Welcome to the Thrive in Five weekly blog, this week I want to impart with you some wisdom from an 11-year-old friend of mine. This lad suffers with a bit of anxiety and he is often trying to look at ways he can alter his behaviour and just generally feel calmer – so he is less reactive, bit more reflective, and a little bit more in control of his emotions.
Another thing he does, which I find so impressive for an 11-year-old boy, is that every night after he has taken a shower, he does a 10 to 20 minute meditation in his bedroom using his phone and his headphones, and following an app (Headspace I think). He’s stayed with me for a couple of days and that’s what he did every night. What an amazing skill to have learned at 11 years old, and a skill he can carry forward into his adult life. And he’s always got that in his tool bag for any time he feels stressed, anxious, low, under-energised, reactive, and just wants to regain control again.
So many of us feel like that – we feel stressed, we feel anxious, and we feel out of control. Meditation is a fantastic way of changing your physiology, of getting yourself from a very stressed, sympathetic, dominant state to a calmer, more in control, parasympathetic dominant state. So if an 11-year-old boy can do this, I think we can all give it a go.
There are a few apps you can try, headspace, Calm, or you can simply sit quietly and maybe put some headphones on that cancel out any noise and go through 5, 10, 15 minutes meditation. I just do 10 minutes a day, but it is a very, very powerful way of altering your physiology and helping you to get more in control of yourself. And when you practise it every day, you can use it for public speaking, for any kind of event that might cause you to feel stressed. Maybe it’s just getting on the train and going into work.
I wanted to share that with you. I’ve talked about this before, but I was so impressed to see an 11-year-old boy having that built into his nightly practise, and he extols the benefits.
Meditation is this week’s little bit of wisdom and insights borrowed from an 11-year-old boy. So have a think about how you can integrate it into your practise. Maybe you just start with two minutes, maybe you build up to a little bit longer over time. It’s very, very powerful for me and I’ve seen it work with lots of other people as well.
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