Mindfulness for People Who Don’t Have Time for Mindfulness

(aka… Your Brain Already Knows How to Calm Down — You Just Don’t Use It Yet)

Ever have one of those days where your brain feels like it’s on fire, your shoulders are somewhere near your earlobes, and someone suggests you should just “sit quietly and meditate for 30 minutes”?

Yeah… same. 😄

In this episode, we’re breaking down one of the biggest myths around mindfulness - like that it requires time, silence, and a personality you don’t currently possess.

Because the truth is…
Your brain doesn’t need 30 minutes to start calming down.

It needs a few seconds.

Today, I’m diving into the neuroscience behind mindful micro-moments - the tiny, everyday pauses that can actually help regulate your nervous system, bring your brain back online, and build real resilience over time.

No meditation cushion required.

🧠 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why mindfulness has a serious “branding problem” 
• What’s actually happening in your brain when you feel overwhelmed 
• The role of the amygdala (your guard dog) vs. your prefrontal cortex (your CEO) 
• Why your brain thinks your inbox is a life-threatening event 
• How just a few seconds of awareness can begin to calm your nervous system 
• What the parasympathetic nervous system actually does (in plain English) 
• How micro-moments help rewire your brain through neuroplasticity 
• Why calm isn’t something you find - it’s something you practice 

💭 Key Takeaway:

You don’t need to escape your life to feel calmer.

You need to learn how to meet it differently.

🔗 Resources & Links:

👉 Free tools & resources: https://transformativejourneys.ca/
(Bounce Back Blueprint, Mindfulness Tools, Stress Whisper Toolkit & more)

☕ Support the podcast: Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/transformativejourneys 

⚠️ Disclaimer:

🛑 Johanna is not a therapist, just a human sharing lived experience.
 ✨ “I’m just Johanna – a fellow human being on my journey through this thing called life, and your guide on this transformative journey.”

🎶 Music: “Back Roads” by Will Harrison, via Epidemic Sound

Transcript

About Transformative Journeys

Mindfulness Needs a Re-Brand

The Brain-Science Behind Mindfulness

That's where Micro-Moments of Mindfulness come in

The Parasympathetic Nervous System link

Neuroplasticity

Mid-Roll - Free Resources

Calm isn't something you find outside of yourself

Taking this into real life.

