i need help organizing this and improving it. Blocking For Essay 3Research, Revision, and Reflection

Each of these boxes represents one paragraph in your final essay. You will be able to use much of your essay 2 in this final essay with some small revisions. You may, of course, organize your essay differently than suggested here. This is just a map for you. Most of your journals can be used to build these paragraphs.

Body Paragraph 6: Discuss two mindful practices that have helped you to relieve stress and have better focus(this is a redesign of your essay 2, body paragraphs 2, and 3)

1. Introduce one solution to reducing stress and repairing focus as mindfulness.
2. Describe what your activities were and how they generated a state of mindfulness. (You may want to combine 2 of your most impactful body paragraphs from essay 2 on your mindful activities in this one paragraph.
3. Introduce one source that will support what you are claiming about you mindful activities.
4. Use a short quote or sentence from the source and put it in quotation marks. Cite it using parentheses afterward.
5. Describe your activity. Add sensory details and description to help your reader/audience understand what your experience was like when you engaged in this activity (Go back to your journal and grab the best description!)
6. Introduce another mindful activity that was effective for you in restoring your peace of mind.
7. Add a short phrase or paraphrase from another source that you read about mindfulness that supports your strategy. Cite it with an in text citation (----).
8. Connect the above source to your strategy. How does it support your choice?
9. Conclude your paragraph with a sentence about what this experience taught you. What did you learn?

From Chaos to Clarity

Where is your focus right now? Are you all in as you are reading these words on your screen or is your attention divided? I was tired of multitasking and going from one thing to the next. One minute I would be studying for a college exam and the next I would find myself captivated by the latest workout leggings and scrolling on a stranger's Instagram. I knew I had to make a change if I wanted to become the best version of myself. Switching my focus from one task to the next never seemed to ever get me to where I wanted to go any faster. With consistent mindfulness practice I went from being distracted and stressed to being fully present in all areas my life. I have been able to improve my focus, become a better listener, and cultivate an awareness of my attention to break free from life's distractions. Where you place your attention in life is everything, don't let anyone or anything steal it from you. When we can home in on where our attention is at any given moment, we get to reap all the benefits of being fully present in what we decide to put our energy into.

We are living in a time where any which way you look and anywhere you go, you will surely find somebody looking down at the bright light of a phone in their hands. Go to your nearest coffee shop and there are many more people with their heads in their laptops ang phones instead of connecting with one another. Even looking at drivers on the road you will find them looking at their phones at a redlight or looking at their apps on the screen in their dash. It's sad to say I have done all the above. Having access to Wi-Fi and your phone on and nearby is required for almost every career, so I don't think we are all at fault. I have struggled to maintain my focus, especially while studying to take an entrance exam to get into a nursing program called the TEAS. It had been a while since I have been in high school, so it felt like starting over when studying concepts like algebra and chemistry. I downloaded an app on my phone to prepare for the test and with all the other more entertaining apps on my phone, I found it hard to keep myself focused on studying. I remember answering practice test questions and then when I got them wrong, I would get discouraged and go on Instagram for instant gratification. I continued this studying procrastination process, where I studied here and there and whenever I could. When it finally came the day to take the test, I was disappointed to see my score in the math portion. I wondered if my lack of focus on this topic had much to do with it. The difficult thing for me is knowing that as much as I want to put my phone away and get off social media, it is the very thing that I am learning from as well. After investigating ways to take my focus back I started making it much more difficult for me to get on these social media apps that I lost so much of my time and energy out of my day on. Taking back my focus is so important to me. Sometimes we lose track of time and forget that we are no longer paying attention to what matters most to us. It's so easy to let our attention get stolen right from underneath our fingertips. By reclaiming my precious attention and focusing back on my studies I was able to start again to achieve my goals.

This week I decided to commit to spending less time on social media in hopes to improve both my mental focus and attention span. I started by looking at my screen time in my phone's settings to see what I was working with. I was not surprised to see that Instagram was my most-used app; I was averaging a little over an hour a day. I thought about how large of a time chunk that is to spend on my phone, let alone on just one of the apps. My daily average of time spent on my phone was an astonishing total of 6 hours and thirty minutes a day. I knew I had to make a change to this mind-numbing scrolling habit. In my settings, I put a limit on my apps on social media to just 25 minutes daily. I did not feel ready to eliminate my usage completely on these apps. On the first day, I found it helpful, even getting ahead on my anatomy reading. However, as the days went on, I often caught myself instinctively reaching for my phone out of habit. After my 25-limit alert came up on Instagram, I would sometimes ignore it and bypass it. I had to remind myself of the intention I had set to pick up a book when I felt the urge to scroll. It got me to thinking, could I be addicted to my phone? Alyssa Deitchman notes that "the short-attention-span issue is linked to the idea that social networking encourages the reward center of the brain to signal as it does with drug use, due to the instantly gratifying nature of these simulated interactions" (Deitchman). Knowing that the algorithm on Instagram is tailored to my interests, and that it is constantly showing me things I like, it's easy to recognize how instantly gratifying it is. By reducing my time on social media, I learned how often these apps take control of my attention, and how addictive they can be.

