21 Mindfulness Exercises & Activities For Adults (+ PDF)

mindfulness techniques, exercises and interventions

People who meditate are happier, healthier, and more successful than those who don’t.

The amazing benefits of practicing meditation and mindfulness are available to everyone who has the time to practice these skills.

If you have already tried meditation, mindfulness or other positive psychology interventions before, you may have thought it “wasn’t for you” after a couple of tries.

But like any skill, mindfulness takes practice. Try it again! Sometimes the only thing standing between our goals and us is a little bit of direction.

Hopefully, this article can provide the direction for you to give mindfulness a try either in your own life, your therapy, or your coaching sessions. Let’s dive in!

Before you read on, we thought you might like to download our 3 Mindfulness Exercises for free. These science-based, comprehensive exercises will not only help you cultivate a sense of inner peace throughout your daily life but will also give you the tools to enhance the mindfulness of your clients, students, or employees.

Group therapy that incorporates mindfulness has shown some promising results. It is as effective as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), a staple of the clinical psychology world (Kocovski, Fleming, Hawley, Huta, & Antony, 2013).

There is also evidence that group mindfulness meditation therapy is as effective as individual CBT (Sundquist et al., 2015). In a global climate with few clinical psychologists in relation to the need for them, and in a time when individual therapy time is limited and expensive, the proven efficacy of group-based therapy is great news.

Even if you do not feel a need to visit a therapist, there are mindfulness-focused groups that share and deepen meditation practice (Brach, 2016). Here are four exercises from such groups.

One such group mindfulness-based treatment program by Fleming & Kocovski (2007) aimed to reduce social anxiety. It is a good example of how mindfulness exercises can be incorporated into a group setting for its various benefits.

In this example, the exercises used have proven effective for treating social anxiety disorder in particular; however, they can be applied to many other group settings with positive results.

The treatment plan involves groups of about 8 members meeting for 2 hours, every week for 12 weeks. The first portion of each session is devoted to a short mindfulness exercise and discussion.

The treatment plan’s mindfulness exercises went as follows:

There are many different mindfulness exercises mentioned here which were specifically put together for the aim of reducing social anxiety disorder; however, the first three exercises are commonly used in group sessions to encourage mindfulness.

A description of each of these group exercises can be found below.

This is a great introductory exercise for beginners to start practicing mindfulness since it can be attempted by anyone with any kind of food (although one with an interesting or unusual texture, smell, or taste is best).

In this exercise, the facilitator provides participants with a few raisins and asks that they pretend they have never seen a raisin before. The facilitator then asks them to pay careful attention to:

Focusing on the single object of the raisin is meant to bring the participant’s mind to the present, to what is right in front of them. We may be used to raisins, and not used to taking time to actually notice them.

When you follow these instructions and take notice, it is much easier to focus on what is in front of you. If your mind does wander, that is natural too. Gently guide it back to the exercise.

Another popular exercise for practitioners of mindfulness is called the Body Scan. It requires very little in the way of props or tools, and it is also easily accessible for most beginners.

Would you like to follow a Body Scan right now? Try this 30 minute guided narrative by expert and founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Jon Kabat Zinn:

A typical Body Scan runs through each part of the body, paying special attention to the way each area feels. The scan usually moves systematically through the body, e.g. starting at the feet and moving upwards as follows:

After the Body Scan is complete and the participants feel ready to come back to the room, they can slowly open their eyes and move naturally to a comfortable sitting position.

Now that you have a firmer understanding of the Body Scan, listen to this mindful body scan script.

For some, the absence of visual stimuli can feel stifling. After all, a healthy imagination does not come naturally to everyone.

The activity of Mindful Seeing may be helpful to anyone who identifies with this.

It is a simple exercise, requiring only a window with some kind of a view. The facilitator guides the group following these steps:

There’s an extensive group treatment plan by Fleming and Kocovski’s (2007) that offers a glimpse into how to use mindfulness in any kind of group session and provides detailed worksheets, exercises, and handouts which can provide inspiration and guidance for your group facilitation.

This last activity is extracted from the Positive Psychology Toolkit© and introduces mindful listening as a group exercise.

Mindful listening is an important skill and can be a great group mindfulness exercise. In general, people thrive when they feel fully “heard” and “seen,” and mindful listening offers a break from focusing on the self or our own response.

Instead, this form of listening can create an inner stillness where both parties feel free of preconceptions or judgments, and the listener is not distracted by inner chatter whilst learning valuable positive communication skills.

