It’s the inner critic that lives in our heads that is constantly judging ourselves and others. This inner critic doesn’t make us feel good and can keep us stuck in cycles of stress, anxiety, depression and addiction. So why do we let this auto-judge run rampant? The reality is most the time we’re not aware enough to keep it in check and even when we are we don’t know what to do about it.

Here’s one trick to get your self-judgments in check:

The first thing you need to develop before gaining freedom from the inner critic is an awareness or acknowledgment of it. That allows a space to sit between your awareness and the judgment itself. In this space you find perspective, clarity and regain the choice to engage a healthier response. This moment is what I call The Now Effect.

Once you’re sitting in that space you can choose to count the judgments that arise.

Note right now if your mind is making a judgment about this idea before even trying it out. That’s numero uno. Great job!

This may sound silly, but counting your judgments has a specific effect. It not only widens the space between your awareness and the judgment itself, but it also impersonalizes it. When you impersonalize something you stop identifying with it and so it loses its hold on you.

One thing we know is that as you intentionally practice and repeat something it starts to become automatic.

Here are two ways to get your judgments in check:

1. Toward others – It may be easier to start this process noticing judgments of others. Get these in check by setting an intention right now to count your judgments toward other people for one day.
2. Toward yourself – The next day count self-judgments.

Your mind may wander from this practice at times and that’s perfectly fine. The moment you notice you’ve wandered is a moment of clarity, a moment of mindfulness where you can choose to gently redirect your intentions back to the practice. That’s the Now Effect in action.

Don’t be enslaved by your judgments, give this a shot and let your experience be your guiding teacher.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

*** Want Free Daily Now Moments that pop you into a space of awareness and remind you of what really matters delivered to your inbox?

Judge photo available from Shutterstock.

This made me think of two critical elements that can help shape our happiness and success.The first is proactively looking at what it is we actually want in life. The second is looking at a key element that can help prime our minds toward the happiness and success we are looking for.

So here we are, in this moment right now, a space of awareness and choice to intentionally reflect on these 4 very important questions to help give you the support to making the change you’re most interested in.

1. Think back to when this year started — what were your expectations?  What did you want/hope for? Have any of those begun to manifest?
2. In this past week, what are you grateful for?
3. What are your intentions for the rest of the year, how would you like to be (e.g., more calm, a better listener, more focused, kinder to yourself and others, more present to friends and family?)
4. Looking forward, what are you wishing for yourself (e.g., health, feeling safe, free from fear, happiness, a sense of peace)?

Take this into the hours, days, weeks and months ahead. Making change stick is about setting an intention and repeatedly coming back to review that intention as if it was a doctor’s appointment. Repeatedly coming back and reviewing your intentions is an important thing to do to ensure making the changes you want to make.

BUT, there is something potentially even more important and that is controlling the environment you live in to maximize opportunity to make that change.

What does that mean?

Who do you surround yourself with? Is there a way to put people in your life who are supportive to the changes you want to make? That will maximize your potential.

This is exactly why I created The Now Effect Community, a free resources to support you with daily now moment reminders, a weekly support letter and a free live online monthly call where I and other special guests (i.e., Rick Hanson, Tara Brach, Sharon Salzberg, and more) share a teaching and interact with you live to answer your important questions. You can register now for free, first call is with me starting Wednesday at 12pm PST. You don’t need to have all levels of support, just customize it and choose the one you want.

The factors included in making change truly happen are your intention, effort, strategy and controlling your environment. The latter is key to priming your mind toward success.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from. 

People meditating photo available from Shutterstock.

For example, if I were to get pulled over by the police for speeding I might think “the world is out to get me” or “I need to slow down.” I may miss the possibility that this may have saved me from an upcoming accident. Some people say life is like a blank canvas, go ahead and paint your masterpiece.

The problem with that statement is that life is not like a blank canvas because we bring all of our past experiences, woundings, traumas, and triumphs with us to the seat. These inform that immediate snap judgment that occurs beneath our awareness in any given moment.

