Zen Habits Favorites

One of the most common problems among people I work with and coach is the feeling of always being busy.And then it becomes a rationalization: I can’t honor my commitments because I’m too busy! I can’t be with my family or friends because I’m too busy. I can’t work out, meditate, shut down at night to get to sleep, or make time for solitude and disconnection … because I’m too busy. Is it true? Or can we develop a habit of not being busy, even with the same workload?

Our lives are spent building up to more important moments, later, the moments when we’ll be happy. But when those moments come, we’re not happier. In fact, we’re already looking ahead.

For the most part, everything is normal. We’re managing. On good days, things go pretty well. On bad days, frustration and stress get to us. But what if we could shift everything in a magical way?

It happens to all of us: we don’t get done what we hoped to get done, then we feel stressed or guilty about it. It’s time to let that go, because it’s not helping us. We can build resiliency around this, with a little mental training. And it will help us in magical ways. Think about whether you’ve done any of these things....

When I write these articles, they’re as much a reminder to myself about what I’ve found to work as they are a reminder to all of you. I’ve found them to work, but that doesn’t mean I always remember to practice them. It doesn’t mean I’m perfect, by any means.

I used to think, as many people do, that if we’re unhappy with ourselves, we’ll be driven to get better. And if we were all of a sudden content with ourselves, we’d stop doing anything. I no longer believe this.

The next time you experience frustration, just notice it. Just be mindful that you’re unhappy with something or someone, that you’re feeling frustration in your body somehow. Now notice what it is in this moment that you wish were different. What is missing from this moment that is frustrating you? Frustration stems from what you don’t have.

As you sit here reading these words, you are breathing … stop for a moment and notice this breath. You could control the breath, and make it behave as you like … or you can simply let yourself breathe. There is peace in just letting your body breathe, without having to do anything about it.

The question I’ve been asking myself lately, before I do anything, is a deceptively simple one: “What’s the most loving thing you can do in this situation?“

When I remember to do this — and I very, very often don’t — it lifts the difficulty that I’ve been facing internally and shift my focus to understanding and empathizing with other people, seeing how I can give them compassion.

If you’re on Facebook looking at your friends’ food pictures or vacation photos, that will shape your reality. If you’re on porn sites, that’s what your reality is. If you follow people on Twitter who complain all the time, that affects your life in a major way.

There’s a part of today’s consumerist world that drives us to want more, buy more, act on our impulses, hoard, spend to solve our problems, create comfort through shopping, seek thrills through travel, do more, be more. What would happen if we broke from our addiction to wanting and buying more?

You can read entire books on productivity, dozens of blog posts, and implement half a dozen different productivity systems. But at the end of the day, you’d have gotten nothing important done. The truth is, productivity is fairly simple, in theory.

We think we need to improve ourselves and our current situation, because we’re dissatisfied (at least a little bit) with how things are. So we strive for change — exercise more, eat better, read more, be more mindful, do more meaningful work, be more disciplined. And yet, we struggle with change. Why is that?

When we feel difficult emotions in real life, we can stop believing in the story, and start to see the reality of what’s happening: there’s just physical objects around us, moving. There are atoms and molecules, living organisms, people who can talk and create.

We feel the moment isn’t enough unless we talk about it, share it, somehow solidify it. The moment is ephemeral, and we want solidity and permanence. This kind of groundlessness can scare us.

Pretty much all of us experience frustration on a daily (or even hourly) basis. We get frustrated by other people, by ourselves, by technology, by work situations, by small crises that come up all the time. How can we calm ourselves and let go of our frustrations, so we’re not so irritated and angry throughout the day?

Think about how busy our lives have become. Think about how distracted we’ve become. Think about how many things needlessly pull on our attention, our time, our money, our sanity. The point isn’t to opt out of life. It’s to see that life is much more than we dare to believe it can be.

The basic nature of life is that it is everchanging, uncontrollable. When we think we have stability in life, something comes up to remind us that no, we don’t. There is no stability, no matter how much we’d like it. And this kinda freaks us out.

Everyone is trying to look good in the eyes of others. Everyone stresses out about how they look, how they’re perceived, whether people think they’re awesome or good people. It’s why Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and mirrors exist.