The Coffee Pause

The Water Bottle Pause

The Doorway Pause

The Courageously Calm Commute

Micro-Moments throughout your day

Habit-Stacking in a little mindfulness

The Three-Second Challenge

Recap

Wrap-Up

Thank you and links

Buy Me A Coffee

Disclaimer

Speaker 0:05

Okay, tell me the truth. Have you ever had one of those days where you feel so utterly overwhelmed, so unfocused, so friggin' frazzled, that you're bouncing back and forth between five different unfinished tasks with your shoulders virtually attached to your earlobes, your teeth clenched so tightly together that you just realized your ears are ringing. And somewhere out there, you recall reading something, somewhere, where someone said, "You need to sit quietly and meditate for 30 minutes." Um - no. Alright, let me be honest. The overwhelmed part real. Like regularly during some seasons in my day job. Longing for a meditation cushion in 30 minutes of silence? Mm-hmm. Yeah, not. And don't get me wrong - I have nothing against meditation. I really did do it every single day for many years - and the reason I stopped is a funny story for another day – But I never ever ended up getting back into that habit. But what if I told you there's a way to calm your nervous system that takes just a few minutes or even a few seconds in a pinch? No perfectly quiet room, no candles, no cushions at all. And what if I told you that if used consistently, it can literally begin to rewire your brain to handle stress differently. We've talked about mindfulness before on this podcast, because I am a big fan of mindfulness. But today I want to go a little deeper into the neuroscience of what I like to call mindful micro-moments or mindfulness for people who don't have time for mindfulness. And how waiting for your coffee to brew, sitting in traffic, or even a pause before you walk in a door can actually help regulate your nervous system, improve your focus, and build real resilience without a cushion, without chanting, and without pretending your brain is ever going to be completely quiet. So let's dig into that. Life doesn't give us a map for healing. And growth? Yeah, it's messy, uncomfortable, and not for the faint of heart. I'm Johanna LeRoux, and this is Transformative Journeys, a podcast about resilience, self-discovery, and learning how to rebuild something meaningful after everything changes. We talk neuroscience, real life, unlearning, and all the messy stuff in between. New episodes drop every other Monday, and there's bonus content on YouTube if you want more in the meantime. m Welcome back to Transformative Journeys with Johanna. I'm your host, and what if I told you that some of the minutes you currently waste scrolling your phone thinking that the distraction is calming you actually have seconds in them that you could actually put to good use to help your brain really calm the hell down. No bullshit, no woo, no esoteric occult practices or specialized training at all needed. Things that are so simple, you might accidentally be doing them pretty often now, just maybe not at times when your brain actually needs it. So let me take a quick step back here and say that I think mindfulness really has a bit of a branding problem because most people immediately associate it with meditation or something similar and think that it requires time, silence, and a personality trait that they don't actually have. It's sort of packaged as sitting still, scheduling time for it, clearing your mind, or some form of doing it right. And if all of that sounds like a totally not- your- thing kind of thing, you just assumed mindfulness wasn't for you. Meanwhile, you're standing at the microwave, reheating your coffee for the third time this morning while checking your emails on your phone and wondering why your jaws clenched like you're heading into, I don't know, an arena with a lion. But I'm gonna share a not so secret secret with you. Mindfulness has zero to do with clearing your mind. You certainly don't need to schedule it into your already busy day, and you definitely don't need to sit still to do it. And it works. And you know why it works? Because you were born with a brain that's wired to self-regulate it itself if you teach it how. So unless this is your first rodeo with me, it's gonna be no surprise that I'm gonna step into a bit of brain science for a minute here. When you're feeling stressed, overwhelmed, frazzled, there's two major players in your brain involved. One is currently offline or cowering in the background, and one is in full gallop running the entire show. So let's go with the one that's running the show right now, and that's your amygdala. It's your brain's hyperactive guard dog. You know, the kind of highly trained mission specific overprotective Belgian Malanoise dog - on amphetamines. It's lightning fast, it's super reactive. And it's just a bit of a drama queen, really. But it actually has an important role. Its job is to keep you alive. It's located in the deep down in the in the oldest part of our brains that evolved to keep our most ancient ancestors alive. The cave people that didn't have it, they're not your ancestors because those ones just wouldn't have survived. But it's not just, you know, hanging out there waiting for a lion to jump out of the bushes or a car to slam on its brakes in front of us. It's also scanning for things that stress you out. A tone of voice, body