It’s happened. You’ve found the one, you’re engaged, and you’re now about to embark on one of the most beautiful adventures in life. But before you can reach that big day, you have a mammoth task ahead of you and honestly, where do you even start? With so much to think about it can be easy to get caught up in the madness of Wedding planning. So, have a seat, cosy up with a cuppa, and take a look at our tips on practicing mindfulness when planning your Wedding.
Help each other
If you have your heart set on a certain look or feel for your Wedding, you may find it difficult to let someone else manage the planning process. Particularly if you find it difficult to compromise on what you want. Alternatively, you could struggle to make decisions and often rely on your partner to take on these tasks. Before planning anything, sit with your partner and choose 3 priorities each. This will guarantee that you’ll either be limiting your input or making more of a contribution. Dependent on what you need to focus on. Avoid allocating tasks to one person, make this a team effort and encourage thoughts and ideas from both parties. Mindfulness is about being aware of ourselves and how we manage a situation. Acknowledge how your partner can be helped but also how you can be helped.
Take a breath
Cliché I know, but sometimes one of the biggest ways to help yourself is to stop and simply breathe. Make breathing your sole focus and work to shut out all other worries and sounds. This will always be easier said than done. But when you feel things getting too much, take a step back and breathe. Clearing your head of any Wedding Planning worries will enable you to view the situation from a completely different perspective. It will also allow you to be more mindful of your own responses.
Break away from planning
The time that you’ll be spending with your partner will largely involve planning of some sort. Whether it’s meetings with your planner or chatting through ideas with your partner, your Wedding will take up a lot of your time together. This is exactly why it’s so important to allocate time specifically to not planning. Use this opportunity to do activities that you can enjoy together or even take up a new hobby. By learning a new skill, you’ll stimulate your brain and body in ways it may not have experienced before. It will allow you to practice mindfulness together and give you a great excuse to tick a few things off your bucket list! Whatever it is, make sure it’s completely unrelated to planning and gives you the chance to spend quality time together.
Have a drink!
No, I’m not saying that you should reach for the rosé at the first sight of trouble. Equally, remember to enjoy these planning stages. Grab your friends, a stack of wedding mags, a bottle, and go have fun. Alternatively, if you’re not big on drinking – good for you, I’m very impressed at your self-control – do something to help you let your hair down. You can still go out without having to end the night stumbling through your door… at 4am… with one shoe on… that isn’t even yours…
Mindfulness encourages you to live in the moment so grab life by the horns and revel in the beauty of your surroundings.
Healthy body, healthy mind
Yes, I fully appreciate the irony of telling you to have a drink and then advising you to be healthy but stay with me on this one. Feeling physically good is a sure-fire way to becoming mentally stronger and happier. Through a well-balanced diet, regular exercise, and plenty of water, you can combat tiredness, enhance productivity, and generally look and feel a million times better. Remember that the overall goal is not a certain look or weight, it’s a feeling. You don’t need to be doing HIT workouts every day to get results. Just be mindful of how you feel, listen to your body and aim for happiness.
Acknowledge the stress
Mindfulness is not about pushing worries aside and forgetting about them. It’s a technique in place to make you more aware of those stresses and the way you can overcome them. It sounds like odd advice but when you get these worries, focus on them. A common problem we find with stress is that the thing that worries us becomes the thing to consume us, making it almost impossible to think about anything else. Including how to solve it. So, when you hit a wall; stop, breathe and, with a trusted loved one, work out the solution. Start by picking the worry apart and evaluate what the root cause is. It’s important to not dwell too much on the ‘what ifs.’ You’ve got a problem, now let’s solve it. Once you have established how the problem was caused, think about what part of it is worrying you the most. By breaking it down into smaller concerns it automatically becomes more manageable.
The 72-hour rule
A piece of advice that I’ve recently taken on and one that I wish I knew about sooner! Now, this rule won’t magically solve all your problems and there will be situations that you wouldn’t be able to apply the rule to. However, what it can do is help you to evaluate what’s important in life, which issues are worth worrying about and which ones just aren’t.
The 72-hour rule put simply is that if it won’t matter after 72 hours, then it does not matter. If you won’t feel the need to react after 72 hours, then don’t react.
Now, let’s not deny the fact that this rule is problematic so let me address this first. Just because you wouldn’t be as reactive or as bothered by an issue 72 hours later, does not mean that your feelings are not entirely justifiable upon first response. However, the focus of this rule is to establish whether you should be spending your time worrying about something that just isn’t worth it. It’s about acknowledging the stress, evaluating it, and putting it into perspective. It would be so easy for any couple planning a wedding to become stressed over problems that, at any other point in their life, they just wouldn’t be bothered by. So, help yourself, show some self-love and if you and your partner don’t deserve to be worrying over this, don’t do it.
Sleep, sleep and more sleep
Crucial not only before the big day but also in the months leading up to it. Be disciplined, set a time for when you’ll go to bed and make sure you stick to it. This doesn’t need to be a schedule that you keep to every night but on the evenings that don’t include late-night plans, by setting a ‘bedtime’ you’ll prevent yourself from spending all night planning. Your Wedding won’t be the only thing going on in your life, you may have work commitments, family commitments etc. so don’t let this consume you. Allocate slots in the day for Wedding planning to prevent it taking over work and family needs. Adults should get around 7 to 8 hours of sleep on average, which at times can be difficult to achieve, but work towards that goal so that your mind and body can get the rest it needs.
List it!
Early organisation and a breakdown of everything you need to do will enable you to have a much easier ride in the long term. It will take commitment and it’s likely to be a far from fun task – although if you’re anything like me you’ll thrive on the opportunity to get your notebook and highlighters out! But, this will give you a chance to go over everything that needs to be done and get an idea of how your Wedding will look. Work with your Wedding Planner on this. We’ll have the knowledge you need to understand every aspect of your Wedding so let us take care of the logistics so that you can concentrate on the fun stuff!
By diarising your tasks, you can prevent last-minute rushes to beat deadlines and you can put as much thought into each aspect as you want. If you can get your planning organised, you can get your thoughts organised which will make more time for you to practice mindfulness.
Back to basics
Spend time in the places that bring you the most comfort and allow you to listen to your surroundings. Ideally this would be in a quiet, outdoor space that allows you to connect with nature and open your senses up to the world around you. Equally, if a comforting space for you is sat in your favourite chair, cuddled up under a blanket with a book and mug of hot chocolate in hand, then do you! Despite the importance of being around loved ones, by having time to yourself, you can practice mindfulness without distraction. Take a look at some of our recommended Italian destinations for a luxury break from life.
Above all else, it’s incredibly important to make sure that if you are struggling, you talk to someone. Communication is key when experiencing any kind of change or big event in your life. So when you feel your stress levels rising, pick up the phone, meet with a loved one and share the load. There’s also plenty of organisations and community groups that provide support and advice whenever you need it, so speak up!
