It’s no doubt it’s important to be well rested. And I’m not talking about just resting… but long, good, restful sleep where you wake refreshed and feeling good.

It’s ok to work hard and stay up sometimes to get things done, but if you stay up often – hours after you ‘normally’ go to sleep, you’ll wreck havoc on your health and well being.

If you don’t sleep solidly for 8 hours, you’ll be more receptive to illnesses of all types. You body won’t function as well and it won’t process foods, toxins and more as well as it could if we’ll rested.

Here’s the kicker. If you doubt that you need regular sleep to feel good and perform at your best, do this experiment.

Stay up for a full week 5 hours past your regular bed time… if you are daring, stay up 8 or more hours past this time. Only sleep for a few hours or even six hours.

See how you function the next day. See if you’ll be alert. See if you’ll be more forgetful. See if you’ll be more moody. See if you’ll move towards your goals as well with such low energy and mental rest.

Hard isn’t it? You bet! Your mind and full body require sleep just like it requires food and air. It simply can’t do as good of a job without it.

To realize more of your dreams and potential, make sure you are well rested and get regular sleep. A good way to do this is to set a regular sleep and wake time.

Make sure your in bed at the same time nightly.

If you can’t do this, then you need to look at your lifestyle and see what you can modify to make it happen. It’s not worth it to not be well rested and have the risks of running around like that.

You’re immune system will suffer, you can get ill easier, faster, and keep it longer if you let your body go without sleep.

How will mindfulness and acceptance help you achieve your goals? Here’s an analogy of how:

Imagine your going on a journey. You have short term objectives and a long term goal too.

Along this journey, you have many challenges that come up. Many internal and many external. As we go towards any goal, that seems to be the case. However…

Imagine that you took all your thoughts literally. And your thoughts were a thing that was trying to get you to not risk. But play it safe so you can live. So the thoughts are more of a wussy. But they can scream and snort and really sound convincing. Worry after worry after worry. If you listen to it and buy into it, that’s what it wants, you might then ‘play it safe’.

So along the journey, this thought process get’s going with fearful images, thoughts and what if’s. Imagining the worst possible outcomes. Sometimes, you get wrapped up in it and buy into it. Then you stop in your tracks. You do either 1 of two things at first. 1) you know your goal, so you try to fight against the thinking with ‘evidence’ or ‘reality’ or ‘positive thinking’ trying how to cure anxiety and panic attacks. This works a little bit, but your being sidetracked and your constantly vigilant to the thoughts so you can fight them. This takes lot’s of energy and time – more than even the journey itself.

In short, your fighting a war in your head.

The second possibility is, you buy into your thinking and give up on your goal. You stop the journey and head home where it’s safe. However, this leads to a limited time, quiet desperation, and no sense of personal mastery of fulfillment. Much worse even than fighting a war in your head.

But there is a third possibility. An option that will free you from the war in your head and also will allow you to move forward in your valued direction towards your goals and be fully alive. Feeling all the emotions, having all the bodily sensations, having all the thoughts, and accepting them and seeing them but not buying into them. You can move forward in your life and towards your goals.

Mindfulness Freedom

This third options is called mindfulness and acceptance. It works by training your mind to see your thoughts and accept that they are there while being fully present in the here and now, without buying into your thoughts. It’s the difference of looking at your thoughts or looking from your thoughts. When you learn to not take your thoughts seriously, but it’s just something the mind does, you are free. You literally put down the guns of war and exit the way. Liking being able to watch from a safe distance. You no longer need to fight. You are free.

Free to act on your valued goals without getting sidetracked by getting wrapped up in your thinking. Free to have all your internal experiences and just accept it and let it be. Free to choose your values and goals and move forward and not avoid life anymore. That means all of life and all of your experiences. You are fully alive.

This is the gift of mindfulness done correctly. You are free to engage in your life without fighting in a war and without giving up on your goals or avoiding feelings and thoughts along the way. You see it, and you move forward. It’s real zen.

So many people today are trying to avoid anxiety, in this article, I’ll show you why that’s the worst thing you can do and why facing your anxiety is the way to go. That’s a fair strategy on the surface, as the mind is constantly trying to problem solve. However, it’s focus is mainly going to create more intense anxiety. 

Lack of acceptance of any emotion is likely to make it stronger and your experience far worse. When it comes to anxiety this is for sure a truth.

Let me paint a picture to give you an example. Imagine you have gripping chest pains. You then think, ‘I’m having a heart attack’. You then feel more concerned. Your body is surged with the fight or flight substance called adrenaline. Now your body is having more symptoms from this surge of hormone and you hands are tingling, your breath is shorter, faster. You feel even more pressure and tightness in your chest. You have psychosomatic body symptoms. That’s a fancy word for your mind is creating bodily symptoms for you. Here’s the kicker…

Acceptance with Anxiety is the way to cure

All of these uncomfortable symptoms you are experiencing, as well as the anxiety, are all 100% harmless, safe, and non-dangerous in any way. However, you are convinced that these symptoms and your danger thoughts relating them are true. It only intensifies until you feel compelling urges to call the ambulance and or go to the emergency room at the hospital due to fear that your dying of a heart attack.