The Mindful Listening exercise involves these steps:

Those questions are:

In addition to the group activities here, you may also be interested in trying gentle yoga or Qigong, both of which involve a deliberate posture, purposeful breath, and an emphasis on awareness. Both of these activities have provided evidence for the benefits of mindfulness (Newsome, Waldo, & Gruszka, 2012).

There are several ways to engage in mindfulness on an individual level, including worksheets, techniques, and different exercises.

If the idea of participating in group mindfulness exercises is anxiety-provoking or stressful for yourself or your clients, then diving into mindfulness practice alone can be the best way to proceed.

Here are six exercises that can help to build mindfulness in different ways.

The Observer Meditation (download the PDF here) looks at why it is worthwhile to detach from our internal thoughts and feelings—an important part of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, in which mindfulness plays a large role.

Adopting an Observer perspective can help us put some distance between who we are and problematic domains in life that we might be overidentifying with.

To begin the exercise, follow these steps:

If you find any emotions coming up, recognize them and create space for them. Then bring your attention back to your observing self—your feelings and thoughts are there, but you are separate from them, noticing them. This is the “Observer you”.

This exercise can be continued for as long as desired and there are many stages you can work through that will help you practice being an observer of yourself. It is not an easy exercise at first because we are often habitually inclined to react to and over-identify with our feelings.

The goal of evoking the Observing Self is to enter a separate mode which allows you to step back from yourself and your experiences. Simultaneously, however, you are connecting with a deeper constant self that is unaffected by dynamic emotions.

This exercise is called “five senses,” and provides guidelines on practicing mindfulness quickly in nearly any situation. All that is needed is to notice something you are experiencing with each of the five senses.

Follow this order to practice the Five Senses:

Look around you and bring your attention to five things that you can see. Pick something that you don’t normally notice, like a shadow or a small crack in the concrete.

Bring awareness to four things that you are currently feeling, like the texture of your pants, the feeling of the breeze on your skin, or the smooth surface of a table you are resting your hands on.

Take a moment to listen, and note three things that you hear in the background. This can be the chirp of a bird, the hum of the refrigerator, or the faint sounds of traffic from a nearby road.

Bring your awareness to smells that you usually filter out, whether they’re pleasant or unpleasant. Perhaps the breeze is carrying a whiff of pine trees if you’re outside, or the smell of a fast-food restaurant across the street.

Focus on one thing that you can taste right now, at this moment. You can take a sip of a drink, chew a piece of gum, eat something, notice the current taste in your mouth, or even open your mouth to search the air for a taste.

This is a quick and relatively easy exercise to bring you to a mindful state quickly. If you only have a minute or two, or don’t have the time or tools to try a body scan or fill out a worksheet, the five senses exercise can help you or your clients bring awareness to the current moment in a short amount of time.

You can find another great exercise if you are strapped for time in this 3-Step Mindfulness Worksheet. In this exercise, there are only three steps:

Step 1: step out of “auto-pilot” to bring awareness to what you are doing, thinking, and sensing at this moment.

Step 2: bring awareness to the breathing for six breaths or a minute.

Step 3: expand awareness outward, first to the body then to the environment.

When you are ready to finish the exercise, open your eyes slowly and try to carry that mindfulness with you as you go about your day.

One core process that can be influenced by mindfulness practice is our ability to observe our thoughts, emotions, and sensations without reacting to fix them, hide them, or solve them. This awareness creates room for choice between impulses, and action which can help develop coping skills and positive behavioral change.

1. As you were0 .imagining, did you notice any of your thoughts? 2. As you were imagining, did you notice any of your emotions?

Unlike meditations or a body scan, this exercise is quick to perform and useful in getting a mindfulness practice started.

With meditations and the body scan, thoughts often pop up, and keeping a quiet and clear head can be a challenge. This last exercise can be the perfect technique for those with busy lives and minds. The exercise is broken into three sections, one per minute, and works as follows:

Keeping a quiet mind can be rather challenging, and thoughts will often pop up. The idea is not to block them, but rather to let them come into your mind and then disappear again. Try to just observe them.

All the exercises mentioned above can be used for the benefit of yourself, individual clients, and even in group settings. They are beneficial to all client groups; however, some will be better suited than others, so a method of open-minded trial and error can often be necessary.

