Ep #3: 4 Essential Habits to Reducing Stress: Meditation

Stress and anxiety are on the rise, and it's no surprise in an overstimulated, media
-addicted, immediate gratification -demanding world, our brains are on overload,
and the demands on our time are relentless. For many of us, all that overthinking
and mental chatter is wreaking havoc on our nervous systems. I believe that the
secret to developing a greater sense of calm in your life is to manage your mind
and body with good daily habits. So this is part three of a four-part series where
I talk about my go-to daily habits that help me manage my stress, my health,
and my overthinking brain. Let's get started. Hey there, you are listening to the
Overthinkers Guide to Joy. This is a podcast for overthinkers, overachievers,
perfectionists, type A, stressed out, anxious people who just want to calm down and
feel better. I'm your host, certified life coach Jackie de Crinis.
Hey there and welcome back. This is part three of my home series,
the four essential daily habits that you need to reduce your stress and relax your
mind to feel better and more productive. So hopefully you've heard the first two
segments, the H and the O of the home series, hydrate and observe your levels,
where I talked about the import of water, what we eat and how we sleep as some of
the fundamentals on your daily checklist. Today we're going to dive in to one of my
favorite ones, meditation. So meditation is an interesting one. I find it incredibly
polarizing for many of my clients. I have a handful of clients who come to me and
they do actually have a daily meditation practice and for the most part most of
them don't. And here's my favorite things that people say when I say, Hey, would
you be open to starting a daily meditation practice? This is what I get back.
Oh, I tried it, I don't like it. Or, mm, it doesn't work for me.
No, I can't sit still. You know, I've tried it, but I just can't get comfortable.
Here's a couple of my other favorites. I have no time.
So, meditators, long -time meditators, their response to "I have no time" is,
"If you're too busy to meditate for 20 minutes, then you probably need an hour." I
love that one. Okay, another one I hear all the time, "I have no privacy. I have
children, my dog barks, my husband's always home, whatever." Okay,
you don't need privacy to meditate. You need to save space, but you don't actually
need privacy. We're gonna get into that later. Some people will say to me, I'm just
not into it. You know, I'm not religious in that way. (laughs) Well,
here's the good news. Meditation, although part of many religions, has absolutely
nothing to do with religion. Meditation is a practice that is completely agnostic.
It doesn't involve higher power. It doesn't involve God. It doesn't involve a
particular deity. It's just meditation. That's it.
It's sitting still and being comfortable or learning to be comfortable in the
practice of stillness.
That's another one I love. Oh, I'm not good at it. Like there's a grading curve.
Oh, they're a really good meditator. Oh, they're excellent at meditating. Oh, I'm
just bad at it. I failed. There is no right or wrong way to meditate.
That's actually the first rule of meditation. You get to meditate however you want.
Now, are there some guidelines? percent. Is there some tricks? Absolutely.
But there's actually no right or wrong way. So you can't fail.
Another one I hear a lot is, "I get so anxious when I close my eyes. It actually
makes my anxiety worse to close my eyes." That's a good sign you need to meditate.
Another one is, "People like me can't meditate." So do you know whose direct quote
that is?
Me, that's what I said for all the years that people told me you should really
learn to meditate. I was like, yeah, people like me can't meditate. So what did I
mean by that? I met people with overactive brains, people who overthink.
Hello, welcome to this podcast. People who are Anxious, people who are nervous,
people who have too much to do, people who have big jobs, people who can't quiet
their minds. Yeah, people like me can't meditate.
Here's the truth. People like me need to meditate.
People like you need to meditate. So the more you think people like me can't
meditate, the more likely it is that you are the one who needs to meditate.
Another one I get is I don't have a meditation cushion. I don't have a comfortable
chair. I always fall asleep when I meditate. People say to me,
well, it's easy for you to meditate because you live in paradise. It's like one of
my favorites because I live in Hawaii. I should be able to meditate as opposed to
New York City or Los Angeles where I was born and raised or Anywhere in the world
That's a fallacy that you need to live in someplace. That's quiet or rural or Zen
or Other people meditate and so therefore you can have permission to meditate You
don't need a waterfall and you don't need to live in paradise to meditate.
What do you need to meditate? Well, you need to give yourself permission to sit
quietly for five minutes a day. Now, ideally, meditation is optimal at closer to 20
minutes a day. And if you're trained in transcendental meditation, which I was,
that's 20 minutes a day with just a silent mantra in your head, 20 minutes a day,
twice a day. That takes some skill and some teaching to work up to that.
I'm not suggesting that everybody learned transcendental meditation, although I do
think it's the granddaddy of all of them. There's lots of forms of meditation.
