behavior Archives - Page 5 of 12

November 23, 2019November 1, 2019 by Pete Wiley

Unstructured Time—Setting Yourself Free

When was the last time you had some free time?

By free time, I don’t mean time to mow the lawn or a chance to finally clean the garage. I mean time that’s completely yours to do whatever you want—to do what you feel like doing in the moment.

Free time is such a foreign concept to most of us—we generally don’t make time for it and don’t even recognize it when we have it. Fitting in free time—unstructured time—can be extremely rewarding and can help us learn about ourselves and how we fit into our world.

Crisis. Man walking on the flooded street after Hurricane Sandy landfall

October 12, 2019February 17, 2019 by Pete Wiley

Handling yourself in a Crisis: Making a Plan

How do you handle yourself in a crisis?

Are you able to think logically and rationally? The ability to remain calm when responding to a crisis is not something that comes easily to many people. It can be quite hard to hold your emotions in check, especially when faced with an emergency that could significantly affect you or those you love.

Part of this ability is related to our level of self-control. Some of us are more prone to panic than others. There are those who, somehow, are able to keep their heads no matter what’s going on, while others fly off the handle in response to the slightest emergency. If you’re in the latter group, is there anything you can do about it? Are there ways to stay calm in a crisis?

September 28, 2019February 17, 2019 by Pete Wiley

Foresight: Seeing the Best Future

How would your life change if you could see into the future? You might be able to avoid disasters or take advantage of opportunities. You might be able to help people before they got into trouble.

But what’s the point of speculating—no one can see into the future, right? Or can we?

There have always been people who seem to have the power to accurately predict future events, whether it’s the stock market, the weather, or people’s reactions.

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Scent. Woman smelling flowers during a walk in the woods.

September 14, 2019February 17, 2019 by Pete Wiley

The Scent of Mindfulness—Follow your Nose

Smell is often the most undervalued sense.

For many of us, unless a scent is extremely strong, extremely pleasant, or extremely unpleasant, we don’t pay much attention to it. Even with our limited sense of smell (compared to many animals), there is a wide range of smells in the world that we can enjoy, that can provide information, and that can become another universe for us to explore.

There are many variants out there of the Five Senses Mindfulness exercise, in which the participant focuses on each of their five senses in turn. It’s a great exercise in mindfulness and a good starting point for being more mindful of our senses, but if we can expand this idea into our regular moment-to-moment mindfulness, it will result in whole new worlds opening up to us.

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Focus. Determined woman focused and in the moment.

June 22, 2019January 3, 2019 by Pete Wiley

One Thing at a Time: Overcoming Challenges to Focus

Pay attention to one thing at a time.

It’s easy to say, but there is so much we have to keep track of. It’s also hard to stay focused—to keep our minds on what we are doing without getting distracted or letting our minds wander.

It’s important to remember that we are only capable of doing one thing at a time. At any single moment, our brains can only think about one thing. We may be under the illusion that we’re able to work on several things at once, but what is really happening is that we’re focusing on one thing for a very short time then moving on to something else. We may even be cycling through several tasks, causing us to think we’re focusing on all of them at the same time, but the bottom line is we can only focus on one at any given moment.

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