The most important part of mindfulness is to recognize that it is a training of the mind, and like any exercise will take some time to see the benefits. The trick is to persevere, approach the process with self-compassion, and allow for reflection, change, and flexibility between different techniques and interventions.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (or DBT) is a type of cognitive-behavioral therapy that is mainly used to treat individuals with borderline personality disorders.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy is characterized by the following steps:

Mindfulness is a core skill taught in DBT, as it helps clients gain awareness of their own thoughts and feelings (Jennings & Apsche, 2014).

In one study, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy-Mindfulness (DBTM) training was added to general psychiatric treatment to test its effectiveness. A module on mindfulness was developed to help clients achieve the “wise mind,” and focused on two sets of skills—the “what” skills and the “how” skills (Soler et al., 2012).

This first set of skills is meant to help the client learn how to:

These skills allow the client to be aware of what is happening to them and of their part in their own experience. Becoming aware of their own thoughts and grounded in the present forms the foundation for the next set of “how” skills.

The “how” skills relate to the goal of teaching clients how to observe, describe, and participate in their own experience. This set of skills is intended to help clients:

The clients were also taken through a series of other mindfulness interventions including mindful breathing, the body scan, and other simple awareness practices.

Individuals in this study who received DBTM training, in addition to the usual treatment, had enhanced benefits compared to the group who received only the usual psychiatric treatment: the more minutes an individual spent practicing mindfulness, the greater the improvements in psychiatric symptoms (Soler et al., 2012).

DBT clearly has something to teach us all in its application of a wide range of mindfulness techniques and exercises. Let’s take a look at a few easily applicable examples.

These five exercises are quick and easy and can be put into practice every day.

This exercise calls for nothing but a leaf and your attention.

Pick up a leaf, hold it in your hand, and give it your full attention for five minutes.

Notice the colors, the shape, the texture, and the patterns. This will bring you into the present and align your thoughts with your current experience.

As with the raisin exercise described above, this exercise calls for mindful eating.

Pay attention to what you are holding, notice the feeling of it in your hands. Once you have noticed the texture, the weight, the color, etc., bring your awareness to the smell.

Finally, move on to eating, but do so slowly and with concentrated attention. Notice the taste and its texture against your tongue. This exercise may help you discover new experiences with familiar foods.

Download the exercise here as a PDF.

This exercise is a staple of mindfulness, designed to simply enhance your awareness of your own thoughts.

To begin, sit or lie down in a comfortable position and try to let all tension in your body dissipate. Focus on your breathing first, then move your awareness to what it feels like to be in your body, and finally move on to your thoughts.

Be aware of what comes into your head, but resist the urge to label or judge these thoughts. Think of them as a passing cloud in the sky of your mind.

If your mind wanders to chase a thought, acknowledge whatever it was that took your attention and gently guide your attention back to your thoughts.

In this exercise, you begin by closing your eyes and listening for the cue. When you hear it, your aim is to focus your attention on the sound and continue your concentration until it fades completely. This exercise helps you to keep yourself firmly grounded in the present. You can use the audio below:

The goal is simple: to focus your attention on the center of the shifting pattern of color. You can let your mind wander freely, noticing whatever thoughts come into your head but staying in the present.

This experience is similar to the well-known phenomenon of the quiet fixation that results from staring at a candle flame or a campfire.

The same focus and deep thought can be brought on by this exercise, but be careful not to lose yourself in thought, and instead stay present with the moment and let your thoughts pass by.

This exercise requires a video to practice, you can use the one below:

Mindfulness has been a crux of therapy for patients with borderline personality disorder, and it also has applications for people without a diagnosis of mental illness.

People anywhere on the mental health spectrum can benefit from mindfulness techniques. It helps regulate emotions and can be a helpful resource for management and coping (Arch & Craske, 2006; Dubert, Schumacher, Locker, Gutierrez, & Barnes, 2016).

Mindfulness is used in the treatment of depression to reduce symptoms and lowers the risk of debilitating relapse. One study with 11 individuals suffering from depression concluded that there are three keys for making mindfulness effective in the treatment of depression (Nauman, 2014 June):

We’ve described practices focused on breathing and muscle relaxation already (such as the Three Minute Breathing Space or the Body Scan).

If you are interested in learning more about mindfulness techniques for treating depression, you can look into Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy.

Alternatively, watch this inspiring TEDtalk by Zindel Segal who explains the mindful approach needed to not only address depression but also manage recovery and reduce the risk of relapse.

