Bring meditation practices into your daily life and current circumstances (work, family) to deepen your understanding, rather than needing to drastically change your life or quit your job.
View emotions as passengers in the backseat of your car; acknowledge their presence without letting them drive, and avoid suppressing them by putting them in the trunk.
Tune into your body’s signals, as it constantly communicates to protect itself, helping you surf emotions rather than drowning in them.
Use meditation to create a pause between stimulus and response, allowing for a conscious choice that is least harmful or most constructive.
Take responsibility for your feelings and ‘report’ them (e.g., ‘I’m feeling tense’) without blaming others, which makes communication less of an attack and more likely to be heard.
Honor your feelings, including anger, without bypassing or glossing over them, but respond in a way that minimizes harm and extracts wisdom from the emotion.
When you feel your ‘blood boiling’ or ‘seeing red,’ use mindfulness to recognize this state and consciously pause or step back from the situation.
When calling for a pause in a heated discussion, explicitly state your commitment to revisit the topic later, ensuring the other person knows you’re not avoiding it.
When pausing a discussion, provide a timeframe for when you will return to it to avoid uncertainty and ensure the issue is addressed.
After an emotional reaction, reflect on how you acted, imagine doing it differently, and use this ‘post-mortem mindfulness’ to inform future responses.
Apply the RAIN acronym (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture/Nature) to become emotionally fluent and navigate overwhelming emotions.
If recognizing specific emotions is difficult, simplify by asking if your body feels ‘contracted or expanded’ or ’tense or spacious’ to start identifying emotional states.
Explore an ’emotion wheel’ or similar list to familiarize yourself with the nuanced expressions of various emotions, aiding in self-recognition over time.
Communicate from a place of emotional understanding, expressing the lessons learned from an emotion after it has passed, rather than reacting directly from the emotion itself.
Address the body’s signals through mindfulness and communication to prevent emotional issues from accumulating as physical tension or ‘body armor’.
When experiencing imposter syndrome, drop into your body to feel physical sensations (e.g., chest tightness) to create distance from the thoughts and avoid buying into them.
When imposter syndrome strikes, borrow the wisdom or confidence of those who believe in you, trusting their perception until you can see it yourself.
When stuck in your head with imposter syndrome, consciously deepen your breath to drop into your body and become more present.
Cultivate tolerance for discomfort through meditation practice, which allows you to lean into uncomfortable situations (like feedback) and see them as opportunities for growth.
Be present with discomfort in challenging situations to extract lessons that can inform future actions, such as preparing differently or integrating feedback.
When dealing with challenging people, aim to tolerate and accept them, wishing them well from afar, rather than forcing an open heart.
When dealing with challenging people, set a low bar for yourself, aiming simply to ’not hate them’ in the moment, which allows for self-kindness and temporary neutrality.
To prevent causing harm, avoid spending too much time in the realm of hate, as it can lead to dehumanizing people.
Use loving-kindness practice to humanize challenging people by imagining them as a young child or considering their own life difficulties.
Cultivate goodwill by reciting phrases like ‘May I be happy and healthy,’ starting with easy people (benefactor, loved one), then neutral people, and finally challenging individuals.
Begin loving-kindness practice with easy targets like pets or children to get the ‘juices flowing’ before including yourself or more challenging people.
If self-kindness is difficult, imagine a loved one or pet sending you loving-kindness to help soften and prime your heart.
Cultivate ‘sympathetic joy’ (mudita) for others’ good fortune, as this expands the amount of joy you can experience, rather than limiting it through jealousy or envy.
When experiencing mixed emotions (e.g., joy for others’ success alongside personal sadness or envy), embrace the complexity and avoid denying or suppressing your feelings.
Practice mudita (sympathetic joy) by bringing someone’s good fortune to mind and wishing them more, starting with loved ones, then neutral, and eventually challenging people.
To practice mudita for difficult people, recall a time you felt joyful, imagine them feeling that joy, and then wish them continued happiness, simplifying the practice.
Set a low bar for mudita, wishing others well from afar, while simultaneously acknowledging and honoring any personal feelings of envy, sadness, or grief.
Avoid ‘premature sympathetic joy’ by fully honoring the entire spectrum of complicated feelings you experience in a given moment, rather than forcing joy.
Set up email auto-replies to communicate availability (e.g., Monday-Friday) and delete non-essential apps from your phone to create clear work-life boundaries.
When feeling pressure to respond immediately, pause to reflect and question if the perceived urgency is truly warranted or self-created.
Tune into moments of peacefulness and spaciousness experienced when stepping away from devices, using these pleasant feelings to reinforce your choice to set boundaries.
Continuously apply mindfulness to maintain boundaries, recognizing that they are a ‘slippery slope’ and require ongoing attention, not just a one-time setup.
While engaging with technology (e.g., scrolling), pause to tune into your body, checking your breath and internal landscape, then consciously decide if you want to continue or stop.
Remove default settings like autoplay for next episodes and algorithm-based suggestions on streaming platforms to make consumption a conscious choice rather than passive engagement.
After a single episode or unit of content, check in with yourself to consciously decide if you want to continue, allowing for intentional self-soothing or disengagement.
Explore and use apps or browser extensions (like ‘distract free YouTube’) and resources like the Center for Humane Technology to foster a more wholesome relationship with technology.
Use meditation to connect with and address uncomfortable situations in your daily life, rather than treating it as a means to escape from them.
Download the 10% Happier app to join the free 7-day Work-Life Challenge, which offers videos and guided meditations to practice what you’ve learned.
Download the 10% with Dan Harris app to access a library of guided meditations, weekly live Zoom community sessions, and ad-free podcast episodes.