Creating peace: How to make room for mindfulness in everyday life

Perhaps it’s a sign of maturity (to put it nicely), I’m finding more value in creating peace in everyday life than in creating excitement. Moments of peace are rewarding, especially in a world that can often seem chaotic and disharmonious. Moments of peace aren’t simply quiet or boring, they are quiet, contemplative, content, and clear. They’re grounding, healing, and I have to admit, addicting.

I have a tendency to turn my attention inward, and this has taught me how to make room for mindfulness. I said “make room”, because mindfulness isn’t always accessible to us at a given moment, unless you’re an advanced meditator (or someone super chill?). For the rest of us, we can create an environment that makes it easier to be mindful, no matter what your location and situation are.

I like to think about it as being the calm in the eye of the storm. A point of stillness in a sea of activity.

Here’s how I’ve learned to create space for mindful moments.

Observe how you’re using time and attention

Your attention determines the experiences you have, and the experiences you have determine the life you live. Maura Thomas, Harvard Business Review

Time and attention are both limited resources. They’re both intangible, so easy to waste but so precious!

Our external world is full of activities and excitement, so some people may simply hop from activity to activity, never giving introspection or mindfulness a good try. If you haven’t paid attention to what’s going on in your head, you may not realize how you’re spending your time and attention. Chances are, you’re looking for distractions all the time.

It could be that you’re an extrovert and love being distracted and engaged by a million things, but it could also be that you’re feeling overwhelmed from constantly having your attention taken away. Either way, there’s much to gain when you’re mindful.

Pay attention to what activities you’re spending time on, and how you’re working on different tasks. Are you on your phone too much? Do you use distraction to escape problems? I definitely do. I’ve been using eBay to distract myself from my problems. Well, knowing what I’m doing wrong is the first step to correcting the behavior!

Likewise, paying attention to your thoughts and behavior is the first step to becoming more mindful. What you pay attention to, grows.

Reduce auditory distractions

It used to be just the radio, the TV, and music players. These days, we still have those things, but we also have YouTube videos, Podcasts, Twitch streamers, TikTok, and endless random videos on Facebook and Instagram. “Watch me! Listen to me!” they urged, hungry for our attention.

No offense to the content creators out there. I find them very entertaining myself. Listening to informative podcasts and watching entertaining videos is perfectly fine, the problem arises when it consumes most of a person’s waking hours. Sometimes I consume content so much I feel like I can’t hear my thoughts anymore, so it’s important to carve out some moments of silence.

When you’re doing something, be it having breakfast, folding the laundry, or doing nothing, resist the urge to play something in the background.

Instead, focus on the task at hand, or if you’re doing nothing, focus on the ambient sounds. The sound of traffic, of the floorboard creaking as a family member walk past, or the sound of your cat purring gently beside you.

Listen to the hum of the computer, and listen to your breath as you breathe in and out slowly.

When you’re eating, taste your food. Savor it. Observe how the taste and texture come together. If you’re putting laundry away, feel the texture of the clothes you’re folding, and see how the seams come together neatly when you fold them. On your commute, take 5 minutes to just take in the sights and sounds. Watch people’s faces, body language, or check out the scenery. Listen to the hum of the engine.

These are all little windows of opportunities to practice mindfulness. It’s pleasantly grounding. Amid the hustle and bustle, we can be a little oasis of calm.

Do one thing at a time

Why are auditory distractions not okay, but ambient sounds okay? Well, listening to anything that requires some mental processing causes little bits of your attention to be diverted away from whatever you’re doing. That’s why we like to listen to music when doing mindless activities because it takes our mind off the boredom.

This leads me to the next point. Do one thing at a time, or single-tasking.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the feeling of flitting from content to content, or task to task, never really focusing on a single thing. Sometimes I check my phone and switch between apps on autopilot. Or I’m writing and then I check my phone every now and then.

According to this Fast Company article, researchers found that just a 3-second interruption can double the mistakes you make. Single-tasking technically doesn’t create moments of peace, but it helps us to improve our focus, accuracy, and productivity. In a way, we’re practicing mindfulness when we focus on one task at a time.

In addition, we’re less frazzled and tired after doing a task, which makes more room for mindfulness! We also spend less time doing them. Win-win!

Delete distracting apps from your phone, or your life

Obviously, our smartphones are huge distractions in our lives. Some people are addicted to games, some are addicted to social media. (I wrote a whole blog post on the latter about our brains in our noisy world.)

