When you’re constantly in a rush to get to the next destination or activity, stopping to center your energy can be a real challenge.

Neglecting to focus your attention on the present can be harmful to your mental, emotional, and physical health, which is why it’s so important to practice mindfulness. Here are four reasons mindfulness can keep you happy and healthy.

Mindfulness Encourages You to Be Present

When you’re busy balancing work, school, family time, and a romantic life, you’re not always living in the present. Instead, you’re often planning ahead, trying to figure out how you’re going to have time to fit everything into the day, week, or month.

When you practice mindfulness, you force yourself to stop and experience the present, often noticing things you didn’t have time to see before. When you place importance on being present, you’ll find that not only do you have the time to take things slower, but also that being there makes you happier. Grounding meditations are perfect to use to train yourself to be in your body.

Mindfulness Helps You Get Over Negativity

Whether it’s a big or small issue, negativity can linger much longer than it needs to. This can become even more significant when you don’t have time to address the root problem.

Mindfulness encourages you to ponder and absorb your feelings, both good and bad. As you take the time to think about your negative thoughts and learn more about why they exist, you can also ponder ways to address any lingering issues with yourself or those around you. Though dwelling incessantly on sad thoughts won’t put anyone in a good mood, bringing negative thoughts to a conclusion can lead to greater happiness.

A quick way to isolate the negative feelings is to close your eyes and ask yourself honest questions such as why does this really bother me and honestly listen to the answers you hear. Having an ongoing honest conversation with yourself allows you to be your authentic self. Often the answers we will hear will pertain to feeling abandoned or disappointed or even being used. Half the battle is being able to validate our core or root.

For example, during the holiday season most of us got to interact with family. Our family members have a way of bringing our inner struggles to the surface even if they are not aware of their mystical powers. After all, our family is where all of our life work began. So let’s say your Aunt blindly starts to poke around in your personal life and you are able to endure this lovely process at the time but after the fact you really can’t shake the negative thoughts that this has brought to the surface for you. This is the perfect time to sit quietly and ask yourself why this bothers you so much and to really have that conversation with yourself.

Often we will fixate on the person who has triggered our negative thoughts and not really search within. Using these mindful techniques allows us to really dive within ourselves and make peace with why an issue is raw within us. In this instance the nosy Aunt is a blessing because it allows the dis-ease within us to be brought to the surface and be released from us.

Once this is done we can get back to being mindful or present.

Mindfulness Helps You Beat Stress

Like negativity, stress can slowly build to unmanageable levels, and you may not realize how bad stress is until it’s too late. Mindfulness encourages you to think about and accept how you feel in the moment, so you won’t be able to deny that you’re feeling stressed or overloaded.

By lowering your stress levels, you can often sleep better, alleviate chronic pain, and even lower blood pressure. These physical health benefits will make you feel happier and improve your emotional and mental health as well.

A great exercise to release negativity or stress is to find some time alone and kneel down. See yourself talking to either a spiritual leader you admire or a religious icon you admire or even a version of yourself from the future. Have a conversation with this image in your mind and see yourself offering your current challenges to this image. Really take the time to explain to this image what you are going through. Most often you will realize that there are two or three things that feel like a dozen that you wind up handing over to this image and you will find yourself feeling much lighter immediately following.

Mindfulness Lets You Improve Relationships

As mindfulness encourages you to focus on your own thoughts, it helps you become a more centered person. Once you’ve found a healthy way to deal with the issues that most people face on a daily basis, you can make yourself more available to others.

One of the greatest benefits of having a well-developed mindfulness practice is that it can help you improve personal relationships. When you have more mental, emotional, and physical capacity to share with others, you’ll have much happier and more fulfilling relationships. A love tarot reading can help you find the healthiest relationships for you.

Practicing mindfulness can help not just you, but also those around you. Make time for mindfulness, and you’ll pave the way for a more meaningful and happy life.

Relephant Read:

How to be Mindful in our Daily Lives.

Author: Kimberle Evans

Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: Simpleinsomnia/Flickr