Seasonal shifts ask something of your nervous system. A few simple practices can make the change easier.
AT A GLANCE
- Why the Season Change Feels Unsettling
- Start With Two Minutes, Not Twenty
- Anchor Yourself Through Your Senses
- Use Your Breath as the Simplest Tool
- Take Mindfulness Outdoors
- Bring Attention to Conversations
- Let Go of Doing It Correctly
The calendar turns to September and the pace changes. Schedules tighten back up, the light shifts earlier, and the loose rhythm of summer gives way to something more scheduled.
For a lot of people, this annual transition can bring a low hum of stress that is hard to name. Nothing is wrong exactly, but the ease of summer seems to have disappeared. Mindfulness practices are among the more reliable strategies to ease this transition. Here are some practices that work in the small gaps of an ordinary day.
Why the Season Change Feels Unsettling
Your body responds to seasonal change more dramatically than you may realize. Daylight shrinks by a couple of minutes each day through September, which shifts sleep timing, energy, and mood. Temperature swings ask your body to adjust. Routines that had gone comfortably slack tighten again.
None of that is a problem to solve. It is just a transition, and transitions take energy even when they are welcome. Recognizing the source can take some of the weight out of this transition, since a vague unease is much harder to sit with than a known and temporary adjustment.
Start With Two Minutes, Not Twenty
The most common reason mindfulness practices fail is that people begin with an overly-ambitious version. Twenty minutes of seated meditation is a real commitment, and it is a lot to ask of a habit that has not established itself yet.
Instead, two minutes is enough to be useful. Sitting quietly with your coffee before the day starts, without looking at your phone, is a genuine practice. Pausing during your day to look out the window and watching your surroundings can also do the trick.
If possible, attach the practice to something already fixed in your day. The first cup of coffee. The moment after you brush your teeth. The stretch of time while the microwave runs. Building into a routine carries the habit so willpower does not have to.
Anchor Yourself Through Your Senses
When your mind is spinning, sensory attention tends to work better than trying to think your way calm. A common approach is to name five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can smell, two you can taste, and one thing you notice about how your body feels.
The exercise adapts easily. If hearing is not the sense you want to rely on, lean on sight and touch instead. The warmth of a mug, the texture of a wool blanket, the smell of the air after rain, the specific color of a maple leaf. The point is simply to occupy your attention with what is actually around you.
Fall makes this easier, since the season provides a lot of sensory material. Cool air, changing color, the smell of woodsmoke, the feel of the first sweater of the year.
Use Your Breath as the Simplest Tool
Breathing practices work because they are the one part of your nervous system you can operate directly. Slowing your exhale sends a signal that things are safe, and your heart rate tends to follow.
A useful pattern is to breathe in for a count of four and out for a count of six, keeping the exhale longer than the inhale. Four or five rounds is usually enough to notice a difference. It works while you are waiting in a parking lot, before a difficult phone call, or lying awake at night.
If counting feels fussy, simply putting a hand on your stomach and noticing it rise and fall does most of the same work.
Take Mindfulness Outdoors
September weather is worth taking advantage of. A slow walk with no destination and no step goal is one of the more effective practices available, and it does not feel like an exercise in discipline.
The Hearing Health Foundation and other health organizations have long pointed to time outdoors as a support for both mood and sleep. Morning light in particular helps steady your internal clock as the days shorten.
Consider walking a familiar route deliberately slowly and noticing what has changed since your last walk. The point is not to cover ground. It is to be somewhere specific rather than everywhere at once.
Bring Attention to Conversations
Mindfulness is usually described as a solo practice, but it applies to conversation too, and this may be where it pays off most.
Listening without preparing your reply is harder than it sounds and noticeably improves the exchange. Putting the phone face down, turning the television off rather than muting it, and facing the person you are talking with all reduce the effort the conversation takes for both of you.
For anyone with hearing loss, reducing background noise before a conversation starts helps considerably. So does a captioned telephone, which displays written captions of what the caller says, so a phone call can be a moment of connection rather than a task requiring concentration. Our guide to types of hearing loss and how they affect phone communication explains why some conversations take more effort than others.
Let Go of Doing It Correctly
Many people abandon mindfulness because they believe they are not good at it. Their mind wanders, so they conclude it is not working.
The wandering is the practice. Noticing that your attention has drifted and returning it is the entire exercise, and it happens dozens of times in a few minutes for nearly everyone. There is no version where the mind stays put.
Some days will feel calm and some will feel scattered, and both count. Two minutes of scattered attention is still two minutes you spent somewhere other than the running list in your head.
The fall transition does not require a new routine so much as a few small pauses inside the one you already have. Start with two minutes and let it grow as you need it to.
Take the next step:
- Explore CapTel phone models to make conversations easier to follow
- You or someone you know may be eligible to receive a CapTel phone at no cost
- Have questions? Call CapTel at 1-800-233-9130
Keep exploring: More on hearing health FAQs | Visit the CapTel blog | Share this article with a friend
CapTel® is the inventor and technology leader in Captioned Telephones for people with hearing loss. CapTel phones show word-for-word captions of everything a caller says, helping those with hearing loss stay connected with the important people in their lives.
