YOUR MIND AT WORK
How do we create some mental space to think better?
When someone says, don’t think about it, there’s a good chance you struggle to let it go. And yet you might even find yourself still thinking about it in the middle of the night when you wake up. It might even still be on your mind while you are getting ready for your new day.
Perhaps you can relate to the churning machine inside your head that never sleeps called your mind.
The mind is always working. Even when you are asleep, your mind is sending all kinds of messages through the system; some are dreams that you can remember and others are simply so unconscious that you don’t register them, until you suddenly have the solution to the problem you were stuck on.
When your mind is full.
Overwhelm and anxiety is often described as the feeling of not being able to “think straight” and the feeling that thoughts are competing for your attention. The myth that we can multitask is adding even more to this feeling, creating a feeling of chaos inside because our attention is constantly being hacked by other people’s agendas. We might not even notice until the end of the day when we realized we didn't complete all that we set out to get done and we are exhausted.
It’s easy to feel that we have to solve all the problems at the same time, however the key to reclaiming our attention is to choose and prioritize what comes first and how to respond based on what matters instead of just reacting to the urgent. It is essential for us to create the mental space for strategic thinking, not just putting out the fires of the daily challenges that land in our inbox.
The more we have on our plate, the more this can feel impossible, and stepping back to get an overview, before we lean back in, can seem like a luxury we cannot afford. However, that’s where we get stuck. Trying to do it all, think about everything, and get lost in the complexity of it all, wishing for the hamster wheel in our mind to stop, only to find that the only time it does is when it breaks down.
So what do we need to empty our mind, become mindful and create change and transformation instead?
Maybe we don’t need to empty our mind but rather learn to listen better so that we can choose how we use our attention.
Learning to listen to ourselves instead of fixing ourselves.
It can seem like a paradox that I’m suggesting to listen more when our thoughts are already running faster than we can keep up with. But that’s the thing, when we pause to listen to our thoughts we can slow things down, cut through the noise and recognize the thoughts that are just running on automatic, focusing on what’s not working, wasting our time, and mental space.
What I often hear is that people want to get rid of the thoughts and fix their busy mind, feeling like the overwhelm means there's something wrong with them. But the key to unlocking the potential of our mind is to get to know it better and realize when we fall prey to "danger thinking" instead of constructive, growth mindset thinking.
Recognizing the patterns of how we use our mind means pausing to notice when we get stuck in overactive thinking, which happens under stress. Practice pausing at different times a day to listen to ourselves is how we can learn to catch the mind when it's on its way down the rabbit hole and start putting our mind to work on what we want it to work on.
Thinking we can manage our mind by “man-handling” our thoughts and trying to “not think” is like trying to control our breath by not breathing. Eventually the breath forces itself back.
Pausing to listen is how we reclaim agency over our own mind. Without the pause we will not even realize how busy the mind is. When we pause to calm our mind we must not confuse it with emptying the mind but rather using the power of intention to direct our attention.
The most simple way to practice is to put our attention on the breath and notice how it goes in and out. It’s helpful when practicing mindfulness like this to repeat in your mind; breathing in, breathing out. And when a thought comes, simply say; thought. That keeps your mind busy and you train yourself in one-pointed focus, which is how the mind gets stronger and stronger, little by little training your mind to pay attention to what you want it to focus on.
One pause at a time, you start choosing how you use your mind to work better for you.
Begin anew and be generous with yourself.
Most people find it challenging to train the mind. And it is, but each day we can begin anew. Each moment we can begin anew. And sometimes when things don't work out we realize that we forgot to begin anew and kept carrying the old mindset that belongs to yesterday.
