Very often, bouncing between work, family life, social media, binge-watching our favorite show, and consuming ceaseless trending news, our lives can become a blur, and we start living on autopilot. When we try to remember what we did at the end of the week, the view backward is often obscured in a mist of brain fog. Inside that fog, we can get disconnected from our center, the place where we can hear our authentic inner-voice. Life shrinks and it feels as if we are just trying to survive, but what we are missing out on is thriving. 

How do we reconnect to our center, make mindful choices, and live with intention? Here are three daily mental micro-habits that you can do in your head, almost anytime and anywhere, that can help you to mentally transition from surviving to thriving. 

Mental Micro-Habit 1: Access Gratitude

 One powerful way to interrupt the autopilot of survival living is to access gratitude. Gratitude empowers us to shift from a state of scarcity consciousness to a state of abundance consciousness. There is a powerful wisdom teaching, ‘There are two types of people, flies, and bees. Flies look for garbage and bees look for honey nectar, and they always find what they are looking for.’ Scarcity consciousness is a state of mind in which we feel like there is never enough and there is always something wrong (like our life is filled with garbage). Abundance consciousness is that state of mind in which our life is overflowing with the sweet honey nectar of all the good things we have been given. Gratitude casts us in the story of being someone who has received goodness. Someone whose life is full, rather than empty. Gratitude is the key to accessing abundance consciousness. 

 

The first mental habit is the daily gratitude check-in.  Take a moment, and mentally check in with yourself and ask, ‘What are three things I’m grateful for from today?’. General things like health and family are great to give thanks for, but, for this exercise, try to think of three specific stories of things that happened to you that day that you are grateful for. When we sincerely ask ourselves, ‘What am I grateful for?’, and sincerely answer, we find the truth of how much goodness is in our lives. A truth that can become the foundation for thriving.

 

Mental Micro-Habit 2: Send blessings

This mental habit works with our imagination. Imagination is a powerful tool for mental wellness. Our bodies will often react to what we fantasize about in our imagination as if it were real. In this exercise, we are going to use our imagination to generate feelings of love and connection.

 

Imagine someone you need to send an email to. This exercise is going to work with that ability to imagine other people but instead of sending them emails, you are going to send them blessings. Think of a blessing as an expression of goodwill and life-affirming friendliness, kind of like a spiritual ‘hi-five’. You can also think of it as sending them positive energy.

So, close your eyes and imagine the person you just spoke to, it could be your co-worker, your life partner, the barista at the coffee shop you were just in. Now imagine your goodwill toward others is like a little spark of light. Now send this little spark of light in the direction of the person you just spoke to (like a mental blessing email). Then imagine the person you saw before that, and send them a blessing. Repeat this process of thinking of all the people you encountered throughout your day and sending them a blessing of goodwill and kindness.

Generally speaking, we all want to be happy and have good things in our life. Health, wealth, good friends, and family. These are all blessings. There is a deep spiritual teaching, ‘give that which you want the most’. Through sending blessings to others, you automatically put yourself in the position of someone who is filled with abundance and has the ability to give, and every time you send a blessing, you yourself are receiving more strength, life force, and centeredness.

Mental Micro-Habit 3: Learn from Life

Pharrell Williams, the recording artist who released the 2014 smash hit song ‘Happy’ said, “You learn from experiences, and I suppose that’s where I color most of my music, from experience.” When we are in survival mode, it can often feel like we are going through the motions of doing the same thing every day, which probably means we feel like we are not growing. If we feel like we are not growing, that probably means we feel like we are not learning anything. The key to growth is to keep learning from life.

Another mental habit to mine treasure from our day is to learn from our experiences. Once again, similar to accessing gratitude, take a moment to pause, reflect and ask yourself, ‘what is something I learned today?’. There is a famous quote from 20th-century anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, he said: “The scientist is not the person who gives the right answers, he is the one who asked the right questions.” If we are paying attention, life is teaching us all the time.

Something common to all three of these mental micro-habits is that they all put us at the center of our life story. Instead of life being a story that happens ‘to’ us, by choosing to focus on gratitude, blessing, and life lessons, we become the hero of our life story. A hero whose life is a journey filled with goodness, giving and learning.  Today is a great day to thrive.