June is here, and several massive changes are just around the corner. First, no more mindfulness columns until next fall! (I know; I’m sad about it too.) Second, summer break is coming up, if you care about that sort of thing. Third (getting serious now), a major transition like the end of the school year offers a special opportunity, and here it is:

Transition periods are among the easiest times to create new habits, according to psychology research. Want to create a simple, low-effort habit that will integrate the practice of mindfulness into your day? Create a mindfulness trigger—something that sets you up for a few moments of mindfulness several times a day.

How to find your mindfulness trigger

Pick any minor, routine activity that you do every day (e.g., washing your hands or flipping on a light switch). Make this activity a mindfulness trigger: Every time you do the activity, try to remember to do it mindfully. That means paying nonjudgmental attention to the experience through your senses.

For example, when you turn on the faucet, think, “Aha! This is my trigger to be mindful.” Then, as you wash, tune your attention into the raw sensory experience of washing: the sensations of coldness, wetness, and contact as the water hits your hands, the sound and sight of the water, and so on.

Be more interested in the sensory experience than in evaluating the experience (e.g., “This feels good!” “Ugh, this water is too cold!”) or telling stories about it (e.g., “I’d better wash fast, I’m running late…”). This exercise has two benefits. It sharpens your mindfulness skills and helps bring mindfulness to the forefront throughout your day. In addition, it turns routine activities into surprisingly rich and enjoyable experiences.

Unless you are the Dalai Lama, you will sometimes forget about your trigger and carry out the activity obliviously. For example, you may wash your hands and not remember until a half-hour later that you were supposed to do so mindfully. That’s OK! This is a practice, and proficiency takes time.

Eventually, remembering this trigger activity will become a habit. Then, when you feel ready, you can add a second activity. Over time, you’ll add more and more mindful moments to your day.

Mindfulness techniques are like apps or pieces of software. The apps might be great, but they won’t work perfectly if you run them on a slow, clunky, out-of-date device. Sometimes you have to update the hardware—your brain.

Maybe you’ve been using the techniques that I share here for dealing with stress, improving your focus, and sharpening your mind. Want to power them up? Here’s how you can access the full strength of these techniques: meditation. If you meditate every day, even just a few minutes, the mindfulness techniques you’ve learned will become much more powerful. Plus, the meditation practice itself becomes very restful and enjoyable, like giving your mind a well-deserved break.

Two game-changing tricks to develop the meditation habit

Meditation is easy (see Mind your mind in previous issues). But creating a habit of daily practice is not. I struggled for years before discovering two tricks that solved the problem for me:

1. The clever trick

I use this trick whenever I feel the urge to skip my daily sit or do it “later” (aka never). The trick is this:

I shrink the length of the session in my head until I hit a level I don’t feel resistance to.

For example: “Could I do 15 minutes? No, I feel resistance, I’m not gonna do it. OK, what about 10? Still too long, the thought puts me off. Maybe five? Huh, I don’t feel resistance to that. I feel like I can sit for five.” Boom.

Then, if my session ends and I feel like sitting longer, I do.

2. The better trick

I wake up at a set time every morning and immediately meditate, before doing anything else.

You might be different, but if I do anything else first — breakfast, a workout, checking my phone — I have trouble getting myself to sit. Actually, I’ll go further: Putting off the morning sit almost guarantees I won’t sit at all.

So there’s a second part to this trick: Admitting to myself that “I’ll sit later” is code for “I’m skipping my sit today.”

Once I owned up to that, meditating daily became almost effortless. I just stopped believing my own “I’ll sit later” lie and committed to sitting first thing in the morning, when I’d actually do it. This was a game-changer for me.

It’s February—time to start stressing out about our love lives. In all seriousness, dating and romance are great (when they’re going well), but Valentine’s Day can sometimes bring a little stress with it. When I’m single on Valentine’s Day, I stress about why I’m not dating. When I’m in a relationship, I fret about buying gifts and planning dates. Meanwhile, the greeting card and chocolate moguls laugh at me as they swim in heart-shaped pools filled with money.

Good news: If your dating life is giving you a headache, there’s another aspect of your relationships that you can focus on, one that will make you feel great: gratitude.

How to strengthen your gratitude muscle

Gratitude isn’t just some quasi-spiritual cliché. Research suggests that gratitude has a huge impact on well-being and mental health. Studies show that grateful people are happier, less stressed, and less prone to anxiety or depression. They cope more effectively with problems, they sleep better, and—special Valentine’s Day fact!—they are more satisfied with their relationships.

Gratitude is a quality you can develop, like exercising a muscle. Here are two methods for doing so, courtesy of the great positive psychologist, Dr. Martin Seligman.

