Here's to forming more good habits!

I decided to take advantage of a service offered through my work: Mindwell-U’s “30-Day Mindfulness Challenge.” It is based on the idea of “Tak[ing] 5” (details here): https://www.mindwellu.com/take-5 and each day I need to watch a short video and do mini-reflections (in addition to taking 5 at least once… ideally 5 times or more). I participated in the challenge from March 3 to April 1, 2020.

​By the end of the 30 days, I would’ve taken 5 approximately 90 times (roughly 3 times a day). I started the 30-day mindfulness challenge at a very unique time (when COVID-19 turned into a global pandemic), and so my conclusion as to whether the mindfulness challenge worked is somewhat wishy-washy: I’m feeling uneasy overall, but I might be feeling way worse if I didn’t do the mindfulness exercises every day.

Action items for the future (which may or may not evolve into my next DK30, we’ll see):

1. I need to decide on what cues to use to Take 5 and stick to it, ideally in different parts of the day (so far I succeeded in taking 5 when: I’m stressed out, noticing the weather (e.g. oh it’s sunny), before I drink my morning cup of coffee, before I go to bed).
2. Expanding on Day[9]'s kittens and ninja-stars idea (petting the kittens)*: I decided to spend more time amplifying the small good things like “I harvested a lot of home-grown potatoes from the back yard yesterday!” (because all kittens deserve to be petted), and I may attempt to make this more systematic.
3. Expanding on Day[9]'s kittens and ninja-stars idea (dodging the ninja-stars)*: To me, Take 5 is a way to patch up the wound caused by a ninja star (e.g. get stressed --> Take 5 --> feels less stressed. Yay). Ideally, I wouldn’t want to get stressed in the first place. So what causes the bad feelings? The next step is to find what causes me to feel uneasy and to stop the ones that I have control over (and prevent the fight-or-flight response from kicking in when the inevitable ninja-stars come flying out of nowhere).

*If you are not familiar with kittens and ninja-stars, check out the illustration I made for it or even better yet - check out the original source.

Some reflections on the 30-Day Mindfulness Challenge at large:

1. I suspect I wasn't in their target demographic (i.e. I wasn't the targeted audience) in the sense that
   a) it felt like I was getting a lot of sales pitches / buy-in soliciting (“why you should do this” in different words over and over again, although I’m already buying into the idea), and
   b) I wanted more academic rigor (what can I say - I did a Bachelor’s in cognitive science-y stuff and I love brains).
2. And since I wasn't in their target demographic, the messaging used in the videos sounded prescriptive and I think that contributes to the dryness and the sales-y vibes I mentioned earlier. I was craving for anecdotes - like how did it give someone hope?
3. I liked how the Mindfulness Challenge encourages the participant to customize the Take 5 practice to make it easier to integrate into everyday life. So I made my own interpretation of the Take 5 infographic as a reminder to keep taking 5: