What is our mind anyway? As Dr. Joe Dispenza, international lecturer, researcher, corporate consultant, author, and educator, states, “ Our mind is the brain in action!”.
With all that is going on with this COVID-19 outbreak, our minds can most certainly experience overload and overwhelm. Most times, we check our e-mails, Facebook posts, text messages and missed phone calls the first thing in the morning after we get up from our sleep. We add to this continuing information stream the television reports on what has happened to negatively impact our nation, states, cities and individual loved ones close to us. This intense information stream the first thing in our mornings can and does create increased stress in our lives as we start our day!
Our minds are central thought and information processing centers assigned to evaluate this flow of information and decide actions to take based on the information received. Managing our minds must start with the management of our internal thoughts and information from outside sources as referenced above.
Here are several things to consider in helping with the managing of your mind:
Be in the present moment as much as possible – this will take some mental discipline:
Stay in the present: don’t look to the past as that is not where you are going (The rear-view mirror is much smaller than the windshield of your care, so look to the future while staying in the present moment!);
Listen to uplifting music and podcast that encourage the positive side of our lives;
Exercise to get your mind and body moving in synchronization and dissipate the developed stress associated with handling life events;
Research has determined that we process between 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day and 90% of those thoughts are the same thoughts as the day before. Consequently, the same thoughts lead to the same choices, that lead to the same behavior, that leads to same experience and produces the same emotions. You are stuck in the same routine or mental program.
To break this routine and manage your mind, you must become conscious of this routine or program and become more aware of how you think, speak and feel. To enhance this management process, you must first acknowledge that your management system, whatever it is, is out of control and overwhelmed, calm your mind and take a well-deserved mental rest in a quite palace without external sensory input from the world!
Secondly, you must evaluate where you are in terms of what must be done. As you go through this process, you will find that the list is large with both high priority and mundane items presenting themselves. This activity is much less daunting as you write down each item on a separate piece of paper as it occurs in your thoughts. This process is to be performed without judgement or prioritization as to importance of what item is to be tackled first, second, third, etc. This technique is commonly called a “mind dump”. The whole purpose of this process is to completely clear the mind and observe the identified tasks visually, thus getting them out of your head. This process has a calming effect in that the tasks are now visible before your eyes and not buzzing around in you mind like angry bees!
Thirdly, pick up one task at time and ask the following questions related to completing the task:
Is the item actionable?
NO – to the Trash or File for later use as reference use
YES – Does it take more than 1 action to complete?
YES – Make it a Project with multiple steps to complete
NO
What is the next Action?
Does need to be done by You?
NO – Delegate it
YES
Done in less than 2 minutes? – DO IT!
NO – Defer it to later.
Advance to the next item in the stack of tasks and repeat until the stack is complete!
This process will allow you to greatly reduce the stress in your mind, sort your tasks into manageable categories and gain a sense of accomplishment in your life at the end of the day as you complete the tasks.