I find that mindfulness is one of the best ways you can combat micro-stress in our lives. In a world where the daily life of a commuter is filled with so many tiny stressors, it seems impossible to live a healthy life in which this stress does not accumulate and affect our quality of life. However, I believe that I have some suggestions to reframe your mindset towards this and reduce the amount of micro-stress we experience to the minimum.
I have always been a lazy person, I did not appreciate any small amount of extra work that was given to me and I liked doing things at my own pace. Growing up, I was very much critiqued for this behavior, I skipped most of my homework from elementary school to my high school graduation - I did all my required work, but none of the optional work that did not piqued my interest. Now I see as a grown up, it is very important to listen to your body, take things slow and not overburden yourself. Today, despite my lazy personality I make the mistake of overworking and burning myself out occasionally. Things like exams and projects due make me find myself doing uneven amounts of work. Going to school makes me rush out of bed to catch the metro. Now I look back and yearn for that lazy and disorganized child within me, because that child knew best that in every part of life, I should be as sneaky as I can in my ethical boundaries and do the least amount of work. I should not overstudy for exams and skip the parts that are irrelevant to my studies, not read unimportant passages from books, do not make the mistake of caring too much what others might think and wear an uglier shoe for a long and tiring day. In this sense, so not giving your all to every single task you do and reserving your energy for the future, laziness is a valuable trait. It is saddening to realize that many adults - and now, unfortunately, teens alike - fall into the trap of trying their best and extinguishing their inner fires for their true passions and prominent works.
So how do we combat this? How do we avoid burning ourselves out and do the least possible without falling into procrastination and executive dysfunctioning? The answer is simple, by paying attention to what tasks we have. I have heard the advice of “prioritize your tasks” maybe a hundred times by now. This is the most classic advice to someone experiencing a burden of events but what does this even mean? For me and many others this is probably just some corporate lingo stuck together to give some sense of control to many people who are tasked with more than they should in an ethical sense. But I invite you to do the same, in a different way. I want you to pay attention to the tiniest thing you are doing and evaluate how much this matters to you. Some things in life are absolutely skippable, but due to our cognitive restrictions such as habits and assumptions about the nature of such tasks, we believe this to be necessary and burden ourselves with doing it rather than skipping it. Notice how your shoulders are tense and up to your chin? How your tongue is placed on the roof of your mouth and that your posture is slouching right now? None of these things are things that you are consciously doing and do not have to be doing but are caused as natural reactions to daily, tiny stressors. So let go, let go of your shoulders, your tongue, your body, let your muscles relax. You will find that even now, you have much less you have to do. Maybe you find yourself saying way too much about a topic while discussing with a friend without realizing you do not need the extra explanations, maybe you have a tendency to try to perfectly open up the lid on new ketchup bottles or you eat too much without giving your body a rest to recognize if you are full or not. Like, you can literally wait until your food becomes just a tiny bit colder so it doesn’t bother you, you are allowed to do that. As an advocate of this very specific type of laziness, I would absolutely despise being misunderstood, I am certainly not advising that you should not pick up something you dropped or leave your plate as is on the table after you ate, these would even be worse for the mindful laziness which I am promoting as you would end up having more to deal with when you had to begin with.
Now I want to add more to this understanding of mindfulness by mentioning a small ritual I do everyday while I commute to university which makes me feel extremely grateful and happy. Before you leave the door to face the loud traffic and ticket gates which require you to search for your purse in a hurry, just make sure you are wearing an outfit that brings you comfort. Shoes that do not give you blisters, a sweater that keeps you perfectly cozy in the cold weather without making you sweat or a shirt that keeps you cool in summer. Then realize as you walk, the merits of each of these articles of clothing. The feeling that your shoes are fitting perfectly and each step feels like a massage, the feeling that your outfit makes you feel like you are getting a big hug from someone. The mere recognition of this sensory experience can make you realize that there are many things which we take for granted in our daily lives, and for this reason I have been walking to university with a smile on my face every single day. I used to wear shoes that hurted me for so long. Then I bought new shoes because I realized that I can prioritize my finances for this thing which will improve my life quality on a level than buying junk would. Then I found inner peace. It was as easy as that.
Before I close off, I would like to mention one last thing. Music is a great tool for boosting your energy on the daily, however it can also be a substance which we abuse and constantly feed ourselves to in order to block out our thoughts. I am guilty of this myself, I cannot take a shower or put on my clothes without listening to music. Without constant stimulation from music or listening to a podcast, how am I to live my life? I believe people who listen to a podcast while doing chores can relate to this. So how come the best medicine to stress is a cause of stress? Well there is a difference between putting on music for the noise and for pleasure. When it’s noise, we can easily forget how loud the music is. This is an incredibly dangerous thing to do especially if you're unconscious about the situation and you can end up hurting yourself a lot in your state of hypo-alertion. Another thing is that if we grow overdependent on music to be able to function, we might end up being addicts and see music as a filler or blocker of thoughts rather than art that feeds our souls. I am a huge fan of classical and jazz music. I always believed myself to be listening to music that brings me the chills and a great aesthetic pleasure, yet when I noticed that everyday when I walked to work I would listen to rock on full volume, just so I can not think how terrible this is, I noticed that I have completely lost the point. What brought me a greater pleasure was to bring down the volume to %20 percent, go up to the beginning of the album that I was listening to, and carefully follow the journey music was taking me. I had since then quit listening to music on full volume unless I was absolutely enjoying it and kept my volume down when my headphones told me it was dangerous. Music is a powerful tool for mindfulness and it can serve as an amazing focus point when we are feeling overwhelmed or lost or down. The dopamine flow which music brings can make us feel better and put us in a particular mood which we can then feel capable of doing our tasks to.
In general, mindfulness is an easily learnable skill that we often take for granted because of our hustle culture society. We have quite literally made it desirable to work until we cannot function properly and we are burnt out, we are taught that we should always give our best to every single task. I believe that’s not only harmful but also limiting. It’s actually pretty fine to not overdo your tasks. To take a day off to do absolutely and completely nothing. To wear something comfortable. Be lazy for a while.