Do your habits help or hinder you? Try our Cloudy resilience toolkit now
What are your habits and how are they making you more resilient? Cloudy is a toolkit designed to increase your understanding of your current state of wellness, as well as show you what skills you could brush up in order to be more resilient. Resilience plays an important part in succeeding at your studies and getting the most out of your everyday life.
Cloudy has a series of habit-building activities, with tools and techniques you can use to better prepare yourself for challenging moments. We’ve put together a selection of habit builders from the Cloudy resilience toolkit for you to try before signing up for the tool.
Self-confidence exercise
Self-confidence is an important part of vision. You need to have enough confidence in yourself to reach your short-term goals and continue your journey towards achieving your long-term goals. It can be easy to only take in negative feedback and not to concentrate on the positive. Take a moment to reflect on the week and write down a few thoughts about your achievements.
- Think about the times when you felt you did a great job this week.
- Write down exactly what you did.
- What was the positive outcome?
- Are there any other situations this week that could have turned out better if you’d applied the same actions?
- What does this tell you about your personal strengths?
Mindful check-in
A mindful check-in is a great way to reflect on your own feelings and thoughts and increase your awareness of what’s happening in the present. Think of a mindful check-in as the process of looking at your own internal weather pattern to better understand your own mental climate long-term.
A mindful check-in will normally take 3–5 minutes.
- Thank yourself. Take a moment to appreciate the fact you have taken a few minutes from your day to understand your own emotions and sensations. Get comfortable by either sitting well or lying down.
- Check-in with yourself. Try to just be present and check-in on yourself. How are you feeling? What are the thoughts you’re experiencing right now?
- Acknowledge the now. You might start having thoughts about things that have been happening recently in your life. Acknowledge these thoughts in the present.
- Congratulate yourself. Take a moment to congratulate yourself for taking the time and effort to check in on yourself.
Did you notice anything change in how you feel? Try to keep these activities going by scheduling a daily check-in on your calendar, either when waking up in the morning or during a regular break at university or work.
A guide to spot meditations
You don’t have to spend a half-hour cross-legged on the floor to meditate. As Matthew Young from the Melbourne Meditation Centre points out, a formal meditation of this kind is certainly useful, but it’s possible to meditate anywhere and at any time. This can be a great way to clear your mind and manage stress, no matter what’s going on around you. A 10–15 second meditation every hour could have a great effect on your wellbeing. Try it out using the five senses technique of meditation and see if it works for you.
- Look. Identify five things you can see.
- Listen. Identify four sounds you can hear.
- Feel. Identify three distinct sensations.
- Smell. Identify two smells.
- Taste. Identify something you can taste.
If you’re interested in trying more habit builders and learning more about your current level of resilience, register for Cloudy today.