1. Keep a gratitude journal

I can’t recommend this practice enough. It’s quick and easy, yet Dr. Seligman has found (and, from experience, I agree) that it brings long-lasting benefits. Here’s the practice:

At the end of each day, write down:

• Three things that went well that day, and
• Why those things happened.

I find this especially satisfying when I choose things that involve my relationships with others. So if one of your three things is “Cooked a great meal with my roommate,” your “reason why” might be “We’ve been making an effort lately to spend more time together” or “She’s an amazing cook.” This practice trains us to spot and savor the positive things in our lives.

2. Make a gratitude visit

Here’s what you do:

• Think of someone who has shown you incredible kindness—someone whom you never fully thanked and who lives near enough for you to visit.
• Write the person a short letter expressing heartfelt gratitude. Say what this person did for you, how it affected your life, and how that makes you feel. Don’t mail it yet.
• Get in touch with the person, and say you’d like to visit.
• Meet the person, and read the letter aloud.
• PROBABLY CRY AND HUG.

Ever feel anxious or overwhelmed? If you’re not a robot, your answer is probably yes. Anxiety isn’t a fun experience, but it’s totally normal. The good news is that there are simple ways to work with anxiety so that it’s less of a problem. One method is called the “mindful pause.” It can take as little as 30 seconds, and you can do it any time you start feeling stressed or anxious.

Meditation helped Jon Krop, JD, go from “disorganized screw-up to Harvard Law School graduate.” Jon can guide anyone toward chill—anxious people, depressed people, New Yorkers, even lawyers. He teaches meditation online at jonkrop.com. He also runs Mindfulness for Lawyers and Breathing Room NYC (a meditation group for people with anxiety).

The “mindful pause” in four steps

Because the “mindful pause” is so quick and discreet, you can do it almost anywhere. Just start tossing “mindful pauses” into your day. Get a feel for it. Then, when difficult moments come, you’ll be ready. Here’s how it works:

1. Take a deep breath.

Take a slow inhale, filling your lungs. By slowing and deepening your breathing, you encourage feelings of relaxation and calm.

2. Turn toward your body.

Open your attention to the sensations in your body. Let yourself notice whatever comes up: warmth, tingling, pressure, or the touch of clothing. There’s no need to evaluate the sensations as “good” or “bad.” Itching is simply itching. Coolness is simply coolness.

If you notice sensations that seem connected to stress or anxiety, those are especially good to turn toward. Most of us resist those sorts of sensations. This resistance is what creates suffering, not the sensations themselves.

It’s like playing in the ocean: When a wave is coming, and you try to plant your feet and resist, you get knocked over. But if you dive straight through the wave, it’s no problem.

This step needn’t take longer than one in-breath or out-breath. Stay with it longer if you like, but it can be that quick.

3. Rest your attention on your breath.

Pay attention to the sensation of air touching your nostrils as you breathe. With gentle curiosity, watch the flow of changing sensations at the nostrils. These sensations anchor you in the present moment.

Just like the previous step, this step can be as short as one in-breath or one out-breath.

4. Carry on with your life!

The last step of the “mindful pause” is to simply re-engage with the world, without hurry.

Open your eyes if you’d closed them and carry on with your day. But take your time. Don’t lunge for your phone or speed off to your next activity. Move at a leisurely pace.

Ever notice that more stuff seems to happen in the first few weeks of school than in the next six months? So many people to meet and events to check out and flavors of ramen to try. All that activity can be a blast, but it can also be overwhelming. It’s easy to get anxious, worried about missing out, or afraid of making a bad impression. Sometimes we get so fixated on the future that we forget to savor the present.

Are you going to be in your head (not that fun) or in the moment (way more fun)? You can choose.

How to gently help yourself stay in the moment

“All his life he looked away to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was! What he was doing!” —Yoda (bad grammar, good point)

When you start to spin off into anxious thoughts about the past or future, this technique lets you catch yourself and come back to the present. It’s an old meditation practice, and it works as well today as it did a century ago. Here’s what you do:

1. When you notice you’ve gotten lost in a thought about the past or future, give it the mental label “thinking.” Just say “thinking” in your head. Not “thinking about my reading assignment” or “thinking about what I’m wearing tonight.” Just “thinking.”
   The labeling should be gentle, like touching a soap bubble with a feather, says Pema Chodron, a meditation master and all-around cool lady. That’s all it takes.

2. Return to the present by bringing your attention to your senses. For example, notice your feet on the floor, or feel your stomach rise and fall as you breathe, or take in the sounds around you.

3. That’s it!

This technique may seem weird at first, but it quickly becomes second nature. It can be very powerful. Getting caught up in our worries, fears, and judgments is totally normal. It’s going to happen. This labeling technique can help us untangle ourselves from all those mental knots and come back to the now—where the good stuff is.