It’s a three day weekend and you are so looking forward to the time off and resting from an intense work week. You decide to spend some time leisurely working in your yard, soaking up the sun and enjoying the everyday activity of the neighborhood. The only problem is that 30 minutes into this activity, you realize it’s not leisurely at all. It feels like work, hard work, and you feel exhausted as a result. You hadn’t even realized it, but the nice relaxing day you planned has been hijacked by a million different thoughts about work. In fact, you are realizing that you haven’t taken any time off today at all.
Why does this happen? It must be the job’s fault, right?! I mean, people leave jobs every day claiming that they just can’t disconnect because the job has penetrated its way into all facets of their lives. But no, it’s not the job’s fault. In fact, you can change jobs and eventually, you will end up back in the same place. You can even quit working altogether and your brain will still find so many problems to solve that you are still exhausted! (Trust me on this one, I’ve tried it.) So what if you could keep the job AND retain your peace? I’m going to tell you how, in just three easy steps.
You see, our brains easily get into habits. If you are solving problems all week, that can become a thought habit and unless you teach your brain to shut off, it will keep solving those problems all through the evenings and weekends when you want it to just relax. So the first step is to become aware of what’s going on. You are in the yard, your brain is hard at work and your body is completely stressed because it can’t differentiate between the mind’s inability to solve a work problem and you being in the wilderness running from a tiger. It’s in fight or flight mode and doesn’t even know that you are actually safe, until you answer the question “What is actually going on here?”
The second step is to label it as a hijacked brain. You wanted your brain to be in the yard with you enjoying the peace and calm, but somewhere along the way it got hijacked and went to a different place. That’s it. Your job isn’t the issue, nor is it the people you work with. Your brain just took a stressful detour, but now that you’ve noticed it and labeled it as such, you can break the trend. You might want to take it further and judge yourself for not being able to just disconnect, blaming work for putting you in this position, or blaming your boss or people you work with for the problems they create, but none of that is useful or relevant. You have agency in this situation and judging yourself, others or the circumstances of life isn’t helpful or even the problem. You have a human brain, it got hijacked as human brains do. That’s it.
The third step is then becoming acutely aware of the present moment. What sounds do you hear that are close by and far away? What do you see? Open your eyes to everything in front of you, in vivid detail including the textures and colors. What do you feel? In your hands, under your feet, in the air around you? While the tug-of-war between your thoughts and the present moment can be very common as you are building your mental muscles, the longer you can retain your focus on the sites, sounds and sensations of the current moment, the more at ease you will feel.
The brain has way more plasticity than we realize and continuing to practice this over time can help your ability to create balance in life. You can learn to shut off your brain from the need to constantly achieve or think through situations in such alarming detail that you’ve convinced yourself you can control them, but it’s not a one and done situation. Just like most people can’t go from nights on the couch to running a marathon the next day, you can’t expect to stew about work for 20 years and then stop yourself immediately once you know these steps. It requires going to the gym for daily practice. In this case, the gym is wherever you are and the workouts happen in the moments where you want to be relaxing but your brain has a different plan. Each situation is an opportunity to do a few reps and strengthen your mental muscles.
Just like it helps to kick off your physical fitness journey with a trainer, a coach can be a great sense of support for your mental fitness journey. Reach out and let’s talk about what that might look like for you.