language, and facial expressions, deadlines, the email that you haven't answered yet. In modern life, let me tell you, it is not getting many breaks because the reality is that it can't tell the difference between that lion waiting in the arena - and your inbox. So it's firing all the time. And when it fires, another of its jobs is to flood our system with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, the things that help those ancestors prepare to run or to fight, hence the term fight or flight system. When that happens, it directs literally all of your cognitive resources to what it thinks is most important. Your focus so that you can pay closer attention to the potential threat, your heart rate to pump extra oxygen to your muscles so that you can run or fight, and that adrenaline, it's also pretty much stripping you of your patience. So, how's that sounding so far? Like I've been spying on your life? That's because it's the same for all of us. All right, so let's move now to the part of our brain that's offline when this happens, your prefrontal cortex. It's the calm, rational, thoughtful part of our brain. Consider it the CEO or the regulator. Our decision making, our emotional regulation, our perspective, and compassion all happen in that part of our brain. Unfortunately, it tends to take a step back as soon as that hyperactive guard dog starts barking. It only likes to work when our nervous system feels safe. If the dog's barking, the CEO's locked in the boardroom with the blinds closed and the door locked. We don't actually lose our emotional regulation when we're stressed. We just temporarily lose access to it while the dog's barking. So the CEO is still in the building, but we have to muzzle the dog before it's going to peek its head back out of the boardroom door. The problem is that if your amygdala doesn't know the difference between that lion we talked about in the bushes and your inbox, when your inbox or message notifications ping over and over as your inbox is filling up, you see the email or the envelope with the bill you know you don't have the money to pay right now, or your boss's name shows up on your call display when you're in the hard middle of something, or after hours, your brain screams, "THIS IS HOW WE DIE!!" That's where micro-moments come in. Mini moments of mindfulness that can help bring your prefrontal cortex back online. And seriously, quality mindfulness, like I talk about in my episode on "Mindfulness As A Strategy", definitely has its place. And I will continue to encourage it until the cows come home. But your brain doesn't need 30 or 15 or even 10 minutes to shift into a slightly calmer, quieter state of mind. What can work when you just don't have that thirty, fifteen, ten minutes kind of time is interruption, awareness, and just an intentional pause, even for a minute - or a few seconds if you're in a pinch. Which might sound almost too simple to work until you understand what your brain's actually doing in that moment. So for me, a micro- moment might mean stopping to actually pay attention while I'm filling my water bottle up at the cooler in the lunchroom at work. Maybe just listening to the sound of the water swishing around in the bottle as it fills. Not because I'm some kind of super- cool Zen type person. Seriously, I'd love to be, but I'm not even f*cking close. I know it works to start shifting me out of that tight-chested brain feels like it's on fire, fight or flight mode, where I can feel my guard dog running the show. Funny thing about that whole water bottle thing, though, is that sometimes it makes me feel like I have to pee... But that, of course, just gives me a slightly longer pause moment because uh now I have to go to the bathroom before I head back to my desk. But, anyways, the cool thing about this, is that pause, when you pay attention to your breath or focus on a moment or activity for just a few seconds - like even just a few seconds - sends a message to your nervous system. It kind of gently pats your guard dog on the head, smooths down its hackles, and reminds it that we're not actually dying. You're telling it, "It's all right.. we're okay". That little pause can start to lower cortisol and adrenaline and activate what's called our parasympathetic nervous system and allows our CEO to peek its head out of the boardroom door. And just because I find some of this stuff absolutely friggin' fascinating, and because it's my show and I get to talk about what I want to, let's talk about that parasympathetic nervous system. Because for me, what helps me remember to actually do some of this stuff - well, most of the time, anyways... I always say, "Perfect has been canceled until further notice" - is understanding why something works, what's happening behind the scenes that makes it work. Our parasympathetic nervous system is the part of our nervous system that takes control after stress has been activated, when it's time to slow our heart rate, calm our body down, reduce those stress hormones. It likes to restore what's called homeostasis, which is just a fancy term for balance in our bodies. Sometimes it's referred to as the rest and digest state - I recently heard the slightly less elegant "feed and breed" system - in our in our nervous system. When we pause even for a few seconds and bring attention to something in the present moment. Maybe it's your breath, maybe it's a bird singing