Mindfulness or automation? Which one should you use?
“You should practice mindfulness.”
“You should automate your day so that you don’t have to think.”
Automation at meal time doesn’t always go well.
Erm…Ok. WTF?!?
Popular opinion, self help gurus, executive coaches and your Aunty Denise keep telling you to do one or the other.
Which one should you actually do? As always, this is a nuanced topic and requires the fundamental understanding that both mindfulness and automation are simply tools.
Both can benefit different people and different situations better, and the dose makes the poison.
Mindfulness
If you have a hard time regulating your food intake and tend to overeat at dinner time, maybe to a point of discomfort, then mindfulness is a useful tool to deploy. You would benefit from eating in an undistracted environment, from a plate, using cutlery, sitting at a table, and focusing on chewing your food. Eat slowly and sim to make your meal take 10-15 minutes to finish.
Automation
If you’re struggling to stay active or move enough throughout the day, then automation would be a useful tool to deploy. You could take a walking lunch, the stairs at the office, or pace your office whilst on a work call.
These are just methods and can be deployed more applicably in a given situation.
Don’t get caught up in only doing one or the other or marrying yourself to a single approach. Keep your options open and choose tools that allow you to achieve your desired outcome/goal with minimal friction or difficulty. That's not to say it will be easy, but there is no value in making things harder than they need to be.
Examples of automation practice;
If you are trying to start a flossing habit, add it immediately before or after you brush your teeth. This creates a trigger to do the new action after you’ve done the existing one.
If you want to eat more fruit, keep it easy to access and in plain sight. Reducing the steps needed to complete the task makes it more likely to be automatic. The opposite is also true for avoiding unwanted behaviors (make it harder to do).
If you’d like to save time writing emails, create and save a template to save you effort and time (precious resources) when sending emails.
Examples of mindfulness practice;
If you tend to overeat at lunch, remove distractions from your environment when eating. No TV, phones, work etc. Focus on a single task at once.
If you tend to work beyond reasonable hours, create boundaries/alarms in your calendar to break your focus and shift it to recovery/rest.
If you want to be more productive, work in sprints by setting time limits on your projects/work. This allows you to focus deeply on a single task knowing that there is respite built in.
These are lifestyle skills that contribute to our overall health and fitness. I work with 100’s of guys who struggle to build fitness and nutrition into their lives, not because they don't care, but because they have limited time and an almost exhausted bandwidth.
The training is often the simple part. It makes us feel better and it is a key contributor to our health, but we can’t make it happen if we have no time or bandwidth.
Strategically use mindfulness and automation to help create space and time for the most high impact health and fitness actions.
If you want advice on what to automate or be mindful of to improve your health and fitness, email me HERE with your Q’s.
