Household Chores Can Be An Opportunity To Practice Mindfulness Meditation

Household Chores Can Be An Opportunity To Practice Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness is both a practice and a state of mind that revolves around having more presence, attention, and focus. The next time you do some menial chores around the house, kill two birds with one stone and meditate while you do them.

Photo by Logan Ingall.

The practice of mindfulness meditation has shown to have countless benefits, and that’s why researchers at Florida State University wanted to see what normal activities could promote practicing it in your daily life. In their study, half of the participants were primed to be mindful of the dish washing sensory experience, and the other half were primed to focus on proper dish washing techniques. Here’s what their results suggested:

Mindful dishwashers evidenced greater state mindfulness, increases in elements of positive affect (i.e., inspiration), decreases in elements of negative affect (i.e., nervousness), and overestimations of dishwashing time. Implications for these findings are diverse and suggest that mindfulness as well as positive affect could be cultivated through intentionally engaging in a broad range of activities.

Essentially, you can use the time spent doing chores as a mini meditative session to promote your own mindfulness. The key is to focus on what your doing and what it feels like in each moment. They have to get done, so why not get more out of your chores?

Washing Dishes to Wash the Dishes: Brief Instruction in an Informal Mindfulness Practice [the journal Mindfulness via Wall Street Journal]


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