out your window, maybe it's that you have to pee because the water swirling around as you fill up your water bottle has activated your bladder. We're activating that parasympathetic nervous system, which counteracts the sympathetic fight or flight of our amygdala, which automatically starts increasing the activity in our prefrontal cortex. So you're not just feeling calmer, you're letting the CEO out of the boardroom to take charge of the operations again. And that shift, it's not gonna magically provide you with Zen like calm and serenity - God knows I will never have that - but it will move you out of the "house is on fire" mode and back into "I think someone burnt the toast and set the fire alarm off". And sometimes, you know, we've just got to take what we can get. All right, so over time, though, with repetition that lets your brain and body know that ultimately you've got this, your brain starts to build new, calmer, less easily triggered neural pathways that start to respond a little more calmly to stressful situations. That's neuroplasticity. And I know it's like, a much, much referenced term in recent years, but it's the capacity of our incredible brain to rewire itself. A kind of fancy way to say that our brain changes and gets better at what it practices. Practice rushing, practice knee-jerk reacting, practice letting yourself stay stressed and anxious, your brain gets better and better at doing just that. But if you practice pausing, paying attention, and some sort of action to help you regulate yourself, even in tiny imperfect moments or when you don't feel like you're getting it quite "right", and that was in quotes, right? Guess what? Your brain starts to develop that pattern in your nervous system, and slowly it begins to trust that this is just how you are. We can't eliminate stress, and we can't eliminate things that cause a reaction in us. What we can do is train our brains how to come back to homeostasis just a little faster and stay regulated for just a little longer. So here's the unfortunate truth. One deep breath or a meaningless mantra isn't going to fix our guard dog's propensity to react. God knows I wish it could. But the more often we pause, take that breath, stop to pay attention, take that moment, the more reflexive to a more automatic, self-calming type of response it becomes over time. Not avoiding stress because we can't do that. This is how we become more resilient to it. And that's really the goal, right? So let's get into some strategies you can take away with you next. Okay, time for a quick pause - and hold on - Don't go reaching for that skip 15 seconds button. I see your finger twitching. But if you're getting something out of this episode, following and sharing costs you nothing. And neither do the tools that I've created to support you. There's a link to my free resources down in the show notes. Things like "The Bounce Back Blueprint", mindfulness tools, and the new "Stress-Whisperer Toolkit". Resources you can actually use in real life. Free for you, huge deal for me. And if you ever want to help keep the podcast running, there's always a buy me a coffee link in the show notes as well. Or you can just keep listening. That works too. Alright, let's get back to it. I want to throw this bit of food for thought at you now because I want to rewire how you think about calm. Calm isn't something you find outside of yourself. It's something you practice in small actions and choices until your brain starts choosing it automatically. And don't confuse "calm" with "serene". At least I sure don't for me. For me, serene is the utter calm of sitting on my back deck, listening to the birds sing, watching the sun go down, or sitting by the water, listening to it gurgle down a stream or lap up against the shore. That's serene. Calm, on the other hand, is more of a state of mind that I can stop to feel for a minute in between doing things, or that I can bring myself to with a few deep breaths, or a five senses exercise if I'm feeling tense. Or even just move closer to by walking slowly towards a meeting room and taking a second to pause before I walk in the door, or taking a micro moment right before I hit join for a virtual meeting. Because unfortunately, one of the things our brain does really well is choosing chaos overcome, especially if that's what we've practiced all our lives. And that, my friends, is where this whole mini moments of mindfulness thing really gets powerful. So let's take all of this out of our brains, sort of, and into real life, because real life is where you can either lean in and decide it's time for your brain to go back to K-9 basic training, or you can go back to scrolling. No judgments, your guard dog. Let's start with the coffee pause. How about if instead of grabbing your phone while your coffee brews or reheats and starting to scroll and absorb, you know, nine advertisements trying to sell you something, four problems that you have no control over, nine negative political posts, and your aunt's new crochet project on social media, you just stand there, feeling your feet on the floor. You pay attention to your breathing... you smell the coffee brewing... and act like the calm, centered, regulated adult that you want to be, for the 23 seconds it takes for the Kurig to brew your cup of coffee. That is a super cheap nervous system reset right there. And if you don't drink coffee, try my