How Simple Mindfulness Games Can Help You To Find Balance

The more complicated advice gets, the harder it is for people to actually use it to impact their lives.

There’s beauty and effectiveness in simplicity.

Our minds want to be lazy and use the minimum energy possible according to Daniel Kahneman. 

Rachael Kable has mastered the art of giving mindfulness tips in short weekly episodes on her podcast The Mindful Kind. Tens of thousands of people tune in each week for her advice.

It’s not a fluke though as she suffered from anxiety herself when she was in her teenage years. This inspired her to study psychology and help at a mental health helpline. The training she received not only helped her to keep her own stray thoughts in control but to help others too.

When someone is on the other side of a line and desperate, she needed to give practical advice not theory. Here are two of her best examples that can help you in your daily life.

This article is based on the Mindful & Driven episode with Rachael. You can listen here or find the YouTube video at the bottom of this article.

The Mindful Senses game

Rachael enjoys teaching her clients this game because so many have told her how much it helps them. It’s best to do it whenever you want to feel in the present moment not just when you’re overwhelmed.

I just paused in my writing and did it now.

You have to think about the following things in order:

• Five things you can see
• Four things you can feel
• Three things you can hear
• Two things you can smell
• And one thing you can taste

This game stops us from obsessing about what’s going on in our heads and makes us focus on the environment around us instead. Each step takes more thought and diverts our attention away from what is troubling us. I’ve taken to do this while on a walk without headphones on to soak in the beauty of the world.

Though it might not sound like much, it’s recommended by the UK NHS and other anxiety experts, not just Rachael.

Mindfulness doesn’t have to be sitting in the middle of a forest meditating for hours on end. Anyone can do it.

The Breathing Waltz

I must confess I didn’t know the timing of the waltz before my conversation with Rachael and you probably don’t either. Luckily, it’s easy.

Find a comfortable posture then:

Breathe in for three seconds.

Hold for three seconds.

Breathe out for three seconds.

Repeat it for several minutes or until you feel you’ve done enough.

The underlying principle is to spend more time holding and breathing out than breathing in. This triggers the parasympathetic system which calms you down.

Our primal instinct when stressed is to go into fight or flight mode. This makes us breathe faster and harder which was useful if being chased by a lion but not for our more mundane modern stressors.

There are many variations of this concept including 4–4–4 and 4–7–8 yet I can understand people feeling intimidating by needing to hold their breath for so long. The breathing waltz is useful because it doesn’t trigger those same fears.

Try it now. You can even listen to soft music and breathe in beat to truly feel like you’re doing the waltz.

Don’t be afraid to experiment

In both the examples, the exact timings aren’t the important bit. I know people can be tribal and defend the rules until the bitter end but the concepts are more important.

The purpose of these exercises is to help you to be in the present and remain calm. If you want to hear five things and see two then go ahead. If you want to breathe in for three, hold for four, and out for three, nothing is stopping you.

Find something that works for you and you can rely on. Your mind could adapt where the old techniques don’t have as much effect and then you can switch it up again. It’s always a good idea to see a professional and take on their advice too.

I hope you found these simple mindfulness games useful and can see ways you can apply them to your own life. If you’d like to hear Rachael talk about it with me in more detail, check out our conversation in the video below.