If you were abused as a child that is going to have an instant effect on how you view and interpret relationships and the world. If you are a veteran who has just come back from war and saw some of your friends wounded or killed, that is going to affect how you make meaning of many different things in life. Many different forms of therapy ask us to shift the way we seeing things, have a different outlook on life.

It’s not so easy.

However, it’s also important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, says that people can survive any experience if they learn to make a more positive meaning out of it. He says, “even the worst circumstance can be transformed by our minds.”  We do walk around the world shaped by our experiences and the meaning we give to events can have a dramatic effect on how we feel emotionally and physically.

Here’s a sign that makes this point:

The fact is the moment we are aware of the meaning we are giving events is the moment we have stepped out of auto-pilot and into a space of clarity and have experience the Now Effect. To begin to train this to happen more often and cultivate a flexible mind, practice being on the lookout for the meaning you are giving events. Think of your initial interpretation as one slice of a pie and then from this space of awareness asking, “what’s another way I can see this?”

Notice your initial responses to these and then consider the other:

• When the boss walks down the hall and doesn’t say hello does that mean that s/he is mad at you or that s/he is stressed?
• Does showing your emotions mean a sign of weakness or a sign of courage?
• If you get turned down by a job, does that mean that it’s the end of the world, or potentially giving you the opportunity to land a job that you would like better?
• If you’ve just been laid off, does it mean life is over or a new start?
• If s/he’s not calling you back, does that mean s/he just isn’t that into you or that s/he is just busy?

What did you notice with your interpretations? There are all kinds of examples like this that come to us on a daily basis. When we’re feeling particularly anxious, depressed, or panicky during the day it seems almost impossible to perceive things any other way than with negative or crisis-oriented judgment. The truth is, an event could almost mean anything. See if you can try and practice seeing other pieces of the pie and then you be the judge as to how that shifts the way you feel.

As always, please share our thoughts and comments below, your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Ecstatic woman photo available from Shutterstock

Even though we believe our thoughts represent reality, the truth is, our thoughts are not facts. A lot of us live without an awareness of this, operating mostly from a state of auto-pilot, sleepwalking through life.  The good news is we can train our minds to become more aware of this automaticity, get perspective and tune into what really matters.

Here’s an example I often do with my own patients to illustrate why we don’t need to believe everything we think:

Scenario one:

You’re walking down the street feeling particularly depressed, heavy, and hopeless one day and see a friend walking by. The friend looks up at you, but just continues walking without saying hello.

What thoughts come to mind? How do you feel now?

Scenario two:

You’re walking down the street and feeling pretty well, you’re feeling light on your toes, warm, with a smile on your face. A friend walks down the street and looks up at you without saying hello.

What thoughts come to mind now?

Most people I do this with usually respond to the first scenario with some self-blame or self-judgment. “What did I do,” “He hates me,”  or “I’m no good.” Most people respond to the second scenario with a curiosity about what is going on with the other person. “Is he having a bad day,” “that was strange,” or “I hope he’ll be ok.”

The fact is thoughts are temporary and fleeting and when we’re not feeling well, our minds become a magnet for negative thoughts and skewed interpretations of what is going on. When we start thinking and ruminating on these thoughts, they tend to create a snowball effect on the rest of our constitution. If we cling to exaggerated negative thoughts in our minds, (e.g., “he didn’t look at me, that’s because I’m fat, nobody likes me and nobody ever will”), this will certainly have an effect on how our bodies feel, bring on emotions of anxiety, sadness, anger, or others, make us feel like isolating and before we know it, we are either in a full blown depressed mood, a panic attack, or both.

You might say, “Well, I can’t help it, this just happens and I feel I have no control.” I would say that in that moment, you might feel that way because you are unaware of the cycle that is hijacking you. You are caught in the future worrying about the terrible things that could be, or caught in the past with memories and regrets of things you wish would have been different.

There might really be feelings of sadness, anger, or shame there.  The moment you notice this is the moment you are sitting in that space between stimulus and response, a space of clarity and choice and that is The Now Effect. The more the now effect occurs, the more often you’ll start noticing it like moments of grace throughout the day.

