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Spacious awareness and flexible thinking promote well-being.

Demands on our daily lives and beliefs about productivity can make it difficult to cultivate spaciousness.

These suggestions can help you create and maintain room in your life to invite spaciousness.

Co-Authored By Lizabeth Roemer, Ph.D. and Josh Bartok, M.S.

We wrote over the summer about the ways that expanding your awareness and your thinking can help you thrive amid sociopolitical and personal stress and offered suggestions for practices that can help you cultivate spaciousness. However, one significant barrier to cultivating spaciousness of mind is an absence of space in our schedules.

There are, of course, many demands on our time: more tasks at work than our scheduled workday can fit, child- and other family-care responsibilities, a relentless bombardment of many sources of information that demand our attention, and countless other values-based or necessity-based activities that can easily fill each day. Moreover, many people have to work multiple jobs, take unreliable and slow public transportation or walk, and lack child-care support that others have.

On top of these demands, we often receive societal messages that suggest that being busy is a sign of importance, that doing is more valuable than being, and that one’s worth is capitalistically tied to one’s productivity. These........

© Psychology Today