Research shows you spend almost 50% of your time lost in your head

Imagine if that time were spent more productively?

You re-live past events, thinking about what you should have done or could have said. You project forward into the future, worrying about what might happen. Almost half your time thinking about something you cannot change or may never arise – what a lot of lost minutes!

If you perpetually think about past events, you can increase your own stress levels, especially if those events were unhappy or painful. There is no benefit to be gained from relentlessly raking over old ground.

Catastrophising about how something may go wrong in the future is also likely to increase your stress hormones – and it may all be for nothing if that imagined future never happens. All the time you are ruminating or worrying, you could be focusing on something happening right now that would benefit from you being more present.

If you learn how to retrain your brain to spend more time focused on the present, on what you can feel and sense right now, then your brain is engaged in that activity and doesn’t wander off to the past or future.

Perception vs Reality

Your brilliant mind, which can process images and sound, innovate, interpret, control movement and body functions is unfortunately exceptionally bad at one very important thing. It cannot distinguish between the real and the imagined, so when you obsess in the past or feel anxious about the future, your body feels the experience as though it were happening right now. You are flooded with cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones which, over time, have negative physical, emotional and psychological effects.

Humans are super over-achievers, or at least, you have become almost brain-washed to believe that this is how you should be. In the current media saturated environment, where you are bombarded constantly with others’ “perfect” lives, it is easy to believe that everyone else is winning at life. Through the rose-tinted lens of social media, other people appear to be happier, have better jobs, cars, houses, take more expensive holidays and so on. These unreal lives can have a damaging effect on you if you feel that you don’t measure up.

Despite realising that people only post a small snapshot (the happy, successful part) of their lives, you can start to feel that your life needs to be fixed. Constantly striving to be better can leave you feeling even worse.

So, what if you simply allow yourself to be, as you are, right now, without judgement?

Regular practice of mindfulness, which is all about being, rather than doing, gives your mind a much-needed break from the relentless need to achieve and compare.

Mindfulness practice, is, just that: practice. There is nothing you need to achieve from the practice; just be present.

This is a liberating feeling – there is no expectation of anything being a certain way, of any goal being reached. Simply being; that’s all there is to it.