A journey of a thousand miles begins with a micro-Moment
Back in 2015 Google created a new term - ‘micro-moments’. These were defined as times when we ‘reflexively turn to a device to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something’. The world at our fingertips. Sounds good, right!?
However, the addiction to the need to know things, buy things and go places right now, not to mention hours of social media and constant notifications, has led to one of the main every-day psychological challenges of our time - disconnection.
On average, Americans check their phones 262 times per day—that's once every 5 ½ minutes. The mindless micro-moment behaviour has become so addictive that Google’s research showed 91% of smartphone users looked up information on their phones while in the middle of another task. And you can bet that a high portion of this scrolling is in the middle of a conversation, a meeting, or even on a date (apparently 47% of us own up to scrolling during this one!)
What has this done to our health and happiness? In short, our stress levels have increased; we find it harder to focus on tasks (it takes us up to 23 minutes to refocus after a phone interruption) making effective communication and decision-making more challenging. We have become disconnected from our surroundings, nature, family, friends - and ourselves.
What if the micro-moment could be used as a power for good? At MomentCo our approach is based on the power of the mindful micro-moment taken AWAY from your phone, and it all starts with a few deep conscious breaths.
The simple intuitive action of the breath, something we do around 23,000 times a day, if made conscious, has the power to stimulate your vagus nerve, calm the nervous system and allow you drop emotional baggage to face tasks with a fresh perspective. We just need to remember to do it.
That is why we created the Moment Pebble, a natural stone breathing device that acts as an external reminder and anchor for conscious breathing techniques. The light guided breathing sequence programmed within shifts the nervous system from a stress to a calm state.
We are realistic and appreciate that completely breaking the addiction cycle to our phones is extremely unlikely, however, imagine the impact if for just 5% of the 262 times we went to pick-up, we didn't reach for our phones.
Instead, imagine in that micro-moment that we took some conscious breaths, what could we experience in that moment of peace? Perhaps we would mindfully listen and connect with our family and colleagues, allow our imagination to open up and run wild, use our memory to answer a question or we could simply look up and enjoy our surroundings.
Small steps build up over time and will allow you to reconnect with who you are, to your surroundings and allow you to live more mindfully in each micro-moment.