The day starts and before you even have a chance to get your wits about you, life and its faithful sidekick Stress, come charging in.
Stress about relationships.. work.. your kids.. your dogs.. your cats.. your parakeets. Stress about the neighbors, the traffic, the political scene, your health, your health care, the state of the world, refugees, money…
It’s a long list and when you really go with it, it literally drowns you. Blots you out—sometimes before you even get out the front door.
Life has a way of leaving our brains scrambled and pedaling on overtime. And the thing is, our brains don’t work too well on scramble. In fact, they go pretty quickly to mush. And that, isn’t a pretty picture.
To make matters worse, in the middle of all this stress, we like to pride ourselves on the fact that we can multi task galore. How many tasks can you juggle at once? The number’s probably pretty stunning.
For decades I had 20/20 crystal clear amazing vision. And then as time went by things began to fade, get a little more fuzzy around the edges. Until one day I looked at the label on a vitamin bottle and it looked like blurry hieroglyphics.
My daughter showed me a trick. She told me if I made a little tunnel out of my hand and looked through it I’d be able to see. Sure enough she was right! Of course I could only see about ½ a word at a time, but it was crystal clear. 100% sharp. Pretty cool. (Yes, this little side trip is relevant. I’ll be coming back to it a little later. Stay tuned. ☺ )
Here’s the thing. Our brains are amazing. They’re capable of the most stunning things. Truly. But we dilute their incredible power when we spread them thin.
We literally get mind”full” when we stop being mind”ful” and our brains lose their kick in the process. They sputter and hesitate; they over fire and under fire.
Picture Traffic Jam On a Friday Night in Times Square.
To make matters worse, once you start overloading your brain, you increase your stress which decreases your brain functioning. Seriously.
There’s a direct correlation between an increase in your stress level and a decrease in your brain processing ability except for the fight or flight region of your brain which of course isn’t something you want to activate unless you’re being chased by a saber toothed tiger.
There’s something in that little tunnel vision trick my daughter taught me all those years ago.
Laser focused attention is liquid gold.
It brings your brain back online and makes the most of your incredible mental prowess.
- Laser focused attention = increased brain capacity.
- Laser focused attention = decreased stress.
- Laser focused attention = increased sense of accomplishment.
- Laser focused attention = increased productivity.
- Laser focused attention = increased creativity.
I could go on and on. You probably know I don’t usually carry on too much about research, but on this front the research is stunning. The more focused you can get yourself, the more your performance—in every area of your life—increases.
One thing at a time—aka tunnel vision—turns out to be a major key to many things accomplished in a day and even more importantly, to more happiness. There’s unbelievable research on this front.
Happy people do better in all areas of their lives. They’re happier, healthier, and richer. They have more fulfilling work and better relationships.
And no, it’s not that they were those things first and then they got happy. They got happy and then those other things came.
Soooooo….
The tip this week is to start paying attention to how you use your mind. Mindful or “mindfull”? Just notice. And then very gently and kindly start training your mind into one thing at a time. This isn’t necessarily going to be the easiest thing in the world because we are seriously enamored of many, many things at once in our society right now. We like to talk to our children while we’re texting, posting something on Facebook, talking to the neighbor and taking a quick video of the butterfly that just landed on the azalea we’re trimming. It really isn’t any wonder that we’re all so tired and stressed out.
One thing at a time; like it’s the most precious thing in the world. The whole Universe in a grain of sand—that level of focus.
Play with it. I’d love to hear how it goes for you and what you discover so leave me a comment.