In this space of awareness we can apply some mindfulness. Practicing mindfulness means to acknowledge the feelings that are there, not judge them as good or bad, but let them be. This may bring up healing feelings of self-compassion and calm as you realize how much you are suffering in the moment. When you notice self-judgments arise, you can label them as such, and gently bring your mind back to just being with the feelings that are there.

There is a more gentle, compassionate and healing nature to this approach than the usual cycle of self judgment and critical mind that we’ve been used to for so long. This is not to say don’t ever have judgment or think about the past or future, but to do it on your watch rather than letting your mind run off with it and deepening your suffering.

Here are 4 steps to increase your chances of breaking free from a downward spiral and experiencing the Now Effect:

1. Intentionally be on the lookout for the mind snowballing or when you’re in a low mood. This will prime your mind to pop out of it more often.
2. Bring awareness in that moment to how you are feeling. Name the feelings if possible.
3. Think about how your interpretation of the situation may be influenced by the mood you are in.
4. If you are feeling an uncomfortable emotion or pain, apply some self-compassion and do something pleasurable or kind for you that day. This will send the message internally that you care for yourself and allow for the discomfort to come and go quicker as it naturally would.

As you practice and repeat this with intention, like all things, it will start to become more automatic. In other words, rewiring a healthier and more mindful auto-pilot.

As always, please feel free to share your own stories, comments, or questions below. Your additions here provide a living wisdom for all of us to benefit from.

Man walking photo available from Shutterstock

“May we all recognize in this New Year that the moments of our lives are rare and precious. Open to them, Bask in them, We are alive.”

The reality is we often hold things that are rare in our world to be precious. These rare things are held to a high value, whether it’s gold, an unbroken sand dollar on a beach, or the short time that a baby is a baby before growing up.

If you peel the lens back for a moment you can see our lives in this very same way. We’re a blip in time in relation to the life of this planet we stand on and this Universe we live in.  All the moments of our lives are rare and precious and it’s incredibly important to bring that awareness back to our lives.

What happens when we start seeing our time on this planet as rare and precious?

The small stuff that makes up the majority of our sticky worries tend to slide off us and our minds open up to what really matters. We begin to notice more compassion for ourselves and others and we begin to play. We gain a sense of humility and perhaps begin to recognize that what is most important is who you love and how you love them.

Try taking this quote into the New Year and see what happens.

May this New Year be filled with a sense of the preciousness and value of your life and the lives of all people,

Elisha Goldstein

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Butterfly photo available from Shutterstock.

Millions of people struggle with anxiety around traveling in one form or another and right now we’re in the peak period of the year in regards to air travel. I have a tip to help find freedom from anxiety that comes out of the new short enhanced eBook (fancy term that refers to an eBook including video instruction within the book available on IPad, Nook, and Kindle) Mindful Meditations for the Anxious Traveler. I created this $.99 enhanced eBook to be a mindful companion along the journey to more peaceful and restful travel:

Here’s the tip:

We’ve all heard the adage that “It is what it is,” but I like to add another piece saying, “It is what it is, while it is.” This speaks to a larger reality that whatever exists is impermanent, including our fear. When automatic worried thoughts of panic and worry begin creeping into your mind, saying “it is what it is, while it is” pops you out of autopilot, into the present moment, and reminds you that this feeling is impermanent. This reminder helps you to not get so wrapped up in it and can give you the choice to do a short mindfulness practice to calm your body and be kinder to yourself.

That’s what this is all about. We know that in between a stimulus and response there’s a space where the brain is rapidly making snap judgments and decisions about how to react. If there is a fear around travel, it’s going to be inserting judgments in that space through a worried lens.

Our work is to widen that space of awareness, calm our nervous system and get back in touch with our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that is more flexible in decision making and able to regulate our bodies in moments of distress.

In engaging short practices we can train our brains to believe that everything is going to be okay and that we’re not in any imminent danger.

Here’s a practice:

For example, one practice in Mindfulness Meditations for the Anxious Traveler is “The Mindful Check-In.” In this practice you’re guided to pause in the space of awareness and check in with your experience as an observer. You’re guided to see this moment as a new moment and get a sense of where you’re starting from. How is your body in this moment? What emotions are here, and is your mind cluttered or calm?

