The multiverse, or what Shakespeare referred to as “the whirligig of time,” can be overwhelming. It’s the feeling of not being able to keep up, of life passing you by, of everything, everywhere all at once. Of drowning in a sea of content, but not able to deeply connect to anything. Languishing instead of relishing.
But the new year brings with it an invitation to live your life differently. To shape the pace in a way that rekindles your spark, rather than snuffing it. Try monotasking (doing one thing at a time) in favor of multitasking. Simplify. Slow down. Replace the fear of missing out with the welcoming of missing out.
Here are five vital ways to practice kindness, regain equilibrium, connect to yourself and others and stop efforting so much.
5 Ways to Be Kind to Yourself
Savor solitude
Spend more time alone, in your own company. Although our culture often views time alone as a negative experience, in moderate amounts the feeling of being alone can be deeply nourishing. Being in other people’s company constantly is draining; time alone lets you unwind and tend to your inner life.
In the right balance, many psychologists say, solitude can benefit your social relationships, improve your creativity and confidence, and help you regulate your emotions so that you can better deal with adverse situations. Time spent alone is intrinsically calming and decompressing. It gives you time to recharge and engage more skillfully with others.
Try: Aim to spend an hour alone each day, going for a walk, reading in a room you have to yourself or getting up early and meditating.
Abandon the productivity mindset
Recognize how you have become a slave to the notion of productivity, and how easily unscheduled blocks of time get colonized by notions of efficiency. Question the need to be productive, is what I’m saying. Other cultures have much more relaxed time frames, the pace of life is slower, and spontaneous social interactions are given much more generous time slots.
Being constantly busy is linked to burnout, anxiety disorders and all manners of stress. Weirdly, taking the time to do nothing, to daydream, to rest perchance to nap, can be counterintuitively productive. Research on daydreaming in particular found that it has been linked to creativity, improved overall well-being and even increased pain tolerance.
Try: Set aside a half an hour a day, without a screen or a book or any kind of task, and just look out your window and see what inspiration comes. You can do this accompanied by a glass of coffee, tea or your drink of choice.
Take in the good
The human brain is wired to fixate on the bad. For instance, you’ll remember criticism more readily than praise after a speaking gig; a vacation’s worst moment will sear itself into memory while all the fun you had will become a faint blip.
Rick Hanson, bio tk, has made it his life’s work to share the insight he’s gleaned from prioritizing what he calls “consciously focusing on the positive” as the best antidote for negativity bias; it puts “bad” moments into a more realistic perspective by accentuating the good. Hanson has several different techniques for taking in the good, all in the name of self-directed neuroplasticity, another way of saying changing your thought patterns.
Try: One of my favorite of Hanson’s practices is called “filling the hole in your heart.” Hanson says, “When you are having a good experience today – let’s say you are feeling cared about or appreciated – imagine that it is sinking down into old places of lack or pain (like being neglected or rejected), and gradually soothing them, and giving them what they need.”
Turn regret into a silver lining
One of the golden rules of therapy is what you resist, persists. So face your regrets head on—not to self-flagellate, but to learn from the mistakes and put the correction into action. Researchers found that when people can extract a silver lining from their regret, they can harness the positive and think more clearly about how to improve.
To regret is to know that you can do better. Kindness and sorrow live side by side, as the poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes in her poem “Kindness”:
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Sorrow and regret touch everything. No one is immune. It’s our birthright and our humanity, this reckoning with loss and grief. To acknowledge regret is to admit fallibility. But when regret is reckoned with a mature lens, it can help put us into a better relationship with the future. As the poet David Whyte says, “fully experienced, regret turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past.”
Try: Examine a particular regret you might have about a past relationship and see how you can put what you learned from that regret into play in a current relationship.
Have better conversations
Studies have shown that prosocial behavior, friendly, positive acts of kindness, can help lower people’s daily stress levels, and that texting or calling a friend, or even chatting with a neighbor, means more that you might realize. Be open to having conversations with people you meet in spontaneous encounters: at the dog park, the grocery store, the coffee shop.
Shine your attention on the person you are talking with and try to go deeper than small talk. If a story piques your interest, you can respond with, tell me a little more about that. To listen is a generous act; some would call it an act of love. Extending that kind of kindness can make you feel better about yourself.
David Brooks’ book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen is basically well-crafted lessons in kindness. This excerpt from the book gets to the heart of why skillful conversations matter:
If you shine your attention on me, I blossom. It’s a very generous act to make someone feel seen. In writing the book, I asked so many people, “Tell me about a time you felt seen,” and with glowing eyes, they described these magic moments in their lives where someone just got them.
There’s a phrase, “The way you know people is your way of being in the world.” The kind of attention you shine on people becomes who you are. If you see the world with critical eyes, you’ll see flaws in people. If you see the world with generous eyes, you’ll see people in the struggle doing the best they can.
Through the shared kindness of genuine conversation, you get a twofer: the chance to connect to someone else, and the chance to connect to the depths of your own heart. That’s what I would call the ultimate win-win.
Try: Brooks suggests instead of asking people, What do you think about that?, ask them, How did you come to believe that? This question expands the field of the conversation beyond logic. It gets the person “talking about the people and experiences that shaped their values,” says Brooks. The conversation will be more revealing and personal when it takes place through the medium of sharing stories rather than defending an argument with talking points.
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