Imagine if each of your waking thoughts were logged and at the end of the day you read them back.
It would be line after line of the same thoughts pointlessly repeated.
Imagine if this were a person hanging around saying this monologue to you.
Would you be wanting more or would you prefer some peace and quiet?
Upload speeds:
Handwriting = 40 words per minute (wpm)
Touch-typing = 70 wpm
Speaking = 150 wpm
Download speeds:
Listening = 150 wpm
Reading = 200 wpm
Thoughts: 1,000 to 5,000 wpm
The first stage of learning is being unconsciously incompetent: you don’t know what you’re not good at because you don’t know what you don’t know. Well-being skills can be learnt. One typical motif is that how you look at anything changes your experience; for example: anxiety can feel like pleasurable excitement, as the body in both mental modes vibrates in a similar state of high energy; or a difficult situation is your challenge to evolve and an opportunity for personal discovery; or peace of mind is your inner state of being, not the possession of external conditions. And so on, all empirically true but under-practiced.
A background script to run
Triggered on recognition event()
Action.Pause
Script exit
Notice…..
Kindness.
In the world of work, a meeting without creating an output of value is a drain on energy and time. Incessant thinking is the perpetual meeting in the head; and if it is just going over and over the same issues without providing constructive insight, then it is pointless at best, destructive at worst. Outside this room of perpetual thinking is the freedom to notice and enjoy what is happening, instead of what you are imagining.
Noticing the aliveness of the body feels pleasurable - and there is palpable relief when any tension is found and released. Mindfulness can be as simple as noticing the breathing.
The old line with IT is that if you want a problem fixed “turn it off then on again”. The reason is that resetting can untangle mixed-up memory and processes.
The mind if not switched off will often relentlessly loop on the same set of thoughts, gradually wearing you down, sometimes with its own errors and fictions.
There are exercises that help you apply the IT solution, and they’ve worked for thousands of years.
Any person has a wide range of emotions and impulses running through them, to lesser or greater degrees. Sometimes, given the right circumstances, grace can be found in the most surprising places; and sometimes ugliness is expressed where beauty usually resides.
Mindfulness is an awareness that enables greater choice over the energies that move you.
