227. The power of staying present

in the moment. For I guess anyone who's ever been told to just enjoy the moment, to just appreciate what you have right now, you'll kind of understand that doing so is actually a lot harder than it looks. The present feels very, very elusive in so many ways, especially when we're facing so many destructions and our attention is being pulled in so many directions. We're being told to

kind of do it all. When was the last time, within that system and within that kind of busyness culture, that we've actually slowed down and had a look around us and appreciated where we are right now. We're also really inclined to I think, ruminate on the past a lot naturally, but also to overthink and stress about the future.

And what I've you know, at least come to find myself, is that we spend a lot more time appreciating the moment only when it's pasted only in hindsight, rather than when we're in it, and that can really come at our detriment. As we'll come to see, letting yourself be present, be deliberately conscious of all that you're experiencing, and really noticing small things about your reality brings a lot of peace that we tend to neglect in our really busy lives.

It's also been said to be amazing for creativity, mental clarity, productivity, and just all around general levels of happiness, which who doesn't want more of that? But mindfulness, again doesn't always come easy, and that's why I think it's really valuable to start almost training our brains in being mindful when we're young, or during our twenties, when it does tend to have the biggest and longest impact. And that is

precisely what we're going to discuss today. The immense power of staying present, why we tend to struggle to do so, and what we can kind of learn from the experts on how to keep your feet really firmly planted in the now. And I'm also going to kind of introduce you to this kind of like a thirty second introduction into this of living in the moment, into a practice that helps you bring you into the moment that I

personally really love. I actually use it on a daily and I think this is a great place to kind of introduce people to it. It's an amazing method and hopefully you get something out of it. So I really hope you enjoy this episode. I hope it is your calling or something to remind you to be more present in your life, to stop trying to rush to the future, rush to the next chapter, or get too stuck in what's already come. I know it's something that I sometimes

really need a reminder of, especially right now. You know, in recent months, I feel like the older you get, right like time just seems to speed up a little bit, and that's a really scary thought at times. But being really mindful of where you are now and the privilege of getting to experience where you are now definitely is grounding and definitely brings us back, and I think we all need that sometimes. So I'm very excited to share my thoughts, the psychology, the studies that we've dug up

for this one. So without further ado, let's get into the power of staying present. Staying present and enjoying the moment is something that I will come out and say

I really really struggle with. I have struggled with it for many years because of how I think chaotic my thoughts always seem to be, or just the fact that there's always something going on, there's always something to overthink, which is all too common amongst any one of you, any one of us who struggles with anxiety or just has a lot of things on their mind or a really busy life. What's really helped me, though, is being able to categorize the different distractions or interruptions that make

me feel distanced from the present. And when I say distanced from the present, what I really mean is I'm spending a lot more time in my brain than in my senses, a lot more time in kind of fantasy or memory or overthinking that I am in what's actually going on around me, and it kind of feels like there's this static between me and my life, or that I'm walking through life and not really able to remember what has happened. That really, for me is a good

indication that I'm feeling a little bit detached. And there seems to be three ways in which that kind of happens, in which we disconnect. The first way is when we get stuck in the past, falling into the nostalgia trap

or the regret spiral. If you've listened to our full episode on the psychology of nostalgia, you'll probably know a lot about this, But nostalgia is one way that we definitely become unable to appreciate our present because we are very much enticed by the more rosy memories of the past. Regret is another emotion that I mentioned, feeling like you

can't stop reliving moments of embarrassment or cringe. And then of course we have trauma, reliving trauma, feeling constantly pulled into your memories by some really painful experience, and a lot of these specific kinds of I would say distractions from the present come down to unresolved emotional experiences that you know there isn't a place for them to rest. There isn't Your brain hasn't fully gotten through processing what you've been through a situation, and so it continues to

kind of remain in your active memory. The second category is when we get fixated on the future. Now, this is definitely where I spend a lot of my time. Much of what ruins the present is sheer anxiety For me. This really includes anxiety and worry about what needs to

be done. Like you know, you're trying to talk to a friend or a coworker, You're trying to be engaged in that conversation, and all you can think about is how much work you need to do, or your endless to do list, overthinking future choices and out comes, and even some of those more existential questions that can create a great deal of detachment, if not disassociation at the time.

