By Meredith Vagner
“It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.”
I’m overstimulated.
Some days I wish I had been born into a quieter decade where my attention wasn’t on constant assignment to (what feels like) one hundred million different tasks. It’s easy to lament the increasingly distracting world: being continuously bombarded with a slew of notifications from Apple News, pop-up advertisements, email dings, group-me pings, and text messages. While it’s thrilling to hear which states federal agents are being deployed to and the recap of the 2026 golden globes within the span of 30-seconds, I’m afraid my life would be a lot less noisy without these buzzes on my phone.
Like, seriously. National politics and Timothée Chalamet should not be on my screen before 9am. And why am I getting sidebar advertisements on academic journal websites?
Ugh. It can be so annoying.
With all this noise, it’s becoming hard to decipher which voices are to be heeded and which should be ignored. There is so much I want to accomplish and experience, but it feels impossible to slow down and pause. However, I believe that is exactly what we are to do. When we feel overwhelmed and bombarded, slow down and pause.
Even if it’s only for five minutes each morning.
Each morning is a new beginning to our life. But each morning, stress has a way of creeping in before we even notice. There is a temptation to feel hassled and pressured by default. Whether you’re rushing to finish work from last night when you fell asleep with the lights on, rushing to drop your kids off at school so they’re not tardy (again!), rushing to pull your standing-only jeans on while simultaneously brushing your teeth, or rushing to pull the covers back over your eyes to avoid today’s checklist, we all can prioritize 5-minutes each morning to focus on what matters most.
When our knee-jerk response is to step away from our values and true priorities each morning, it makes it even more powerful when we take a few moments each morning to ground ourselves in our purpose. Mindfulness is the healthy awareness of what we are doing in the moment and why. If you’ve spent any time on MyBestSelf101 you’ve likely heard of mindfulness, or perhaps even practiced it yourself. It’s not always easy to achieve instantly, but over time mindfulness can bring a sense of peace and level-headedness to the day.
Research suggests that short, consistent mindfulness meditation can reduce perceived stress and improve mood across the day. One of the reasons I hark on spending 5 minutes a morning in prayer, meditation, or another mindfulness practice, is that four 5-minute sessions over 2 weeks has been shown to reduce stress in novice mindfulness users (Strohmaier et al., 2021). Our reactivity to stress decreases by taking brief, consistent moments each day to ground ourselves within the present moment. If you’re feeling even more adventurous than 5-minutes, a recent study demonstrated that when 10-minute mindful meditations were completed each morning before work, the activity enhanced autonomous self-regulation, promoted greater flow at work, and resulted in higher evening energy levels, suggesting positive effects beyond the work day (Hohnemann et al., 2024).
Remember, your mindfulness doesn’t have to look like this!
As someone who experiences chronic pain, I am particularly earnest about starting my day with morning prayer and 5-minutes of mindfulness. Especially when responsibilities begin to pile up. Mindfulness-based interventions have been shown to improve health outcomes, particularly among individuals diagnosed with stress-related diseases (Creswell et al., 2019). Sometimes waking up without stress is unavoidable. The mind and body are inextricably connected. If you wake up in pain, it’s easy for that physical stress to complicate the myriads of other stressors already present that day. So, this is my strong appeal for those of you who have added physical stress to practice starting the day off right in mindful consideration.
We have the power to alter the course of our day. New comfort, new strength, new wisdom, new patience, new joy, new purpose, and new hope are to be found when the alarm clock goes off in the morning. Whether it be through prayer, meditation, the Mindfulness for Humans course, or another form of personal reflection, try to take 5-minutes out of each morning (before the stress of the day can really creep in!) to change the direction of your day and live in accordance with your values.
Mitigate some of that overstimulation. You won’t regret it! 😁
References
https://www.mybestself101.org/mindfulness
https://www.apa.org/topics/mindfulness/meditation
Creswell, J. D., Lindsay, E. K., Villalba, D. K., & Chin, B. (2019). Mindfulness Training and Physical Health: Mechanisms and Outcomes. Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine, 81(3), 224. https://doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0000000000000675
Hohnemann, C., Rivkin, W., & Diestel, S. (2024). An energizing microintervention: How mindfulness fosters subjective vitality through regulatory processes and flow experience at work. Journal of occupational health psychology, 29(1), 45–56. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000369
Strohmaier, S., Jones, F. W., & Cane, J. E. (2021). Effects of length of mindfulness practice on mindfulness, depression, anxiety, and stress: A randomized controlled experiment. Mindfulness, 12(1), 198–214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-020-01512-5