With the crazy pace of life these days, it’s easy to go through an entire day in a bit of a fog. I bet you’ve had days go by without once checking how your mind, body and spirit feel.
Today’s blog is all about how to become more intentional about one important aspect of your day. This change can have a huge impact on your mood, energy and ultimately, the quality of your life.
What I’m talking about is modifying your TRANSITIONS. Simply put, transitions are when you move from one activity to another, like moving from work to driving home at the end of your workday.
Other examples of transitions are moving from working to a coffee break, from texting your friend to making dinner, or from putting your kids to bed to doing laundry.
Have you ever been stressed at work and then noticed how that carries over into being short-tempered at home?
Or notice that it takes you longer than you’d like to get back into the “work mode” after your lunch break?
These are transition issues and becoming more aware of how you shift from one activity to another is incredibly beneficial for several reasons:
1. Being aware of your transitions can make it less likely that stress from one activity spills over into another activity. This issue is often most noticeable when work stress is still on your mind during the transition back home.
2. Working on transitions helps you to be more intentional about how you want to feel and behave in any given situation. Most importantly, it helps you to be more present in what you’re doing, rather than still thinking about what you were doing before. Research shows that the more present you are throughout your day, the better the quality of your life.
3. Not dealing well with transitions is a huge energy drain. If you notice that as the day goes on, you feel more and more tired, you may be struggling with transitioning from activity to activity. By taking control of your transitions you’ll have a big energy boost.
So how do you improve your transitions?
First:
you want to become aware of your transitions and especially the problematic ones. Often, the transitions from home to work and work to home are not as smooth as they could be. Many people who struggle with sleep also need work on transitioning from their pre-bed activity to going to sleep.
I urge you to make a list of the top 3 to 5 problematic transitions in your day. To do this, think about when you have the most negative emotions or the most conflict with others. These experiences will give you some clues about where you might be able to transition in a more intentional way.
Second:
you want to have a simple method for letting go of the last activity. Whatever method you use, make sure you take at least 2 or 3 big deep breaths in order to help center yourself. While doing these breaths, you could say to yourself, “let go.” Another option is to visualize the last activity going into a box and imagine lightly closing the lid. Or you could take a moment to say to yourself, “this is done and I’m moving on.”
Feel free to get creative and use one of these methods or whatever releasing strategy you feel would be more effective for you.
Third:
now you set an intention for how you want the next activity to go. For example, if you are transitioning from work to the gym, you might set an intention to feel energized and fit during the workout and take a few seconds to visualize the workout going well. If you’re transitioning from watching TV to bed, it could be helpful to imagine yourself in a state of deep, restorative sleep.
That’s all you need to do. Do you feel that this is something that you’d be able to work on this week?
It’s meant to be a very simple 3-step process that you can use over and over in your day.
I’d love to know what your most problematic transition is and why. Comment below and remember, I read and personally respond to every one!