Life is unpredictable, challenging, unfair, and terribly overwhelming. To fight it, to keep going, we should all practice the pause in life a bit more and understand its real significance.
Your quality of life will radically increase. Besides, hitting the pause button every once in a while is the only key to true happiness.
What Does Practice The Pause Mean?
The pause practice is a technique that helps us cope with the stress, depression, and anxiety that comes with our daily lives. It’s simply one of those moments in life when you decide to stop everything you’re doing, take a step back and enjoy the solitude.
That kind of mindfulness doesn’t have a price. All clinical psychologists agree that it will only positively affect your mental health and emotional well-being.
One of those positive effects is finding a greater purpose in life and decreasing the levels of stress and anxiety. It also helps you brighten your perspective on life and change the course of your entire life for the better.
How Do You Practice Pause?
Pause practice therapy doesn’t require hard work. However, it most definitely does demand conscious effort.
And, in my opinion, the hardest part is to start. It’s difficult to find that pause button, and it’s even harder to press it. So, let’s get down to brass tacks and help you find that button that will change your life for good.
1. Take a deep breath of positivity in and let out an even deeper breath of negativity
Take full control over your mind and direct it towards positive thinking. We all hit rough patches in life, but they also help us discover our real strength, and that’s the only way you should think about it.
You’ll never find a way out of a difficult situation in life with a negative stance. On the other hand, positive thinking will encourage you and give you hope for a better tomorrow.
2. Pay more attention to your overall well-being
Take care of yourself. Your physical, emotional, and mental health need to be your main priorities.
Don’t fight other people’s battles. Don’t give yourself to those who don’t appreciate it. Stop wasting your time on people who don’t even deserve to have a place in your life.
Take a rest. Sleep enough. Pay attention to your diet. Work on your relational well-being. Exercise and take walks in nature. Focus on improving your health, staying happy and healthy in every possible way.
3. Make self-care your top priority
Make time for yourself, even on your busiest days. Nothing is worth neglecting yourself and your own needs.
Focus on building strong and healthy everyday habits. Establish a self-care routine that works best for you and stick with it.
Do yoga, meditate, listen to calm music, take a walk in the park, spend time with children, your loved ones, or animals… Do whatever makes you genuinely happy, and do it daily.
4. Practice mindfulness for self-improvement
Evie Shafner, a clinical psychologist with over 40 years of experience in private practice, says, “If you can practice the pause to stay more mindful when you are feeling triggered and reactive, you’ll avoid saying or doing something you’ll most certainly regret later.”
In other words, if you restrain yourself when you’re feeling angry or frustrated, you’ll be able to do the right thing once you calm down. If you act in the heat of the moment, you’ll most definitely do something you’ll regret later.
One of the key factors to self-improvement is practicing mindfulness. It is the ability to control your thoughts, emotions, and, most importantly, actions.
5. Fuel your mental strength by taking a step back
To be honest, all of these things can help you improve your mental strength, but knowing when to pull back and hit the pause button is crucial for developing mental toughness.
Let go of everything and just spend some time alone. Focus on your thoughts, give yourself time to process them, and try to look at them from a different (more positive) perspective.
6. Think before you speak
Don’t ever act or talk before thinking about it. Don’t ever allow your thoughtless actions or words to hurt people you love and care for.
It’s not about whether they’ll forgive you or not, the important thing is that you won’t be able to forgive yourself, and it will haunt you.
I think we’re all aware that social media has both advantages and disadvantages. One of its bad sides is the negative impact it has on our mental health.
There are so many things and people we see and encounter on those platforms every day. So much information we get that simply can’t be stored properly in our memories.
That’s why we should all press the pause button on using social media from time to time. We should give our minds time to rest from the virtual world.
8. Work on building stress resiliency
The fact is that everyone struggles with stress. It has become a part of our lives, an ugly part but still a very common one.
Before you start working on your coping mechanisms against stress, you need to find out its cause first. Discovering the triggers of your stress will help you find a way to fight it.
9. Reduce, declutter, and simplify your daily life tasks
You can practice the pause in life by organizing your daily life tasks. Create a plan that will help you reorganize and become more productive with far less stress.
Don’t find yourself in the desperate situation of being buried in work. The only way to avoid that is to reorganize your life and pause every once in a while to redefine your priorities.
10. Find your passion(s)
Ask yourself these questions… What’s your passion in life? Do you know, or are you still in the process of discovering it?
I know that we all need to work for a living. However, if your job doesn’t follow your passions, you have two choices: either quit and follow your true passion or find a hobby that will align with your passions.
11. Stop worrying about things you can’t control
The fact is, so many things in life are completely out of our control. Worrying about them and obsessing about their outcomes won’t change anything – it will only damage your mental health.
Every time you catch yourself obsessing over something you know you don’t have any control over, switch the pause button on. Getting it out of your head for a while may actually help you find a way to solve it or, at least, deal with it.
12. Walk away from unwanted arguments
You’re allowed to tap into your wiser self and walk away from people who try to goad you into unnecessary arguments.
Every time you sense that a conflict may arise between you and someone else, take a step back and think about the reasons and possible outcomes of that argument. If there is no clear point to getting into an argument with them, then don’t do it.
You know what they say: smart people know when to give up. Avoiding unnecessary arguments will help you preserve your own peace of mind.
13. Practice the pause but stay in the present moment
Practicing the pause is one of the greatest life lessons you should use in your daily life. However, don’t ever use it as an excuse to escape from the past.
Even if that past was better than your present, that is and should stay a closed matter. Trust me, nothing good can come from going back to those past memories.
Let go of everything that has passed and stick to the present moment. That’s where your future lies, and that’s what you should be focused on.
Why Is Pausing Important In Communication?
I strongly believe that words are the strongest weapon of all. Unfortunately, so many people aren’t even aware of the power of words and how they can hurt people in so many profound ways.
That’s why, for the sake of your relationships with your loved ones, you should never do or say anything in the heat of the moment. Every time before you speak, you should think about the consequences your words may have.
Call it being tactful or whatever you like, but it’s the only way to maintain good relationships with the people you love. Saying things you don’t actually think will only come back to haunt you, and they’ll bring many regrets.
The fact is that words can’t be taken back. People can forgive you and get over it, but the truth is, your words will never be forgotten.
Practice The Pause Quotes
I’ve also compiled this small list of practice the pause in life quotes and hope they will motivate you to hit that pause button and step into the zone of mindfulness.
1. “When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.” – Douglas Rushkoff
2. “Practice the pause. Pause before judging. Pause before assuming. Pause before accusing. Pause whenever you’re about to react harshly, and you’ll avoid doing and saying things you’ll later regret.” – Lori Deschene
3. “Pause and remember – The only person you need to believe in you is – you!” – Jennifer Young
4. “Now and then, it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.” – Guillaume Apollinaire
5. “Take a long pause …breathe and know that things are happening for you, not to you.” – Ashton Kutcher
6. “The pause between the errors and trials of the day and the hopes of the night.” – Herbert Hoover
7. “The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” – Mark Twain
8. “Sometimes you need to press pause to let everything sink in.” – Sebastian Vettel
All In All
Unfortunately, not many people know the real power of pressing the pause button in life. That’s why, unfortunately again, most of us struggle with depression, anxiety, and similar mental health issues.
I honestly hope you’ll take the power of pause seriously. Practice the pause in life because it’s the greatest step and healthiest approach to self-help and general self-improvement.
Now, take a deep breath and jump into a state of mindfulness. Forget about everything and everyone around you, and just focus on yourself.