Pay Attention to Your Daily Activities

Note: This is a guest post from Angeliki who blogs at RePsych about the interesting lessons we can learn from psychology, and how to live a great life. She offers tons of great insipiration!

Keeping track of certain aspects of your life can be a surprisingly powerful practice; the very act of recording exerts an interesting psychological effect. Spend a couple of days recording your time use in details and you’re likely to find yourself using it more efficiently. Record what you eat and you’ll find yourself eat more healthily even without taking any other actions.  The idea of making the unconscious conscious chimes with the Buddhist concept of mindfulness- the practice of paying attention in every moment of one’s day without judgment.

And why don’t you take this knowledge a bit further?

When you have a few minutes to spare, take a notebook and write what you did in the morning or in the afternoon or between 1pm and 3pm, decide on a specific space of time.

Write everything you did no matter how small or big and next to each activity write what you gained from it. Was it nurturing, did it give you pleasure, did it give you a sense of mastery/satisfaction, was it depleting or did you feel zoned-out?

It only takes a couple of minutes to make this list but what you will discover can be very revealing. For example, when I did this little experiment, I discovered that I’m a “pleasure hunter”. Most of my activities were marked as pleasure. Also I noticed that a lot of the things I did were depleting and/or made me feel zoned out (e.g. watch TV, walking to places), which surprised me because I thought some of these activities were fun. 

If you want to increase the pleasurable and meaningful activities in your life, here are some ideas:

*do something pleasurable: have a nice hot bath, have a nap, go for a walk, visit a friend, write a poem, go for a run, phone a friend, spend time with your significant other, cook, go shopping, watch something funny or uplifting, read a book, listen to music
*do something that will give you a sense of satisfaction or mastery: clean the house, clear a cupboard or a drawer, catch up with letter writing/ emailing, do some work, pay a bill, do something that you have been putting off doing, exercise
*act mindfully: focus your entire attention on just what you’re doing right now, keep yourself in the moment, put your mind in the present, be aware of your breathing as you do things, be aware of the contact of your feet with the floor as you walk

What is your day structure? What depleting activity can you cross off your day and which one can you make a bit more pleasurable?