Context

This exercise is designed to help you keep on top of your awareness throughout the day.

By becoming more conscious of the events throughout our day, we can become more conscious of the things we do within it.

With this exercise, what we’re attempting to do is become conscious of key moments throughout our day.

• When we wake up.
• When we shower.
• When we travel to work.
• During our lunch break.
• At dinner.
• Before bed.

The key thing to understand about awareness is that we’re not actually aware unless if we exercise it.

Largely, most of us do all of the things mentioned above, without truly being aware that they’re actually happening.

I mean, how many times have you consciously thought about something from the very moment you’ve woken up?

You know, about a giraffe or that you’re well and alive with two wonderful eyes?

Chances are those thoughts have simply never occurred to you, because instead, you go into autopilot mode where you just follow the motions.

For this exercise, we want to do is start engaging our brain so that we can have those thoughts at these key moments throughout the day.

The idea is that once we become more conscious of what’s happening throughout our day, it can become a lot easier to detect and stop negative habits from reoccurring.

In particular, to better address our cravings, as well as those moments associated to our addiction where we feel as if we are not in control.

And despite this exercise being relatively straight forward, it’s an exercise that a lot of people struggle with, because it’s a completely different way of engaging with the world.

Becoming aware is not easy when you haven’t consciously made an effort in the past to be aware before.

Of course, practice makes perfect.

Instructions

Essentially this is an exercise of acknowledgement.

Throughout your day, simply acknowledge what’s taking place at that time.

For more specificity, you can identify the location, time and what exactly you’re doing.

“It’s 7am and I’m currently brushing my teeth in the bathroom.”

At this point, I want you to focus on how you feel.

Are you feeling tired? Are you feeling neutral? Are you feeling angry?

Regardless of how you feel, the idea is to get you to think about these events and how they relate to your emotions.

The other reason behind doing this, is that by identifying how you feel, it actually allows you to dissociate from your emotions and not take them personally.

Of course, you don’t need to think about. It simply comes naturally.

The end goal here, aside from engaging your awareness, is to acknowledge and not react emotionally.

Because the more you do this, the more you know ahead of time how you will feel, and progressively overtime you will simply feel neutral at these particular time triggers throughout your day.

This is a truly fantastic exercise that I do everyday and it serves as an amazing anchor for my emotions.

You engage your awareness from the very moment you wake up, and it just gives you such a strong foothold over how you feel throughout the day.