Of course, I think disassociation. It's kind of in a league of its own here for those of us who aren't familiar with the term, it's this experience where we feel completely disconnected from our thoughts, our feelings, memories, surroundings, sense of self, basically everything that makes up the present, and sometimes we can feel disconnected just for a few seconds or much much longer, And it's a really scary experience to have to feel like you're almost floating outside

of your body or that nothing feels real. Often it's the result of too much stress or extensive trauma. Our brain is kind of trying to find a way to essentially protect itself, to compartmentalize, and to survive when it can't handle that much information or that much stress or trauma. And finally, I think, on a less extreme note, we just have general everyday distractions. Now. When I say distractions, I mean both emotional and physical distractions or preoccupations is

maybe a better word. We can think of things like notifications from our phone a really busy environment as kind of falling into this category. And our phones are I think a big problem point for many of us because

they are just simply designed to be so addictive. That was an intentional choice by their creators, and they can really start to feel like our whole reality at times because of how reliant we are in them and the dependency that we have whereby we're constantly drawn to them for everything from social connection to work, shopping, entertainment information. I think every single one of us has unknowingly missed out on a beautiful moment because we were locked in

by our screens. I've missed an old friend walking by us, We've missed seeing some beautiful interaction take place, or we've missed really feeling what we're feeling, because as soon as it gets too much or uncomfortable, we pick up our phones and we flood our brains with information as a buffer.

In fact, a recent report from the American Psychological Association, it actually suggests that our phones often divert our attention away from the real world, which dar But the reason it does that is because it kind of takes our attention from this messy reality into this nice, neatly formed and neatly designed reality where we know what to expect, our apps have everything in place, we are in control,

and so it becomes kind of a mental sanctuary. And what's the consequence of this, Well, a separate study from twenty twenty basically found that because our phones are constantly capturing our attention, a lot of us do feel socially connected. We are less able to recall certain memories, especially biographical memories,

and we feel less in the moment. And you know, what I read that study, and I was kind of like, do we even need a study to tell us that, Like, who hasn't felt this way or question their relationship with our phone or social media in the last couple of years, Like, I think all of us are probably getting to the point where we realize that what's really keeping us separate from our experiences in a lot of circumstances is a screen.

You can kind of see that there is a bit of a spectrum or a scale here from intense distractions, very existential distractions, to smaller ones, and then those that are a bit less common and those that are very chronic. Of course, our phones are a chronic distraction, I think, or even like overthinking about the future may also be

a chronic distraction. But you know, there is, of course a distinction between complete dissociation and getting caught up and scrolling on your phone or distracted by something in your environment. But they all have the same effect. At the end of the day, we feel less engaged in the moment, and when that continues to happen, we feel less engaged

in our lives. Moments make up our lives. If you've ever had the experience of kind of waking up one day and feeling like you can't remember what you really did for the last two weeks or two months of your life, sometimes even years. That is a consequence of day to day disengagement with the present for whatever reason. Because remaining present really means remaining deliberately conscious of what is happening around you so that you can actually feel

your life, participate fully in your life. And that also means being connected to both good and bad experiences and choosing to feel both because you appreciate that they make up this reality that you have the privilege of experiencing, even during times when it doesn't feel like a privilege.

Being present is not about cherry picking when you want to be present and when you want to detach, because eventually it becomes very hard to reattach when your modus operatum or your impulse is to distract and intellectualize and withdraw instead of feel. So it's showing up for all of it. And I know I said the good and the bad, but I should also include the boring within that as well. There is a lot of joy to be found in the monotonous, in my opinion, but when

it becomes very routine and same old, same old. The natural urges, of course to disengage because you don't need to be fully there. You can be thinking about other things. But those boring, mindless tasks like brushing your teeth, like your daily commute, cleaning your house, answering emails, they make

up a lot of life. There is a lot of minutes in those small activities that we can disengage from, and so if we're not appreciating them, if we're not immersed in them as much as we can be, that becomes a big chunk of life that we spend inwards and removed, and there's a lost opportunity in there for presence and for connection with our senses and with our reality.