You know how feeding duck bread is harmful to them because bread doesn’t provide them with nutrition, yet fills them up? Being addicted to social media or smartphone games is very similar. It hoards our attention and doesn’t provide us with benefits.

An okay compromise between keeping your distracting apps and not being too affected by them is to turn off notifications for your social media apps. You decide when and how much you want to check it. If that doesn’t work, there are apps you can download to limit your smartphone use. These days, many smartphones come with the function to keep track and control your usage of different apps too.

That said, I think you’re better off deleting the distracting app from your phone and accessing it only through your laptop. Want to go one step further? Delete your account for that particular offender.

Make room for mindfulness!

Learn to spend quality time with yourself

Now, we’re social creatures. It’s normal to want to be around people. In fact, it’s healthy. However, it’s equally important to be comfortable with solitude.

When we’re around friends and family, we tend to pay attention to how they’re feeling, or how our presence affects them. The tendency is to communicate, to make that person feel seen, and to keep the relationship close, which is fabulous! It’s fantastic to not be self-absorbed all the time.

However, if you’re around other people all the time, it diverts attention away from ourselves. Ultimately, peace is the most accessible when we’re alone and able to turn our attention inward or use it mindfully.

The key is to find a balance between people-time and me-time, since both are equally vital for our wellbeing, and don’t be afraid of time alone. If you’re afraid of solitude, you’re missing out on the best setting for mindful practice.

Set up a me-space

Having a me-space makes it easier to carve out quality me-time.

This isn’t always possible depending on your living arrangement, but it’s damn effective. Having shared spaces with people all my life, I have my way of carving out little sanctuaries even when I’m sharing a room with 2 other people.

The most important element in a me-space is, of course, you. Your me-space needs to scream your personality so you’ll feel comfortable in it. It can be a table, a corner of a room with a rug or your favorite armchair, or a chair by the window. You have to feel comfortable there. Preferably, people aren’t coming in and talking to you all the time.

Ideally, this space should be free of clutter, both visual and physical. You can decorate the space to make it yours, naturally. Just don’t overdo it. We’re creating a space that quiets you down, not a space that distracts you. This is a space you go to stop and ponder or just breathe and unwind.

Keep your environment tidy and clean

Ever watch Hoarders? I think we can all agree that it’ll be next to impossible to practice mindfulness in a hoarded house. A hoarded house is difficult to keep clean. It’s visually so cluttered it’ll be difficult to carve out moments of peace.

Most of us don’t live in hoarded houses, but we have our share of clutter. After more than a decade of minimalism, I can attest that the lesser clutter you have, the easier it’ll be to keep your environment tidy and clean. After all, the lesser things you have, the lesser things you need to take care of.

As best as you can, reduce clutter. They are visual distractions without which your space would be so much lighter. Then again, even with clutter, you can still keep your environment clean. Dust and vacuum regularly. Put things back where they belong. A tidy and clean space creates room for mindfulness.

Go outdoors and sky-gaze

This is one of my favorite things to do. The sky is the biggest space we have easy access to, it’s free, all we need to do is go outside and look upwards. Sky-gazing not only creates visual space but also reminds us how vast the world is.

Our problems seem so big and overwhelming indoors, but when you’re looking at the sky, it becomes smaller. You realize that the world has been around for billions of years, and whatever bothers you is transient – just a blip. Besides, the sky is oh-so-pretty. It’s always changing. Sometimes it’s a dark blue, sometimes it’s a bright blue, and sometimes it’s overcast. Other times, it’s stained with shades of red and yellow. Sometimes it’s decorated with fluffy clouds, other times it’s star-studded.

Sky-gaze, take a deep breath and take another one. Clear your mind. Make space for mindfulness. Let it wash over you.

Creating peace starts with mindfulness

Mindfulness is so important – maybe more important than ever – now that we’re in the age of information. If we’re not careful, we’ll find our attention constantly taken away by the neverending stream of work, duties, colorful pictures, entertaining videos, and clever statuses. Or we’ll find ourselves multi-tasking all day and end up too exhausted to appreciate the better parts of life.

Creating room for mindfulness doesn’t necessarily bring peace, but it makes it easier for us to be mindful, which can then bring about peace.

I hope you’ve found these points to be useful. Let me know what you think!