water bottle pause instead. Instead of thinking about the report you're halfway through writing, and the seven unread emails in your inbox asking you to do God- knows- what that currently has you in full activation mode - while you're standing there filling your water bottle, how about switching your focus to the bottle filling with water? The sound of the dispenser doing its thing at at my work. It's a filtering machine on the counter that makes sort of a hissing sound. Or the sound of the water gurgling in the bottle or the cup. How the bottle's feeling heavier and heavier as it fills up. Even if it's a small cup or bottle, you've just grabbed yourself anywhere from, I don't know, 15 to 45 seconds of micro-mindfulness. And trust me, taking your mind off of whatever you were working on at your desk for that brief little interlude won't interrupt your "flow". (Did you get that? Flow? Water? I kill me sometimes...) Anyways, if you're like me, you might just score yourself a two-minute extension on that mini break because listening to the water bottle means you have to pee. What about the rest of the day? You might be asking, "What about when I'm not drinking coffee or refilling my water bottle and would look stupid standing in the middle of the room with a vacant expression on my face?" You can try the doorway pause. The cheapest of cheap seats micro- mindfulness moments. Every time you walk through a door, and especially before you walk through the door to a meeting - pause. One focused, paid- attention- to breath in, one focused, paid- attention- to breath out. Why? Because you're interrupting your autopilot and you're giving your brain one breath to transition into the next arena of focus. And if you're worried that you might look stupid standing there doing nothing for three whole seconds, you won't. Nobody is going to notice. (We really do think people pay way more attention to us than they actually do. And there's studies to show that. It's called "The Spotlight Effect".) But if you really are worried about that, physically shift or adjust something, pretend you're smoothing your sweater or your jacket down, adjusting your tie, shifting your laptop or paperwork. But seriously, nobody is going to notice it anyways. Okay, let's talk about shifting your drive home from traffic chaos and frustration into let's call it the courageously calm commute. You're in traffic. You're hitting every single red light on the route home. And you're pretty sure you're stuck behind the slowest person on the f*cking planet. (Be kind. They might be a 17-year-old new driver being extra careful in their mom's car, or the 72-year-old man who's driven by way too many horrible crashes and drives that way because they sure as hell don't want to be the next one.) I really try hard when I'm finding myself frustrated beyond all reason behind the wheel to take a breath and remember that not everyone has a lead foot like me. And no self-recriminations about my annoyance, no perfection, because God knows at the time my frustration is real. And, you know, I don't check that frustration every single time, but I do at least try. But let's face it, our brain's first reaction is "Woo-hoo! Let's spiral!" So you can either let that spiral happen as you, you know, tailgate the person in front of you and then flip them the bird as you floor it past them at the first opportunity, or you can drop your shoulders... take a breath... maybe, you know, take a virtuous page from Johanna's reminder to herself... and accept that this is just the reality of today's commute. So you might as well lean into reality and regulate your nervous system on your way to wherever you're going. And speaking as a mom of three kids - grown now, but I've done the whole dinner and extracurricular activities juggle - who learned to appreciate my 25-minute commute home for the calm- before- the- storm that it often was, I might I just toss in here that if you're on your way home to a whole 'nother scene of chaos and still haven't figured out what you're going to make for dinner before you put on your after-school chauffeur hat, this might just be a good opportunity to begin making the courageously calm commuted daily routine. The truth is that we have a whole bunch of opportunities throughout our days to incorporate moments of mini- mindfulness that can add up to a shit- ton of brain retraining. How about taking a breath and doing some kind, generous, and compassionate people watching while you're stuck in line at the grocery store? Did you ever notice that there's always music playing there? Listen to it while you, inconspicuously of course, look around at the people around you. Appreciate the diversity of people that surround you. We really do come across a fascinating variety of people during our day. Take a moment to smile at the harassed mom telling her kid for the tenth time that no, they cannot have one of the chocolate bars strategically placed at the checkout line... or at the elderly man with the same Wonder Bread, six bananas, and carton of homogenized milk that he's bought every week since he had to start shopping for himself. Or that cute young couple that probably just recently moved in together with a cart full of junk their moms would never approve of. One of the things that I've started doing is I power pack my teeth brushing time. I've started to do some of what's called habit stacking, and one of