Take 5: A Simple Mindfulness Exercise

Hey, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'm going to share a simple mindfulness technique you can use throughout the day to help reduce stress and drop back into the present moment. It's an exercise called take five, and I want us to do it together. So take out your left hand like this, and your right pointer finger. Let's start by placing your point of finger right around the wrist.

What we're going to do is slide the point of finger up the thumb and as we do, take an inhale through the nose. So breathing in. Exhale through the mouth, back down. Up the pointer finger, inhale. Back down, exhale.

Up the middle finger, inhale. Back down. Ring finger. Back down. And pinky.

Back down. Awesome. Good job. So that's called take five. Pretty simple.

Doesn't take more than about 20 seconds. If you had a ton of time on your hands, you could do take 10 and do it on the other side. The great thing about take five is that the tactile nature of it, the touching the finger and aligning it with the breath really seems to be settling for the nervous system. I've been teaching this for while. I first started teaching it to kids and they were really into it.

So if you have kids, this is something you could teach to them. Then I started teaching it to adults and they were saying, man, I use this many times throughout the day. When I'm stressed, first thing in the morning, when I come out of the shower. And then I said, am I going to be bold enough to go into corporations and tell executives to pet their pinkies every time their stressed out? I did that. I had a CEO, get back to me and he said, Cory, all that meditation stuff, that's good.

Well, I got to say that take five thing. I love that thing. So there's something about it that's just really simple, easy and practical that everyone can do. And you could do this first thing in the morning. You could do it in the afternoon.

You could do it anytime you feel stressed or off. It's a very simple practice that takes you out of the story of your mind and drops you back into the moment. Is it going to change your life to pet your finger every time you're stressed out? Maybe not, but it can improve your wellbeing by 5 to 7% and that over time can have a big impact. So try it out. Spread take five far and wide.

Share it with the people you love, especially if you have kids and enjoy. I'll talk to you soon and take care.