I think sometimes daydreaming and kind of indulging in old memories or make belief situations it can be protective, firstly in the case of boredom, but also when our current day to day is just not very satisfying. It's kind of a small reprieve to imagine the day's life will be better, or to think about the times when it was before. That kind of emotional detachment from day to day is instinctual, and some would say hardwayed in as a way to keep our mind distracted from what could

be a pretty confronting reality. And isn't that why kind of all of us go through peer of detachment, because if we were to be truly seeing our life what it was, the problems, the fears, the relationships, the insecurities, it would just be too much, it would be too painful. And so we do need a little bit of like we need to step back mentally, sometimes plain and simple.

We just have a natural tendency to withdraw and want to skirt the unpleasant emotions and experiences because they make us uncomfortable, and logically, by avoiding this discomfort, we can be happier for longer. Isn't that the way that it goes? Unfortunately, that's an incorrect assumption. Unfortunately it goes a different way. Actually, we don't become happier by selectively experiencing our lives. We

become quite numb. And that is exactly what I was talking about before, going weeks, feeling like you've been wrapped in bubble wrap, that nothing is really touched to you or made you feel, not being able to remember conversations with friends, not being able to enjoy the moment because we have become accustomed to this habit of either not fully feeling, or feeling through our phones, only feeling through the memory of something, or you know, my least favorite,

overthinking everything that could happen might happen that we can't control, until we just don't feel anything anymore. We only think about the feeling. But when we switch to a more present mindset, we unlock some pretty profound psychological benefits. Being present is a combination of awareness, acceptance, and attention. We need to be in tune with the moments that we

are not present. We need to accept why that may be, whether it's an internal resistance to our feelings or our distraction, and then we need to redirect our attention from inwards to outwards. That is really complemented by just the simple art of noticing, observing your surroundings, really experiencing them, the sounds, the smells, the sensations, the temperature, and also what you're

feeling internally. Presence to me is also about, you know, surrender, surrendering to what might be uncomfortable, what you might not want to think about, what might be happening, and just being quite stoke about it, like, yeah, this is what's happening right now on it, and I have to be empathetic with myself, and you know it might be hard, but that's reality. And I would rather be present for my reality than kind of reach a point where I

can't remember anything at all. When we're able to do that, we become more empathetic, We're more able to connect with others on a deeper level because we're actually listening, we're actually absorbing everything that they're saying and doing. We improve our mental clarity by slowing everything down to just what's happening right now, not yesterday, not one minute from now, not a year from now, meaning that we can you know, sideline our mental clutter and down the noise for a moment.

And there's also been a lot of really convincing arguments about increased creativity, productivity, resilience because those mental states, they all require a great deal of mental energy, which we often don't have the reserves for when we're bustling from one thing to the next. So there is a real argument to be made for rest and silence and serenity in actually making us more successful and more creative and

more productive and more resilient. The other significant thing about mindfulness is that it makes us a lot more comfortable with what we can't control. The reason we tend to spend so much time in our memories is because we already know what happened, so there is a certainty there. There are no surprises, which really eases our fear of

the unknown. And it's the same reason we spend a lot of time overthinking the future, because our overthinking convinces us that the more we interrogate all the pussible outcomes, the more prepared will be when they get there. But you know, we probably won't be because it's never going to be like we thought it was. And mindfulness really places you squarely in the now, and we begin to realize that what will come will come. It's something we

can't control. And the moment that you're in right now, you were probably worried about two three months ago, but you're here, and when you look around, it's not as scary, it's not as dangerous. You have the skills that you need to kind of get through it. And of course, the final benefit of being mindful, the true power of being present, is that it just simply makes us happier. And the reason we know this comes from one of the most powerful studies of the past ten years in

my mind, by this researcher called Matt Killingsworth. So his study took a huge sample of individuals fifteen thousand people from different education levels, age, occupation, income, marital status. He took you know, he sampled them from across eighty different countries,

and his premise was really simple. Throughout the day, at random times, participants were contacted through their phones by an app that he had designed for this specific study, and they were kind of asked to rate their current level of happiness, what activity they were involved in, and whether or not their mind had been wandering from the activity. Now most people know the study is the one that

basically determined that money is correlated to happiness. So if this sounds familiar to you, that's the primary, I think finding that people liked to highlight in the media. But the finding that I find much more powerful and the one that came from the study was that actually, when it came to our attention and awareness was what really made people happy had far less to do with what they were doing, and significantly more to do with whether

there were ten was fully present in the moment. People who focused on their present moment experience, whatever was happening, even if it wasn't that great, were significantly happier than people who were allowing their mind to wander, who were trying to do a million things at once. Something else he concluded was that our mind is wandering between thirty two to forty seven percent of the day on average.

