News

Future You: Finding calm in the chaos of life

Active Active advice PARC

April 20, 2023

At PARC we’re asking our community to set an intention for how you want to be and feel in the next 3 to 6 months – your Future You! We want members to think about your Future You and choose words that will help motivate you for success – words you can keep in your mind as inspiration as you work towards your Future You goals.

For you, your Future You might be to be a calmer version of yourself. It maybe that finding more calm is what is driving you in 2023 and we’re here to inspire you to reach that goal. We’ve put together some advice on what you can do to bring calm to the chaos of your life.

Everyone can be guilty of not prioritising themselves, rushing around juggling, work, family and home life – so many of us answer the question ‘how are you?’ with ‘busy!’

In order to bring more balance into your life, we invite you to think about the four Ms, mindfulness, meditation, movement and myself to help you secure a new level of calm.

Mindfulness

To be mindful is to take time to be present with your mind and aim to give yourself space to clear your thoughts. There is so much research to back up the benefits of being more mindful and calming your mind, including reduction of stress, improving sleep and enhancing your mood.

The bonus of mindfulness is that you can practice daily and keep working on it until you reap the benefits and feel more calm. The key steps to mindfulness include;

Breathing: Take five minutes to close your eyes and just breath, focus on your breaths and aim to pull away from the intensive list of things your brain is trying to think about.
Concentration: Once you’ve perfected the breathing you can start to really concentrate on the breath and its movement within your body.
Awareness: The next step is becoming aware of your whole body as you breath and noticing what happens on the in and out breaths with a focus on this and nothing else.

Release tension: Once you’ve practiced all the above, you should be able to get to each state quicker every time and then you can start releasing any tension you feel around your body.

This type of practice only has to be a couple of minutes each day and a habit can form quickly if you commit yourself to it.

Meditation

Taking mindfulness one step further is the practice of meditation, where you take it to the next level with a prolonged focus on calming the mind. It used to be quite a spiritual activity that wasn’t well known in mainstream culture, but now is becoming extremely popular given the well-known benefits of the practice.

At PARC we’ve been offering meditation classes to our members for years and they are extremely popular on our digital platform PARC Your Way.

Click here to find out more about our meditation class and see our timetable for when you can stop by to get support with your meditation practice.

Movement

Your body’s health is intrinsically linked to your mind’s health, and if you can spend time nurturing your muscles this will also help nurture your mind. We know that endorphins help boost your mood and they can also help relieve stress and tension, which can bring a sense of calm.

If you are particularly overwhelmed sometimes the best thing you can do is smash it all out in a good gym session, boxing class or HIIT class. Getting your blood pumping around your body helps you to find balance and releases all the pent-up tension and stress.

Even more incidental movement will help you to feel calmer, such as going for walks in the sunshine, playing sports with your kids in the garden, or a good stretch at the end of the day. These activities will all help in calming your mind and elevating your mood.

Myself

The most important ‘M’ in our list for calm is about prioritising YOU so you can achieve your Future You. We can’t expect to achieve true calm in our lives when we are so focused on everyone else’s needs instead of our own. By allowing yourself space to do the things that fill your cup and increase healthy habits then you can truly feel the balance of calmness.

So put this into practice and think more about the Future You! If you want some more accountability at PARC we’re supporting our members by asking them to write a letter to your Future self that we will then post to you in the future!

Write a letter to Future You

Write a letter to your future self, and PARC will post it to you in the future – to see how you are tracking against your health goals.By writing this letter and visualising your Future You throughout the year, it will keep you motivated and accountable! Plus, when the letter arrives in the mail, you can see how you tracked against your health goals.