This widens the space of awareness, can often calm the nervous system and allows the possibility to insert the saying “It is what it is, while it is,” reminding you that you just got triggered into a mind trap and can now recognize the fear or anxiety that is currently there. The thoughts are not facts, but the feeling is. You can begin to recognize that the anxiety has a life of its own and is subject to the natural law that all things come and go.

Depending on the level of difficulty, that response could be engage in the greater art of distraction or maybe approaching the vulnerable feeling with warm presence of kindness and compassion. Inevitably this is the road to transforming the feeling and giving you a greater sense of self-reliance.

It was a joy to create Mindfulness Meditations for the Anxious Traveler and my hope is that it serves as a mindful companion being a source of ease, freedom from fear, and a healthier mind.

More than anything, see if it breaks up a habit, or allows for a new way of thinking or responding.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom that we can all benefit from.

Anxious traveler photo available from Shutterstock.

In 2005, I conducted a national study in an effort to see if people could in fact cultivate what I called “sacred moments” and see what effect that had on their stress and well-being. Lo and behold, in practicing 5 minutes a day for 5 days a week, for 3 weeks, there was a significant positive effect in stress reduction and well-being. What was so fascinating to me was that for many it allowed them to touch a sense of spirituality when they felt they had never been able to do this before.

A quote from one participant:

“[I experienced sacred moments] through this process. I never noticed any Spiritual moments before this. [The words] unique holy and worthy of reverence was not within the scope of my intellectual reaction of things. To be able to pray was something that I was not willing to [do]. What I like about [the sacred moment practice] is it allowed me to explore spirituality in a nonthreatening manner and for me that was special and unique.”

If you want to give it a spin, here were the same instructions the participants were given:

1. Choose an object - This object should represent something special, precious, or sacred to them. Almost anything can be sanctified and considered a sacred thing. According to Emile Durkheim (1915), known as one of the originators of modern sociology, “By sacred things one must not understand simply those personal beings which are called gods or spirits; a rock, a tree, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word anything can be sacred” (p. 52).
2. Mindful Check-In - Begin each practice by taking a few moment to be conscious of the breath and then slowly bring attention to the physical body, thoughts and feelings, hearing, seeing, tasting, and smelling. Just be aware of whatever you notice.
3. The Sacred Object - After the mindful check-in, gently shift attention to the sacred object and being open to what was sacred in the moment. There was no maximum time specified for this exercise. Instructions to participants permitted them to go longer than the suggested 5 minutes and asked them to simply make a log of the time.

Cultivating this practice is a very personal experience and at the same time sacred moments are shared by millions around the world.

As always, don’t take my word for it; go into this practice with a beginner’s mind, letting your judgments reside at bay, and just noticing whatever arises for you in the moment.

Please share your thoughts, emotions, and stories below. You interactions provide a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Stones photo available from Shutterstock.

Self-inflicted attention deficit disorder, exhaustion, lack of focus, reduced health, and burnout. This leads to lower job satisfaction, morale, and productivity. Hardly the results we want.

Did you know that over 50% of the workforce in the US says Job Stress is a major problem in life? This is twice as much as ten years ago. We also have 50% greater healthcare expenditures and corporations are losing over $300 Billion annually because of work-related stress! What’s going on here?

In an age of so much distraction, the old approach of time management at work is being thrown out the window in favor of attention management. Mindfulness is a practical way to get this.  Just think, how has the inability to control attention gotten in the way at work for you (not to mention in your personal relationships)? We’re often spending time worrying about a multiple future projects or dwelling on regrets of past ones. This makes it difficult to really concentrate on a task or another person at work. When we multi-task, we are paying attention to many things and while this may seem like a good thing, we’re actually losing quality, efficiency, and time.

Corporate America has started to take action, with companies like Google, Apple, Aetna, Nexterra, Intel, Twitter, Facebook and many others leading the way integrating mindfulness into the workplace. Many of them are harnessing the power of technology to bring mindfulness to their workforce to help them reduce stress, increase focus and be more productive.

Smartphone applications have come out to help us take advantage of technology to integrate more of this into our daily lives.