But when the mind wanders, we don't feel as happy as we do in those moments of flow, attention, awareness, feeling, because this distracted state leaves us quite vulnerable to rumination, to stress, to depression. Basically, like I said before, we spend a great deal of time contemplating what we're feeling rather than just feeling it, or we just avoid it altogether, which ends up giving us a lot less mastery over

our so called negative emotions. It also means that again we miss out on all the positive experiences because I said this before, right, If your kind of impulse, your status quo, is just to constantly be detached, it's hard to reattach your awareness and your attention during those good moments.

So all those positive experiences that would outweigh or overwhelm the frustrating, sad, lonely ones there are also ones that we aren't fully there for, but savoring the moment on the other hand, and there was this brilliant study, a

different study from twenty seventeen. It really talks about how when you savor the moment, the way you savor a meal, the way savor like a time with a friend, the way you savor you know, sleeping in in the morning, that is going to make you a lot more happier and it's going to increase your level of daily positive emotions, which is basically a psychological scale for measuring how often we feel joyful, happy, satisfied, purposeful, grateful throughout each day.

And in this study they measured people across nine weeks, and those who had more disposition or mindfulness, which meant that they were in the present more throughout their day, they did report feeling a lot more content, more able to work through their anxious thoughts, and yes, more happy. One thing about that that I just want to mention was this term dispositional mindfulness, because it's something that we

really do need to highlight. Basically, for some of us, it's just so much easier to exist in the present moment. Our minds are naturally Stiller, they're more serene, they're quieter in a way that's just part of our makeup. For others, it's the opposite. And I've said this already, but I've spent a great deal of my life very anxious about something or another. And it literally used to make me feel anxious to not be anxious about something, because I was like, what am I missing some big, bad fear

that I haven't noticed yet. So that's how complex it is. And if you're someone like that, mindfulness is just kind of like, it just feels out of your reach. But it is very much something that we can learn. You can rewire your brain and how it operates to perceive your reality in a way that is firmly planted in the moment. And that's really what I want to discuss next. We can list all the benefits until the sun goes down, but it's semi useless if you don't know how to

get there. You don't know how to embrace the power of staying present, you don't have the techniques. So we are going to talk about all of that, and of course so much more after this shortbreak. The cognitive shift required to go from someone who is constantly distracted or very self contained, very in their own head, to someone who is in every moment fully feeling and present is a skill for sure, especially if your factory setting, or the factory setting for your brain is one of nostalgia

or anticipation or split focus. But there are a number of small things you can implement that are so minimal and yet become some of those long term investments that we make in our life satisfaction and well being that we wish we started earlier, and the kind of investments that people who are really happy and really successful and

really at peace tend to do. And I've got to say, I don't know if you need any more convincing, but truly, before I introduce these kind of methods to you, I do have to say, like, what do you have to lose in trying these switches? Often when we hear about mindfulness techniques or we hear about, you know, techniques for staying present that require a time investment, we kind of pause and we're like, it's it really worth? Do I

really want to do this? My life is so busy, you know, how I'm going right now is kind of fine. So I'm just gonna switch off and yeah, I don't have time for a thirty second mindfulness exercise. That sounds silly, but I do think it's worth trialing. We talk about bounded and unbounded risks on the show a lot. This is a bounded risk. It takes very little to practice some of these methods for even ten seconds, five minutes

a day, but it could be life changing. The person who really convinced me of this actually, and why I'm so passionate about it, is this man named Darren Larson who's been practicing mindfulness for over twenty two years and he is actually a mindfulness coach. A few years back, he did this talk and he offered this analogy. Mindfulness is like taking the stairs every day. Sometimes it's kind