those things that I do is while I'm brushing my teeth, I'm also doing 10 squats and some focused breathing. Washing your hands is also a great time to take a mini moment of mindfulness. Everyone expects you to stand there washing your hands long enough to sing the ABCs. So instead of rushing through it, try focusing all your senses on what you're doing. The sound of the water running, feeling the temperature of the water and looking at the lather, smelling the scent of the soap. Because you see, this isn't about becoming perfect, or even thinking that we're going to be able to meet every stressful event that happens in our lives with flawless calm. We're not. We're humans living a very human experience of the messy day-to-day life that is ours, along with chaotic and unexpected events. And with a nervous system that just really wants to keep us safe physically and socially. So it sees lions in every shrub, shadow, cupboard. What this is about is catching yourselves in the moments during your regularly scheduled chaos, noticing your triggers, whether that's feeling rushed, irritated, overwhelmed, or overstimulated, and even briefly hacking in to interrupt the pattern in real time. So this week, instead of giving you reflection prompts, I'm gonna do something a little different. I'm gonna leave you with a challenge. Because the challenge will actually kind of require you to do some reflection and thinking. And like I always say, be kind and self-compassionate. Because I want you to look for times and spaces to apply my challenges. But here's what I want you to do. I want you to try The Three-Second Challenge. For the next two weeks, until we meet here again, I want you to pick one moment every day where you insert a pause. Even just three seconds. Maybe that's a breath or two, maybe that's just a conscious drop of your shoulders before you step into a room. Whatever. That's it. Don't add more to your already full plate. Build it into your current life and the reality of what you do in your day-to-day life. Attach it to what you already do anyway, whether that's coffee, water, doorways, your car, the grocery store lineup. Because real life is where we live every day. And there really are opportunities for micro moments of mindfulness everywhere. This week I did a bit of myth busting about mindfulness and dug into some of the brain science behind not just why it works, but why it's essential for resiliency and how even people who think they are way too busy for that mindfulness nonsense really do have lots of time for it every day. Mindfulness isn't something you figure out how to set time aside for to practice perfectly. It's something you practice imperfectly over and over during a bunch of the little imperfect moments throughout your day. The real life, messy moments when you choose to meet those little storms a little bit differently. As we wrap up, I want to leave you with this. If you've been telling yourself that you don't have time for mindfulness, maybe you've been trying to view it from too narrow a perspective or have just been thinking about it wrong. Because you don't need to time block for mindfulness. It just needs a few seconds sometimes, where you choose real calm over the doom scrolling that quietly multiplies your stress in the background. Your brain doesn't need more time. It needs you to pay attention to the little moments that are already there, waiting for you to notice them. Thank you for being here with me today. I would love it if you came and said hi to me on Instagram at transformative journeys.johanna or visit my website, say to me hi to me over there. I also do an enhanced version of this podcast on YouTube, on-screen prompts, beautiful visuals. It's a just a more immersive experience, and you can head over to my YouTube channel at Transformative Journeys and check it out there. And if you have an idea that you'd like to hear me talk about, please leave me a message because you might just hear it on a future episode. And last, I'm going to do what every single podcaster does because I'm going to ask you to please tap the bell or the like. You tap it... you take a chance on subscribing... and I will keep dropping the best of what's in my heart and my slightly sarcastic soul - because I believe in learning together. Until next time, this is Johanna reminding you, that it doesn't matter if you fall... What matters is how well you bounce. This is Transformative Journeys. I'll see you next time. Your support helps me keep creating free tools and honest conversations. Because let's be real, even when you love what you're doing, sometimes it takes a whole lot of metaphorical duct tape to hold it all together. If you'd like to toss a little love into the duct tape fund, you can now support the podcast at buymeacoffee.com. I'll put a link in the show notes. Hey, just a disclaimer, this podcast is for entertainment and informational purposes only and should not replace the advice of a medical or mental health expert. I'm not a licensed counselor or therapist, just a human with a mic and a story of growth and resilience. No degree, no fancy letters after my name. I'm a full-time student at the School of Hard Knox University of Life, where I figure I'll graduate when I take my last breath. In other words, I'm just Joanna, a fellow human being on my journey through this thing called life, and your guide on this transformative journey.