As students, we tend to have many concerns on our minds: complex timelines, looming deadlines, activities to juggle, and new and old relationships that need our attention. Despite our busy schedules, one thing most of us manage to fit into our daily routine is a shower. For this mindfulness practice, we’re going to turn the 10 minutes that you spend taking a shower into a dedicated time to:
- Be present.
- Think kind and beneficial thoughts.
- Set priorities and intentions for the day.
We’re turning our showers into “transformation stations.”
Building your mindfulness muscle
Setting aside a time and place to practice being present is like doing mental bicep curls. Once that muscle of being present is strong, we can apply it—even in the most stressful situations—where it will help us avoid distraction and get to work.
Positive emotions (such as joy, interest, contentment, and love) enable access to creative ideas and innovative solutions according to the “broaden and build” theory by Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These positive emotions help us build physical, intellectual, and social resources to help us succeed in our academic careers. Being authentically positive serves to “broaden and build” our thought–action repertoire.
Why practice mindfulness in the shower?
When I am trying to create a new habit, I like to employ a few different strategies to make it stick. Here, we’re employing the strategy of habit-stacking. We’re going to add our mindfulness and mindset practice into the existing habit of showering.
We’re also going to make it a little bit weird and a little bit silly so that the novelty and positive emotions associated with the practice will help it stick in our long-term implicit memory system (which lets us remember things without thinking about them).
Lastly, we’re going to make it enjoyable so that it becomes something you look forward to doing each day.
Article sources
Adamczyk, P. D., & Bailey, B. P. (2004). If not now, when? The effects of interruption at different moments within task execution. CHI ’04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 271–278. https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/985692.985727
Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226.
Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society B, 359(1449), 1367–1377.
Lino, C. (2019, July 3). Broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions (+PDF). Positive Psychology. https://positivepsychology.com/broaden-build-theory/
Zimmermann, K. (2014, February 13). Implicit memory: Definition and examples. LiveScience. https://www.livescience.com/43353-implicit-memory.html