of annoying. It burns, your heart rate goes up. Your body is put under momentary stress, you know the stress of confronting reality, fronting uncomfortable feelings, of boredom, of loneliness, of whatever it is you're going through. But that stress trains you for future moments of tension, and it makes you stronger in comparison to you know, taking the elevator every day, which yeah, for sure bypasses the discomfort, but that makes you less prepared for the day the elevator

is broken and you're forced to take the stairs. You're forced to confront something in the moment, but you don't have the skills because you never practiced. Basically, becoming more present is about building endurance and our attentional muscles. And I love this idea of an attentional muscle because it's so visual to me. Like I like the idea of like I can train something and make it stronger, Like how long can I hold my senses on one thing without letting it slip? It's kind of like how long

can I hold a squat? How much can I be aware of my environment before it slips away? Much like lifting weights? How much beauty can I hold? How many seconds can I go just thinking about nothing but what's in front of me? And when I started this practice, I could not go that long. It was probably like

as long as I could hold my breath. And now I feel like the same way that I go to the gym to train my muscles and my body, I really go to mindfulness to train my attention and to kind of train the part of me that experiences joy and peace. So firstly, we are going to start small, and this is a once a day, a daily practice in which you are going to deliberately, consciously bring yourself back into the present moment for just a brief moment.

I want you to set a random alarm on your phone for I don't know, two thirty three pm every day, and at that time, take thirty seconds to pause and place all of your attention into the current moment. And if you don't know how to do that, there is this really simple way of doing this that was created by psychotherapist in the early twoth and he worked in Silicon Valley with all these tech CEOs and highly successful people, and he created this thing for very busy people called

the three by three by three method. This combines mindfulness and simplified breathing. So what I want you to do is name a physical object that you can see, like a lamp, like a dresser, like a plant, and just take a deep breath in for four, hold for three, and then out for five. Then name another object in your surroundings do the same thing. In for four, hold

for three, out for five, and then one more. You can do this not just with things that you can see, but things that you can hear things that you can feel, like different surfaces on your body. But for that whole time that you are breathing in, holding your breath, breathing out, just focus on that one thing in your vision, in your I don't know, in your hearing, in your like anyway. Just focus on what it feels to experience that fully

for three three and three. Something that the creator of this practice, Phil Bozzia, says is that when he first tells people about this, they look at him like, you know, are you spout, like you're just spouting nonsense, And then they try it. And I was one of those skeptical people because how in the world could thirty seconds shift my mindset so quickly? But the best evidence I've found is the one that is the evidence that you can provide for yourself. So I do want you to try it.

And if it doesn't work, that's thirty seconds you would have spent listening to this episode anyway, so you don't really have much to lose. But if it does, if you feel even the slightest change, the slightest transformation, try implementing it for just a week and see if your consciousness improves for the rest of the day. Even when

you're not doing the exercise. The other huge piece of advice I have for people who want to be more present is to actually start the day the way you want to experience the day, which is alive, awake, alert, feeling. The easiest way to not achieve that is, of course, going to your phone the first thing in the moment, you know, as soon as you wake up, and just immediately flooding your brain with just like all this like

crazy information, And I get the impulse. I get also that this might be super simple advice, but sometimes the smallest change, in the smallest reminder to make the smallest change is what is most effective. Those microhabits have the largest impact, and this is certainly a very easy microhabit.

Start the day practicing presence by focusing on your breathing for the first few minutes after you wake up, drinking a cold glass of water and feeling the passage of the water through your body, experiencing sunlight or even a breeze. These are sensory grounding exercises, and the reason that they work is that they very intentionally connect you and what

you're thinking with what you're feeling. The way I explain it is like when you sync up audio and video, you sync up your perception with what is what is actually currently happening, and they're aligned. Basically, what we are doing is seeking ways that we can take ourselves from being detached doing things habitually to doing it deliberately, switching from unremarkable and automatic to remarkable and joyful. In a similar vein, my friend actually introduced me to this method