You go, and they say, nothing is wrong with you. Your heart is beating fast, your feeling pains, but your heart is fine. They give you pills that cover the symptoms and send you on your way. All these pills do is help you ‘avoid’ these symptoms more and more. Which keeps the process going and you trapped in your own fear. That is until you break out! I’ll show you how…

Now let’s imagine that instead of this person spending the reminder of their life limited in their own mind and life by their faulty thinking and acting and lack of acceptance, we expose this person to their feared symptoms continually until they accept them and truly experimentally see and learn it’s harmless.

As we expose this person, no doubt, a surge of anxiety will happen. Catastrophic thinking that comes from every angle. Urges to call the ambulance. More psychosomatic sensations then they’ve experienced before. However, we have this person really stay with it. We teach this person to really accept all their thoughts, feelings, and body sensations as well as paying attention to the here and now.

This person exposes themselves over and over to this by directly approaching it head on with the idea, I’ll let it all happen no matter what even if I die. They do. What happens?

This person would discover that the symptoms do not kill them. The thoughts are just there. The emotions crest, are very uncomfortable, then go. Not dead. If this person gets really really committed to acceptance and exposure. They’d do it more aggressively trying to get the very worst feelings and sensations to happen over and over and over again in rapid succession and they’d hold the real key how to cure anxiety.

It would be frightening to this person no doubt. But a calm sense of accomplishment and peace will go over them as soon as they get that they can accept it, not take their thoughts, body sensations and feelings so seriously but just observe it. They’d totally overcome their fear. Forever. Yes, forever. They’d be free in their world to do so much more with their lives. All because of acceptance. And part of acceptance is being willing to expose yourself to the things you try to avoid. Living this way will free up your life to be ran by ‘you’, not your emotions and thoughts.

Radical acceptance and exposure to experience in all it’s forms is required for the best, most healthy life. Your journey awaits. Begin today with radical acceptance and you’ll forever be better off in your life.

Mindfulness is power. It gives you the opportunity to see the world for what is really happening. Your experience in the moment. Not distorted by the content of your thoughts, imagination or perceptions. But to be aware of the now without judgement. Taking everything in for what it is.

Why does this help you? You get distance from your thoughts. Most people get so wrapped up in their thinking that it colors their reality. Similar to wearing rose colored glassed, or a great pair of sunglasses called BluBlockers. When we think up positive thoughts we color our experience and we don’t see things for what they really are.

How does that hurt you? If you are in a bad relationship for example. You might try to be positive or optimistic about everything, thus not seeing reality and coloring your real event with positive mental content  and you’d make many bad decisions for yourself. In this case, you’d not see the clear signs and you’d keep yourself in a unhealthy relationship.

When you don’t separate the content of your mind to actual reality and learn to observe it, you are not in awareness nor mindfulness, and often you aren’t accepting reality for what it really is, but are practicing a self-limiting and destructive avoidance strategy. Trying to avoid something now that only leads to more pain latter on.

So what is the solution? Mindfulness. When you learn to be mindful of your thinking, emotions, body, sights, sounds, the world around you. To really be present. To see your thoughts pass but not get caught up in them. Not seeing the world from them, but rather looking at them. We have a new perspective. We are here in the present. Right now. We can be flexible in our mental mind and this frees us to make better decisions not based on false content.

Mindfulness Meditation

When we become mindful our lives change in many ways.

How to you learn to be mindful? I know it can seem difficult especially if you’ve lived most of your life in your head. If you walk down the street really not here now, but in your thoughts and worries. If you read the words on this page, but your mind is carrying you away somewhere else. But here’s the good news, you can learn this no matter what. Mindfulness is like a muscle and it will get stronger with regular practice. Soon it can be your new enhanced better way of life that will benefit all areas of your life and allow you to make clearer decisions based on reality too. The results of that are life changing. People from all walks of life and issues have gotten amazing results. I read about people learning to overcome anxiety issues and even serious conditions like how to cure schizophrenia. That’s pretty outstanding.

The fact is, most people today are often wrapped up in their thinking. So you’re not alone. It’s probably one of the main causes of human suffering and pain. Mindfulness is about ‘looking at’, or observing your experiences and allowing them to fully be.

Instead of trying to get rid of thoughts and feelings, you realize, that they will always exist and come and go as that’s the nature of the mind. When we fight our thought and feelings, we are getting wrapped up in our mental content again and not really ‘here’, in the present moment.

What’s worse, is that this fixation on getting rid of the thinking and feelings only makes them more intense! So it doesn’t work. When you learn to just be mindful of your experiences in an observational way and accept them, truly all of them, they’ll have the room to come and go and you’ll be fully alive as a person able to experience all your human experiences.

The nature of the mind is to be a content machine. It will always come up with random thoughts, memories, worries, and often engage in problem solving. Problem solving is great and should be used when achieving goals or goal setting. We when we learn to look at our thinking and not get wrapped up in the content machines content, we’re free to act in a way that will better our lives and give us freedom to enjoy higher life satisfaction now and later.

Most people are afraid to allow and accept all their internal experiences, but this is paradoxically the high road to full human life satisfaction.