There's guided meditation, there's yoga meditation, chakra meditation, qigong meditation,
sound bath meditation. You can do meditation in a group. You can do Meditation by
yourself. You can do meditation in the morning. You can do it at night You can do
it before you go to sleep. You can do it in a closet at work. You can do it in
the bathroom It doesn't matter The only real requirements of meditation is that you
feel like you're in a safe place So I know people who meditate on the beach and
meditate in a park I know people who meditate in their cars, but you don't even
need the perfect surroundings all you need is a chair or a bed or a sofa or a
cushion or the ground or wherever you'll be comfortable meditation does not require a
perfect container it simply requires discipline and scheduling and everybody has five
minutes if you have five minutes
five minutes to watch TV, or you have five minutes to play on your phone, or if
you have five minutes to play a video game, or if you have five minutes to do
anything, you have five minutes to meditate. And here's the thing,
meditation is the gift that keeps on giving. Because once you make it a habit,
just like brushing your teeth, taking a shower, making your bed, any of those daily
habits that make us feel good and organized and like we've accomplished something,
meditation becomes that too. So here are some of the benefits of meditation.
Meditation actually calms your mind down and it calms your body down.
It has been scientifically proven that it can promote healing. It can aid in
digestion. It can make you more creative. It actually creates a sense of time,
a greater control over your schedule. Because by taking time to pause and let your
mind rest, and I'm talking about something different than resting while watching
Netflix or resting while reading a book, both fine or resting while you're sleep.
Meditation is conscious. Now, that's not to mean you guide the thoughts,
but meditation is a conscious pause in your day so that you can either set an
intention, whether that's healing, courage, or greater happiness or calmness,
by setting an intention and by sitting quietly, guided or otherwise,
music or otherwise, your body hears that message in a different way. It's like
programming or reprogramming your mind and body to do what you want,
instead of always being reactive to what you think you need or what you need to do
for others.
So, my practice is I meditate every morning.
Now people ask me, "Do you meditate the second you roll out of bed or do you go
get a cup of coffee or tea first, do you take a shower first, do you exercise
first? What's your process?" My process is I get out of bed, I brush my teeth, I
go to the bathroom, I get my dog, I let him out to go to the bathroom, I feed
him so he and whine at me, and then we go meditate. And that's what I do every
morning. Now, I have a barking dog. That can be an issue,
because it's hard to be zen and it's hard to be quiet and it's hard to get in
deep. If your dog loves to protect you from the birds that live outside,
or the dog he hears a mile away or this stray cat that might have like ran by
the window and my dog has a bark kind of like a car alarm. So it sends a chill
up your spine when he starts barking. And I could have made this a circumstance
that prevented me from learning to have a meditation practice. I could have said,
"Oh, can't meditate because I have a barking dog. And if I lock him out of my
room, he'll cry, so that's no good. And if I let him sit with me,
I don't know if nature is going to cause him to bark. Here's the thing.
Learning to meditate through a barking dog is part of the practice of meditation.
You can't always control the lawnmower, the leaf blower, the barking dog,
the whining cat, But you can control your mind and how you react to it So my dog
and I have this ritual where we sit on a chair together like a Shays lounge and
He curls up in a blanket with me and we meditate every day from anywhere from five
to twenty minutes Now I have the Peloton bike So I have the benefit of using their
app and on their app. They have amazing guided meditations. But I've also used
Headspace, which is also an app, Insight Timer, the Calm app. I've Googled
meditations, guided meditations on YouTube. I have my own guided meditations on a
YouTube channel. You can find that by my name, Jackie de Crinis. I've recorded guided
meditations for my previous podcast, Joy Hunting, which you can find here on this
podcast in some of my earlier episodes, it doesn't matter where you find your
meditation or how you like to meditate. Just find one that speaks to you and start
with five minutes. And if your dog barks or your kids knock on the door or your
husband interrupts or your roommate asks you where's the coffee or whatever's going
on for you, It's okay You can hold up your hand saying just like I'm meditating
you could put a sign on your door saying I'm meditating You can ignore them for
the five minutes and finish meditating
But just practice so I had a meditation teacher a transcendental meditation teacher
and One of her clients Was a roadie for rock concerts.
He did like major rock concerts. And he worked very long hours.
He was always around a million people. He moved heavy equipment. He got very little
sleep. And he needed to learn to meditate. And what he was able to do was in the
middle of the concert, as long as he wasn't on call, right? Moving speakers and
tightening microphones and plugging in amps and all the things that roadies do, he
was free for the length of the concert. So he would sometimes go backstage or even
under the stage and with the music blaring and with the crowd screaming,
he was still able to meditate 20 minutes at a time. So that really stuck with me
when my teacher taught me that, and when my dog is barking, or when the cat is
crying, or when the leaf blower is going, I always picture that roadie doing his
job, getting his break during the concert, and sitting under that stage listening to
blaring rock and roll, and still finding 20 minutes to close his eyes and go
inwards to get his meditation. And if he could do that, I could certainly meditate
during my little 11 pound dog barking. So here's the thing.
I really believe meditation is the secret sauce, kind of the final frontier. And I
say this because as you know, if you've listened to any of my prior episodes, you
know that I used to live a very big, very noisy, very stressful life. I had a
corporate job, I had three children, and a husband, and a home, and a dog, and a
cat, and a hamster, and all the things. All the things that required pulling me in
a million directions. And I worked a long day, and I worked every night, and I
worked six days a week. And I felt like I never could catch my breath.
