A condition that seems almost epidemic in today’s world is the overly busy mind.
We’ve become so accustomed to it that we tend to accept it as normal.
Yet a busy mind can be at the root of many of the problems we experience in our work and lives.
Writer Linda Stone coined the term continuous partial attention to describe our increasingly distracted way of living.
It is the process of trying to pay attention to several sources of information at once, but only ever at a superficial level.
And it isn’t difficult to see why.
We are surrounded by things competing for our attention.
An email arrives and we stop what we’re doing to read it. A message flashes up on our phone. Another notification appears.
We try to do several things at once and often end up doing none of them particularly well.
So, it can seem obvious that the external world is responsible for our busy minds.
My mind is busy because my life is busy.
But what if we have this the wrong way round?
What colours your world?
Imagine putting on a pair of amber-tinted glasses.
Everything you look at will appear to have an amber hue. The world itself hasn’t changed, but your experience of it has.
Our state of mind works in a similar way.
When our mind is quiet, even a demanding day looks manageable. We see what needs doing, deal with what is in front of us, and move on.
But when our mind is already agitated, anxious or fearful, the same day can look completely different.
Everything suddenly seems important.
Everything feels urgent.
And everything seems to compete for our attention now.
This is something I regularly see in my coaching work.
People often tell me they need to become better organised, more focused or clearer about their priorities. They may have a long history of flitting from one thing to another, becoming distracted and struggling to follow through consistently.
Understandably, they assume they need a better system.
Sometimes a better system helps but it is never a substitute for clarity of mind.
And this is where understanding the nature of Thought can make such a difference.
Every day we have thousands of thoughts passing through our minds, most of which we have no control over.
But we don’t have to engage with every one of them.
For instance, anxious or tense feeling can be a useful signal that our thinking has become stirred up.
Yet we often do the opposite of what would help. We take our thinking more seriously. We analyse it, wrestle with it, and try to think our way out of it.
This is like stirring muddy water to make it clear. The more we stir, the cloudier it becomes.
But leave it alone and it settles by itself.
One of the most useful things to see about the mind is that it has the same self- clearing capacity.
Dr George Pransky in his book ‘Life is a metaphor‘ writes:
“Just like our physical immune system, our psychological immune system grows stronger over time. As we learn more about how the mind works, the situations that would once cause us stress no longer have as much negative affect on our psychological wellbeing. We gain immunity from stress.”
As our mind becomes quieter through understanding its nature, we find ourselves more often living ‘in-flow’ rather than feeling we’re fighting against the current.