that she calls the romance moment. Basically, the romance moment is where you choose one activity in your day to fully romanticize and be engaged in. Take you know, brushing your teeth or doing the dishes. Really drag it out. Feel every moment, every movement, Watch what your hands are doing, how your muscles are moving, every second, fully be in it. A really good way actually, like a great way to try this is it a meal, Like when you're sitting

down for dinner or breakfast. Really savor each bite, each new taste, pause for three seconds between each bite, you know, like that research paper said before, you've got to savor the moment. You've got to really be in the moment for all that it's worth. And I think also avoiding that multitasking is also really really valuable. I think it's very hard to do that. We're very busy people, but

just try and focus on one thing at once. The biggest difficulty I do here is with being present, especially in this day and age, is how many distractions there are. And I think we've all had that experience of like we're talking to a friend or our friend is talking to us, and like a phone is buzzing, and there's someone walking past who's like wearing an outfit that you like, and the music is too loud, and it's just like there's just a lot going on, and my to do

list is getting longer and longer by the second. You've got a million things to do, you're anxious about the future, you're thinking about that weird exchange from yesterday, and there is that societal push to be busy and stretched thin.

Going against that and focusing on one thing at a time is actually very bold and actually very very effective, especially when we've been conditioned to go through life kind of like we're operating the landing strip at a busy airport, like anything that's around us, anything that's happening, like you'll

welcome in, come in, distract me, sew it down. Embrace single tasking by limiting how many tabs you have open on your desktop, limiting notifications, setting time blocks twenty minutes for each thing where you're fully concentrated, and then you can shift do the hardest and most mentally draining tasks first thing, and then move on to the smaller, bite sized things that you can take off later in the day as your attentional resource is kind of deplete. There

so many strategies for this. I know. The inclination is to be doing it all and you can just not all at once. And we're seeing this research time and time again that if what you're worried about is productivity, is getting everything done, hitting milestones, achieving goals, actually being intentional, being really attentive on one thing at once with your

time is a much more successful strategy. Staying in the present really allows you to tap into that secret pool, that secret like mental pool, mental lake, like everything that makes you a successful person, you know, purpose, creativity, kindness, attention awareness, self awareness. That all comes from living in the moment rather than feeling like everything is just this tangled web of before after during what's on my to do list? What could possibly go wrong? Over thinking, try

and just detangle that web. And I want to recommend this one final thing for you, which is actually a book, and it's called The Power of Now. My friend Kate, one of my best friends, Kate, who I talk about on the podcast a lot. She's fabulous, she's amazing. I love her. She actually brought me this book for my birthday a few years back, and it's very New Age and spiritual, which I never truly gravitate towards because I'm much more I think scientific personally, but I packed it

on a holiday and it was incredible. It deeply changed my personal philosophy. It made me think about my life differently. I think it's probably the inspiration for this episode. And although it's about thirty years old now, there is this saying that the author has that has always really stuck with me, and it's that only the present moment is real, and only the present moment is what matters. The past is the past. The future you don't know what it's going to be, so the only thing that you can

truly experience is what you're going through right now. And that just always kind of wakes me up a little bit. It always gives me something to think about. So if you want to expand your mindset when it comes to mindfulness, when it comes to the power of now, the power of the present, that book I would really really recommend. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you haven't made it this far, it's great to have you here at the very end as we're summarizing.

I just hope that you know, I think I said this at the end of every episode, but I hope that you just go away thinking about something, learning something, even if it was small. This is like a topic that I'm a subject. I guess that I'm really really feeling the importance of in my own life at the moment.

If you couldn't telp by how much I referenced my own anxiety and my own I think tendency to be rushing, to be filling my life with so many distractions that I never really have to feel the power of staying present is an important reminder for me. So yeah, I hope it's the same for you. And then, if you enjoyed this episode, make sure that you are following along on Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Leave a five star review only if you feel cool to do so. Otherwise, don't don't

even have to worry about it. And if there's someone that you think would also benefit from this episode, please feel free to share a link with them. You can also DM me on Instagram at that Psychology podcast and give us a follow if you want to see what we've got coming out soon, if you want to contribute to the discussion, if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, I would love to hear from you. And until Friday, stay safe, stay kind, be gentle with yourself, and we will talk very very soon.