I was always serving other people. I always had so many demands on my time.
And it was actually a colleague of mine who was going through a rough patch who
found transcendental meditation and said, "You gotta do it." And I was like, "I
don't need it. I don't have time." All the things I listed at the beginning of
this podcast. And I noticed a really profound change in him.
And he wasn't like woo woo zen. He's like a guy who follows the stock market 24
seven. He's a corporate cog. He's brilliant. He's very matter of fact.
There's nothing woo about him. He's not lighting candles. He's not religious. He's
not any of these things. He doesn't believe in like chakra realignment. By the way,
I love most of those things. He was a straight shooter and buttoned down all the
way. And he found meditation, and I saw the transformation. I saw the way he
processed his own aggravation and his own frustration and his overworked schedule
'cause we were all in the same business. We all worked for the same company. And I
was like, oh, there is something to that. So when I moved back to Hawaii and
retired from my job in Hollywood, sorry, long story short, but I lived in Hawaii, I
telecommuted, then I moved back to LA, and then I retired from television and came
back to Hawaii. So I'm living in Hawaii. I've got on paper this life in paradise.
I no longer have my big corporate job. Two of my kids were full grown. I was only
raising the one. My husband and I live in a lovely home and all was great. And my
mind was racing again. I was a victim of my own overthinking and this goes back to
no matter where you go There you are right or like I like to say I came with me
to paradise and ruined it so I technically had unplugged from virtually all of my
circumstances that were creating Incredible stress mind and body and I was still
overthinking and I was still feeling anxiety and I was still feeling stressed and I
was like oh I need to learn to meditate and that's when I hired my transcendental
meditation coach and learned how to properly meditate and then after three years of
that I found guided meditations and I fell in love with those and just simply
changed my practice not my commitment but my practice to daily guided meditations and
I loved them which is what inspired me to record my own and I do them every
single day a minimum of once a day sometimes twice a day and sometimes five minutes
and sometimes 10 minutes and sometimes 20 minutes but I will tell you that not only
have I had extraordinary benefit from it. And not only have I written so much about
it in my blogs and on Instagram and in my newsletters, I have seen a difference in
the way I'm able to process stress. I'm able to break through a creative block.
I'm able to find courage when I'm scared to do something new or and I'm at an
impasse in my new career or in my family, and by sitting and meditating and just
being okay with the stillness, magical things.
So I believe that meditation, daily meditation, is one of the four essentials to
basic self care. And like I said, I won't be prescriptive about it. I'm not telling
you have to do a certain type or a certain length. I don't think one is right or
wrong or better. And I'm not telling you you have to be perfect at it. I'm saying
find your person, find your voice, find your guru, find your app,
find your your YouTube, find the thing that speaks to you,
that motivates you and makes you feel safe to simply close your eyes for five
minutes and give yourself the opportunity to reframe your day,
to set an intention, to change your outlook on something, or even to heal your
body. So I cannot Stress enough, how much I love meditation for overthinkers.
This is a key to turning down the volume on the overthinking brain.
It's going to be hard at first. Your mind is going to want to play tricks on you.
When we close our eyes, it's an invitation for our minds to race. It's Okay,
let it happen and return back to your breath. Just breathe.
So here's a little mini taste of it. If you're not driving a car or you're not
walking, take a moment, close your eyes. Take a deep breath in
and exhale.
Another deep breath in
and exhale.
Last time. Deep breath in.
Exhale.
Now gently blink your eyes open.
you've just meditated. That's it. It's just that over and over and over again.
Nice and relaxed. Always come back to the breath. Let the thoughts come up as they
do. Let them float away. If you would like to listen to my meditations,
like I said, they're here on my podcast on earlier episodes when it was While joy
hunting, you can also find them on YouTube at Jackie de Crinis or just find your
own. Find the one that speaks to you.
Schedule your meditation five minutes. Every morning or every evening,
whatever works for you. And then leave me a comment or reach out to me through my
website and let me know how you did. It's an amazing resource and it costs
absolutely nothing and you can do it every day, anywhere, almost at any time.
And I promise you it will be the beginning of learning to wrangle that overthinker's
brain. So join me next week. We're going to do the last part of this four -part
series, it's the E in home. So just to recap,
H is hydrate, O is observe your levels, which is good eating, good sleeping,
M is meditate, and E is for exercise. We're gonna talk about all things exercise
and how just like meditation, it's just a matter of scheduling it and finding what
works for you. So come join me next week to learn the last four of my daily basic
habits for self -care. I can't wait to share it with you. Have a great week.
Start meditating and let me know how it goes. All right. Bye for now.
If you want to learn more tips about managing your stress and how to manage your
overthinking brain, just go to my website and sign up for my weekly newsletter at
jackiedecrinis.com. That's J -A -C -K -I -E -D -E -C -R -I -N -I -S .com.
You can also follow me on Instagram @jackiedecrinis. Bye for now. Thank you for
listening to this episode of Overthinkers Guide to Joy. If you like what was offered
in today's episode, I would love you to leave a review and subscribe or follow
wherever you get your podcasts.