourself that revs up your negativity, one cue I used was to become more aware of when I was assigning someone a negative label like he’s such a jerk or she’s so self-centered. Then the label itself served as my signal to reconstruct a more compassionate thought or comment.

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Searching for Evidence

Given my research background, I began searching to see if I could establish an evidence-base for a mindful moment practice. My predisposition is to have to prove or provide evidence for my musings, so I started doing research, more and more research, and it took me far and wide. As it turned out, I wasn’t