For example, if you have an iPhone, you can get many Mindfulness Apps that are available to integrate mindfulness into your life. The Mindful Solutions at Work Program just got released that introduces simple practices to integrate into your day, keeps track of your practices, and even sends email reminders of how you’re doing to help you stay on the path.

Here’s a fun 2 minute video that shows you how this works in daily life.  

One of the major reasons that corporate America is grabbing onto this is because the science is there that backs it up.

Now we can all let our experience be our best teacher. As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interactions create a living wisdom for us all to benefit from. 

Woman with a laptop photo available from Shutterstock.

I’m not saying that being straddled with large student loans and the inability to get a job isn’t a real stressor. But today more parents are finding themselves wondering if they made a mistake in not focusing more on the non-achievement oriented things in life that lead to simple pleasures and happiness.

If we take a step back we might see that some of our happiest times are those where we slow down and become mindful of the simple things in life. As we pay attention to our bodies, we can be grateful for the ability to see, hear, smell, taste and touch (or for most of these if one is missing). Some of my happiest moments are those where my family and I didn’t leave our house at all and played together, ate together and rested together.

Becoming mindful of the life around us is completely free and can help you regulate emotions during difficult times, create more flexibility and creativity in decision making, cultivate resilient feelings like gratitude, empathy and compassion and open you up to things that you can enjoy in life.

I’m not advocating for getting rid of achievement or ditching any ideals or efforts to get hired, but more to open the mind to the idea that we are active participants in our own health and well-being despite the more difficult conditions.

This may be a lesson to the rest of us whose kids are not yet in college that making achievement in school the primary focus may be something to reconsider. In what ways may it be important to broaden the scope of what really matters in life to be finding value in the simple things?

In the words of the late Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff–and it’s all small stuff  “Be grateful for the good times and graceful during the more difficult times.”

A little mindfulness can help us during these times and bring our kids up to realize this piece of wisdom.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Young woman photo available from Shuterstock.

A number of people continue to write in with stories. If you have a story, continue writing in and as long as there are good stories that teach the rest of us how mindfulness can work in our lives, I will choose from them from time to time to post on Mindfulness and Psychotherapy.

Of course those that get chosen can also send me a link that I’ll include in the post where people can learn more about them.

Here’s a wonderful story that teaches us the wisdom of being present in the transitory moments of life by Stuart Frazer:

My wife is an outdoor photographer and I recently began sometimes accompanying her on shoots.  I carry equipment, help scout out shots and provide companionship.  The sun was shining this past Sunday and we went for an early morning visit to a beautiful old neighborhood in our city.  As we walked I found myself looking closely at buildings, boats, birds and other people.  Most importantly, I focused on sun and light.

We turned down a street and my wife took a series of shots of a wonderful old home dating back to the 1800s.  The house was in shade, but she noticed a small area unexpectedly bathed in natural light.  The light could not be direct.  Where was it coming from?  I repositioned myself and saw it was sunlight reflecting off an upstairs window in the house across the street. The closed white draperies hanging behind the window glass intensified the reflection. The light we were trying to capture resulted from a complicated, fleeting set of conditions: the angle of the sun in fall, the time of day and the color of the window drapery.  It would certainly be gone in a few minutes.

As we later walked I made a connection. Good photographs capture unique moments, transitory arrangements of the world.  Finding those moments means filtering out noise and being attuned to the environment around us.  You may not capture the moment with the camera, but that’s beside the point.  This exercise reinforced how interesting it can be to take a break from past and future, and to just go with what the eye sees in a short, fragmentary moment.

As Frank said, we can take this as a metaphor for how we pay attention to life. What are the wondrous subtleties that we miss out on because we are living on auto-pilot constantly rehashing the past or rehearsing the future?

It’s through connecting to what’s here through our given lenses of sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound that we connect to the life we are given.

Find a time today to just stop, take a breath and attune to your environment. You may just find an entire life that you’ve been missing out on.

Thanks for the gift Stuart.

If you have a story of a mindful moment in your life, please email it to elisha@drsgoldstein.com and allow it to be a gift that we can all learn from.

Camera photo available from Shutterstock.