Stop tripping yourself up

The Mind vs. The Body

Do you go around in circles inside your mind?

The same memory, idea, scenario played over and over like a record (spinning right round baby right round).

I talk with a lot of people who have powerful minds, the highly analytical type. The ones who need to know all the steps of a process before taking the first one. The ones who need to predict the future with a certainty in the cause and effect of their steps.

I was never this type of ‘goal oriented’ analytical mind but I lived in the world of academia and the idea of ‘the rational mind’ as champion of the body, mind, and spirit triumvirate. But it’s not the champion in every single arena.

Think of it like sports. An elite athlete specializes for one event. They discipline themselves through training to acquire incredible skill and experience. They’re masters of the craft. However, put them into a different sport, a different arena, and all of a sudden they aren’t the elite performers anymore.

It’s the same with the brain. When it comes to matters of meaning and purpose, the brain isn’t our best ally, especially in untangling the inner confusion that comes with self identity, confidence, and aspiring towards excellence.

We need to kick the brain into the passenger’s seat here, and employ the body and the heart to help solve the internal problem.

How to get outside of it

You need a pattern interrupter to get outside the mind.

The simplest way to think of the brain and how it impacts our decision making capacity is to understand it as a short cut machine. It look for the easiest road. It preserves energy and finds solutions that make moving forward more comfortable. That’s great in a lot of areas, and if you’re a highly analytical person, it’s likely you bring a tremendous amount of value by always finding the shortcuts through razor sharp rational ability.

But when it comes to meaning, you can’t short circuit your heart without dire consequences. The brain ends up trying to solve a problem without a shortcut. It keeps searching for the easy way but only finds the start of the swirl again. Then you end up ‘ruminating,’ thinking over and over about distress but never actualizing that thought into positive or constructive action. You’re stuck in a loop inside your mind.

You GET OUT OF IT by employing a different part of yourself. You need to get in contact with your heart. It’s the place of forgiveness, love, understanding, compassion, joy. It doesn’t need to be rational, in fact it’s defined in a sense by irrationality.

A lot of my coaching calls circle around this very problem. How to kick into the subjective areas of our lives without totally abandoning the objective. How each individual can properly harmonize the two inside themselves.

It first starts with a recognition that you can’t solve all problems with the rational brain. Do you really want to take shortcuts when it comes to the ultimate meaning and purpose of your life? Do you want to find the ‘easy’ road towards your potential and destiny? All you end up doing is sacrificing the principle for what’s expedient.

And worse, you end up stuck inside the mind and then you justify all the little sell-outs along the way with backwards rationalizations that make you feel good enough to fool someone else with an ‘explanation’ when you know inside it’s just a ‘cope.

Stop living this way now. Here’s your pattern interrupter.

Your Turn To Apply

Do this next time you feel the ‘swirl’ coming on strong.

Engage your body to start producing something productive.

I had a call with my guy this week about using poetry as that pattern interrupt. When he starts to feel that swirl starting inside the mind, he needs to let it play once, like a record, but then pull the needle off and start writing down what’s on his mind.

Effectively, we need to engage the body into motion as a way to kick the brain out of it’s overthinking tendency. At one point he was doing hill sprints as a way to relieve the same type of pressure, until he went too hard and then needed to dial back on running for a few weeks.

But that ENERGY he tapped into sprinting up hills was the exact pattern interruptor he needed. He described those hill sprints as ‘carrying the baggage that kept piling up inside his mind to the top of the hill and then throwing it away.’

The problem with ruminating is the NO ACTION part. So you solve it by doing ANYTHING other than just thinking.

Here’s a quick list of some things you can do to start moving, think of this as just the starting point. I’m sure you can imagine a few other actions or habits you could include or at least have the courage to experiment with.

• Exercise

• Writing

• Playing Music

• Cleaning

• Gardening

These are a few of things I’ve done personally when I’m either in a creative funk or feeling a bit low and seem to be swirling around the same negative emotion.

I just need to MOVE and change up the energy. I need to stop myself from going right round, baby, right round, over and over in my, like a record baby, right round. The body helps kick me onto a new track and let’s me hear the signal of my heart instead of the rational voice inside the mind.

The heart can allow things to be messy and irrational without the need for conclusion, at least right away. It can feel those negative emotions and sit inside them.

The body then helps me start moving through them.

It’s not about solving the problem in the here and now, it’s about radically changing your energy and perspective about the problem. It can’t DOMINATE your mind any more.

Now you have the awareness to know.

And the power to change it.

It’s on YOU.

Happy Training Team