![\"4MinutesTimer\"](\"https:\/\/img.skitch.com\/20110915-tsrhnb7h3665466fpy9uiw83s.preview.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\nSomething interesting started happening:<\/h3>\n
I got bored, quickly.<\/p>\n
Therefore, I had to do something to stay interested, or at least to stay …mindful<\/em>.<\/p>\nMy physical exercise, in other words, turned into a mental exercise before I even realized it.<\/h3>\n
If you’re standing on your head, there’s not that much you can do (except go into a lotus pose with your legs or something – but you can’t even scratch your nose or check email, so it’s pretty limiting).<\/p>\n
And so, purely as an exercise in countering boredom and in keeping my mind from going all over the place, mindlessly<\/em>, I began counting along with the timer.<\/p>\nFour minutes is 240 seconds, and I started by counting forward. For the first couple of weeks, I let the first minute slip by, and started counting at …oh, the three-minute mark. I was counting to 180, in other words. Sometimes I started daydreaming and lost track, finding myself lost at …wait, was I at 110 or had I already hit 115?<\/p>\n
When I noticed that I wasn’t able to stay focused, I began to “force” myself to pay attention, and I also began ratcheting the starting mark up, in line with the start of the timer. Soon I was starting at four minutes (beginning to count at zero, going up to 240), with the goal of hitting each second with a silent count of yet another number.<\/p>\n
But again, my mind would wander – or else be perturbed by an apparent “synchronicity” I couldn’t calculate (reason away) quickly enough. For example, the first few times I noticed that I mentally “said” one-hundred-forty<\/em> and also saw<\/strong> the number 140 appear on the timer, I was flustered. It broke my concentration: why did I “say” 140 at the same time as the timer “said” 140?<\/p>\nThe first few times it just threw me (was I counting “wrong”? would the number 140 match up tomorrow?), and the next few times I lost track of counting as I reasoned the answer: “Oh, right! When I say 140, I’ve been counting for 2minutes 20seconds, and there’s 1minute and 40seconds left, which is 100 seconds, and 140 plus 100 is 240 seconds, which is 4 minutes…” And so on, mind racing, clock ticking, losing track, not being mindful or present.<\/p>\n
Then I noticed something rather interesting: the power of images.<\/h3>\n
If I pictured the numbers as I counted them, I didn’t lose track. Thus, I’d “say” the numbers silently – 128, 129, 130, 131, and so on – while at the same time “seeing” them. This kept me on track – even if I “wandered” and went off on a mindless tangent, the images of the numbers ticking on brought me back quickly. The words? Not so much.<\/p>\n
Today I decided to count backward from 240, down to zero. Again, I noticed that without a visualization of the numbers, it was easy to lose track – to wander off and think about something else. With a picture of each number in mind, it was easy<\/del> easier to concentrate<\/del> be mindful.<\/p>\nHowever, counting backward I was much slower<\/em> (by at least 30 seconds!) than the timer. I guess that even with the trick of picturing the numbers, I was slower than actual clock time when I had to count backward from 240 to 0.<\/p>\nBut I’m convinced that with a bit more mindful practice, I’ll get the hang of counting backward in time to the timer – as long as I keep a clear picture of the numbers in mind. Otherwise, all bets are off and my mind gallivants in all directions.<\/p>\n
I guess I’m a visual thinker after all, an interesting (to me) insight I hadn’t expected from what I thought would be the purely physical exercise of standing on my head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently took up the habit of daily 4-minute headstands. I’ve done headstands for decades now, but I never tried keeping to a daily regimen, nor did I ever before pay attention to duration. Lately, for a purely physical reason, it occurred to me that I should do headstands often (every day), and that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1242],"tags":[31178],"class_list":["post-4783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just_so","tag-headstand"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4783"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4805,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions\/4805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}