This is a short exercise I call pause and ask. It takes between thirty and sixty seconds, and its purpose is to gather your attention and put it back in the present moment.
You get relaxation out of it, a drop in stress, and usually a bump in productivity. Those are side effects. The actual objective is to train two things: mindfulness — the quality of attention that notices what is happening — and awareness, the wider clarity that lets you do something about it.
Its great virtue is portability. It fits in a lift, in the car before you turn the key, at your desk between two pieces of work, in a queue. Nobody can tell you are doing it.
The walkthrough below comes from the original Spanish edition of this site, so the narration is in Spanish — turn on English subtitles in the player to follow along. Everything in it is written out in full underneath, so you lose nothing by skipping it.
The exercise
1. Pause, and relax the body
Move your attention through your body from the top down: the scalp, around the eyes, the jaw, the shoulders, then down through the back and the abdomen. Wherever you find tension, release it. What you are looking for is the tension you did not know you were holding — most people find it in the jaw and the shoulders first.
2. Ask what is happening
Once you are observing the body from the inside, ask yourself a plain question: what is going on right now?
Usually you will find a train of thought, several thoughts running at once. Sometimes what is there is not thought but emotion — anxiety, worry, anticipation. Whatever it is, take a moment to look at it. What is it, and where did it come from?
3. Observe, recognize, label
Give what you found a word. If it is anxiety, label it “anxiety.” If what you feel is the pressure of having too much to do, say “busy” while you watch the sensation. The same goes for any thought, feeling or physical sensation. Observe it, recognize it, name it — and then let it disperse on its own.
Do not judge what you find. The point is to observe without getting involved, from the outside, as a spectator of your own thinking rather than a participant in it.
When you have observed, recognized and labeled it, return to observing the body. That is the whole exercise.
Why not reacting is the active ingredient
The instruction to neither act nor react is doing most of the work here.
Left alone, a thought or an emotion runs its course and subsides. Acted on, it recruits you, and the reaction becomes one more thing to react to. By declining to move, you leave room for a response to arise instead of a reflex — and a response is something you choose. What it feels like is calm and acceptance. What you have actually gained is clarity about what is happening, which is the precondition for changing its direction.
That is the transition from mindfulness to awareness, and it is why a sixty-second exercise is worth doing at all.
Doing it regularly
Run it as often through the day as you like. If you want it to become a habit rather than a good intention, set a repeating alarm on your phone at whatever interval suits you, and treat it as a one-minute appointment.
Quick reference
- Pause — scan the body: head, around the eyes, jaw, shoulders, back, abdomen. Release tension as you find it.
- Ask — what is happening right now?
- Observe, recognize, label — name it in a word, and let it pass.