Getting off the mental 'exercise bike' can produce better results: Andrea Morrison

But it’s amazing how we think we can do the same thing with our minds every day and expect to find the answer we are looking for or feel better.

We drive our minds more and more, creating more stress and wearing ourselves out.

As human beings we think all the time, sometimes we are consciously aware of it, sometimes we may have a change in feeling, but what we are so often innocently unaware of is how much we add to that thinking, when perhaps we don’t need to.

Recently I was delivering one of my Courageous Females Programmes, and we explore how much time we use thinking about things and how much energy that takes.

For example, an insecure thought might pop into your mind about where your next contract might come from, before you know it you are now worried you might not get another contract, and what would happen if you didn’t.

Five minutes later you are imagining living in a cardboard box, having lost your entire livelihood, your house and wondering what would happen to the dog and the picture a great aunt bought for you as a wedding present!

Whilst this may seem a little extreme, I often do this exercise with clients, and so often they admit that they imagine ending up in dire straits having wasted many minutes in the process and more importantly feeling really stressed about it.

It’s often interesting to be curious about what would happen if you didn’t do that?

How much time would you create, how much space in your mind would you enjoy and how much energy would you save?

Of course, this isn’t the only thing we think about.

Like riding that exercise bike, we might be worrying about a future event, things that are happening at work, conversations that we had or actions that we took, imagined consequences or wondering ‘what would have happened’ if you’d done something differently.

Our minds are an incredible ‘sandbox’ where we can test run and re-run over and over, imagining a whole host of different outcomes.

However, what purpose does this really serve and more importantly does it make us feel any less stressed?

For me, it’s like a lot of things in life, the ability we have to do this is a little bit like salt, it has to be used sparingly.

When we start to see that we so often we have a choice in whether we use our mind’s sandbox or not, that we can bring our mind back to the present, to whatever it is that we are doing.

In doing so we create space in our mind, we start to feel calmer and more in control.

In many ways it’s like getting on a ‘proper’ bike as it literally frees our mind.

Andrea Morrison is a Yorkshire-based transformational business coach and mentor. For more information, visit www.andreamorrison.co.uk