Stress alone is a major reason behind a person lacking drive and focus, making it challenging to maintain motivation and work toward their goals. Everyone experiences stress in their lives from time to time but too much of it can cause issues.on ways to reduce my stress and improve my sleep, then actively put those ideas into practice. I took some time and thought about some areas in my life that I found brought me stress. A few came to mind; one was setting time aside every day for school and trying to get into a nursing program. Another challenge was keeping my home organized and tidy after a long day of work. Sometimes I even find my personal relationships to be causing stress. To address these stressors, I decided to create and stick to a daily schedule in order to establish a consistent routine (Protect Your Brain). One of the first changes I made was to start exercising earlier in the day rather than later. This helped me clear one task off my mind and gave me more energy throughout the day. I found that working out in the morning left me feeling refreshed and ready to face the day. I also set aside a specific time each day to focus on my online college courses. Of course, there were days when I felt tired or lacked the motivation to stick to my routine. On those days, I reminded myself of my "why"my goals of improving my health and succeeding in school (Zhou). By staying focused on my end goal, I was able to push through the moments of doubt and keep moving forward. When I was less stressed, I felt more myself and like I could take on anything I wanted that day. Being able to focus requires reducing stress as best you can.

Most people are aware of how important it is to get quality sleep consistently to feel our best both physically and mentally, but we often overlook how significantly it affects our brain's ability to function. An article from (Sharpen Thinking) states that, "When people don't get enough sleep, their attention and concentration abilities decline. Their reaction time lengthens, they're inattentive, and they don't respond as well to environmental signals." My own experience with sleep has been far less than perfect, but as of lately I have been making small changes that led to big improvements in getting good sleep. I have noticed that whenever I must work later in the day my sleep is often procrastinated. I would find myself watching one more episode of Love is Blind on Netflix and then another after getting sucked in. For a while I was staying up well past midnight dispute knowing I had to get up early in the morning. I recall my ability to focus, especially on my online courses being extremely challenging. I would start reading a PowerPoint of an anatomy lecture and then soon find myself having to reread it multiple times without retaining the information. I felt like just closing my laptop and doing something that required a lot less mental energy. Soon I became tired of being tired and was seeking strategies that would help with my bedtime procrastination. One strategy I implemented was creating boundaries around watching tv in my bed and shutting it down. It was so challenging because it had become a habit to watch tv before bed for many years. I felt motivated to stick to a routine bedtime and shut my tv off by 11:00pm after reading an article by (Zhou) "You're experiencing the immediate gratification of being awake now, whereas the potential reward of feeling good in the morning if you go to bed now is a distant possibility."Of course, there were days when I felt like staying up later and lacked the motivation to stick to my routine. On those days, I reminded myself of my "why"my goals of improving my health and succeeding in school (Zhou). By staying focused on my end goal, I was making progress in getting the best sleep I could, and my brain and body felt so much better on a good night's sleep.

Mindfulness is simply bringing your attention and awareness to the present moment you are in.Cultivating a mindfulness practice of my own has helped me alleviate stress and anxiety, connecting me to the beauty of the present momentthe only moment we truly have. I was inspired to start with the mindfulness technique of paying attention after watching a TedTalk with speaker Amishi Jha, titled "How to Tame Your Wandering Mind." Jha's encouraging message to become more mindful was to, "Pay attention to your attention."What is mindfulness? According to the staff at Mayo Clinic, "Mindfulness is a type of meditation in which you focus on being intensely aware of what you're sensing and feeling in the moment, without interpretation or judgment." (Mayo Clinic) From my own personal experience I can honestly say it's easier said than done but with continued practice I have gotten better at being mindful in my day to day. Mindfulness has helped me to pause and breathe before reacting, which has been so great in stressful situations. If I notice something evoking an emotional reaction in me I can choose a different response and make better choices. Mindfulness has helped me become a better listener because it takes me out of my head and instead in the current space and time I am physically in.

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