By continuing to think through your feelings during meditation, you can stop and redirect your attention back to awareness of sensations in your body. Segal offers many other tips on bringing awareness to our physical experience.

At one point, Segal asks the audience to think about their feet, and later, to experience the sensation of their feet. The difference is profound and offers a gateway to accessible mindfulness and meditation.

Mindfulness techniques can also discharge acute or chronic anger. As one of our strongest emotions, anger can be hard to view objectively and defuse. Mindfulness helps create space between stimulus and an immediate, impulsive response.

This technique can help you deal with the experience of anger (Cullen, Pons, & Mindful Staff, 2016):

This exercise can be repeated as many times as necessary. It is recommended to work your way up from milder experiences of anger to the most intense and memorable episodes.

Practicing this technique can help you to defuse chronic anger in a rather counterintuitive manner: by accepting and mindfully feeling your anger, you can take control of the experience and compassionately address it.

For other resources and techniques on dealing with anger through mindfulness, you can try our Leaves on a Stream MP3. Alternatively, you can follow this 20 minutes guided anger management mindfulness meditation:

Mindfulness techniques can also aid an undiagnosed individual who suffers from occasional (or not-so-occasional) anxiety.

A meta-analysis in 2010 advocated for the effectiveness of mindfulness exercises on anxiety and depression. The researchers found that mindfulness-based therapy was moderately effective for treating anxiety and improving mood and that the effects lasted beyond the initial improvements (Hofmann, Sawyer, Witt, & Oh, 2010).

To begin applying mindfulness to your anxiety, or that of your clients, Mindful.org has provided a short description of 10 attitudes that will help build the foundation for successfully addressing anxiety:

Take note of how you feel. Afterward, reflect on your experience and describe it, with a special focus on your feelings during the process.

For a rather more simple method of applying mindfulness to anxiety, you can try this quick exercise:

By recognizing these thoughts for what they are, you may come to realize that they are not true, and consequently be able to let them go (Hofmann, 2013). If you are interested in trying other mindfulness exercises to address anxiety, you can check out our extensive range of mindfulness articles.

For more information on anxiety, and how to approach dealing with it through mindfulness, you can also listen to Dr. Kim Taylor Show. She clarifies the signs and symptoms of anxiety and offers techniques to treat and manage anxiety.

Addiction is a serious issue that should be addressed by a mental health professional or an institution that has proven effective in treating addiction. However, there are some mindfulness techniques you can use to supplement addiction management.

Mindfulness has been shown to help those suffering from addiction by decreasing their usage and reducing the occurrence of more long-term psychiatric problems (“Extinguish addiction,” 2016).

The practice of mindfulness increases the number and strength of connections in the brain, allowing us to become more aware of our body and more effective at regulating our emotions. It also helps individuals recognize, tolerate, and cope with negative emotions (“Extinguish addiction,” 2016).

One mindfulness technique is specifically crafted for those suffering from cravings. There is a theory that people develop cravings through incentive sensitization, a process that occurs in four steps:

The result of this process is a very strong association between the substance and the “reward” (the feeling an individual gets when using the substance).

Following this theory, it is not the fault of the individual that they experience cravings. They are not punished with cravings for being weak, or lazy, or unwilling to stop. Cravings are like intruders on the mind, uninvited guests that try to influence behavior.

Thus, those struggling with addiction can use mindfulness to pause, identify the cravings and label them as intruders, and thereby give themselves permission to ignore them. Mindfulness can turn the cravings into passing thoughts that may disappear simply by acknowledging their presence (“Mindfulness meditation,” 2017).

For more information and a guided meditation on dealing with addiction cravings you can watch this short video by Jessica Graham:

If you are looking for more comprehensive information on the neurological origins of our addictive behaviors and how we can challenge addiction at the level of the brain, you can watch this fascinating talk by Dr. Judson Brewer:

I hope that I provided you with enough techniques, exercises, and activities to bring you and your clients the benefits of mindfulness.

Mindfulness can be useful to a variety of populations. It is a relatively easy practice with significant results on the brain that can enhance the quality of life, self-confidence, and peace of mind of those using it.

If you haven’t yet, consider trying an activity mentioned above. Over time, the exercises help increase the awareness of our bodies, our thoughts, and our selves.

Feel free to share your experiences with mindfulness in the comments below, as well as any techniques or exercises that you use to cultivate mindfulness in your life.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our 3 Mindfulness Exercises for free.