Let’s talk about our mind and it’s love or chaos. Let me know if this sounds familiar, you want to be calm, you want the internal chatter to be at volume 20 instead of a blaring 100. But no matter how hard you try, you just cannot find the time. You have tried waking up early, but that didn’t work. You tried to do it after work, but then house chores took all the time and you did not “feel” like doing it – Netflix and Youtube sounded better. You told yourself, tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow, I will wake up early and do this. But no matter how hard you try, it seems like the universe is planning against you. I was (and sometimes still) on the same boat. I kept on asking myself, why do I keep going back to bad habits. Why do I keep on doing the same thing again and again? For example, I know meditation is good for me, it keeps me calm and makes me more reflective, but then why does my mind keep on craving chaos? Why I cannot find the time to meditate?
The Concept of Energy
From humans to plants, we all are limited by how much energy we can produce. Over time, nature has a way of making us more efficient by up-regulating or down-regulating certain genes that will help us better with reproduction, survival, and better use of that limited energy. We humans are different. As the majority of the planet lives on instincts, we have a consciousness. We can determine how we spend our energy and our time. This is very unique to us (as fas as I am aware). In terms of humans, we can use the energy two ways – Positive or negative. For example, I can use my energy for negative things such as waking up in the morning, watching two hours of news and getting all spun up or I can wake up in the morning, listen to something positive, read something positive that will bring a positive change in my life. As a lot of smarter people have said, It is the daily choices we make that determines the course of our lives. I have noticed for myself is that the mind wants me to stay on the hamster wheel. It wants me to keep on certain patterns and wants me to be in chaos. After a lot of self-reflection, I realized that I am used to the hormones and excitement created by chaos and subconsciously, I create the stress to get back to familiarity. For example, procrastinating and waiting until the last minute on certain projects.
My Hypothesis
From my personal experience, I have come up with a hypothesis. Energy flows a certain path. For example, electricity has a tendency of following the shortest and quickest route. The same goes for energy. When given a chance, it will flow through the shortest route (think of water flowing through the groves in the ground vs flat ground). These groves will guide the flow of energy which in turn guides our thoughts and actions. The depth and route of these groves are guided by our genes, habits, and predispositions. Over time, these groves define our day to day lives. The more we repeat, the more efficient they become – may that be positive or negative.
1 – Getting off the hamster wheel
The first thing we have to do is to be honest with ourselves. Honesty is the best policy. One way to be honest with ourselves is to have extreme ownership of everything we do. When I mean extreme ownership, I mean that we should focus on the things we can control. We need to tell ourselves that we are the director, producer, and actor of our lives.
Changing your environment
We as humans want to think that we are independent thinkers. Nothing affects us except our will and we do what we want to do. But, research after research has shown that our environment plays a huge role in how we behave and act. This is where the full disclosure comes in – I used to be a very disorganized person. I used to not care about my surroundings, but once I understood the impact of my environment, I started to change my environment.
I started with the lowest common denominator – my room. It took a day, but once I did, I started to feel relieved. It made me feel refreshed. Keeping my surrounding organized not only brought a calming effect, but it also gave a sense of control. Over time, I extended this to other aspects of my life. A lot of times, we tend to think that little things do not affect us. But, our mind processes everything. The video below is a great example of how our mind operates and how powerful our subconscious mind is.
I was amazed at how these little changes made a huge impact on my life. I realized that when our environment is disorganized, it creates a sense of chaos in our minds. This chaos craves stress hormones such as cortisol. Over time, we get used to those hormones. This is one of the reasons we keep on doing the same mistakes again and again.
2 – Garbage in, Garbage out
After making this simple change of cleaning my surroundings and organizing my life, I noticed that when I was watching certain things, it made me either happy or upset. For example, when I watched a comedy movie, it made me laugh. But when I watched a horror movie, my anxiety levels went up. This made me think, what if I changed what I input in my mind in order to change my emotions – intern helping me to change my outputs. In order to figure this out, the first step was to notice what I was doing in my day-to-day life. The best way to do this was via Google calendar to know where your time is going and putting phone monitoring apps such as Rescue time to see what I am going every day.
After reviewing the data, I realized that between news websites and YouTube, I was spending an hour a day watching the news. Now, that might not sound like a lot but that is almost 50 – 8 hour working days a year. Think about that, all that time wasted that can be used for something productive. I realized that I was inputting pure garbage into my mind. So, I blocked news websites and unsubscribed from all the news channels on YouTube. Then, I spend 30 minutes subscribing to educational stuff such as documentaries, downloading audiobooks, and purchasing a few books.
For the next few days, that’s all I did. This was easier said than done. When you go from watching mindless stuff on Youtube to something productive, your mind has a way of pulling you back. I felt like I was missing out. I felt that if I did not research, I was going to miss something important. The other input I changed was doing more meditation and working on my human operating system. The way to work on that was by introducing philosophy, psychology, and reading more books. Introducing these things helped me gain a new perspective that helped me live a better life. For example, sometimes we think life is hard and we are alone. But, think about what victor Frankl went through in a centration camp. He wrote about it in his book called Man’s search for Meaning. With that perspective, our problems are not a big deal and can be managed.
3 – Identity and reminders
So, it’s easy to read a blog post or a book and think that it’s going to change your life. Let me ask you, how many YouTube videos have you watched for personal development? I would say probably a lot. But how much of that stuff do you actually remember? Probably not a lot. One thing overtime I have learned is that we humans have short term memory. You might watch a video, be inspired by it for a day or two but then it is very easy to slip into our old habits. That is why it is important to create an identity and have reminders for that identity.
For example, if you want to be a more productive person who never procrastinates, then your identity needs a person who is a productive person and in order for you to be reminded of that identity, you put reminders for yourself that you can see all-around your house. When I start a habit, I try to put reminders everywhere. This includes my mirror, my phone, and my affirmations. For example, when I was trying to develop the habit of extreme ownership, I put reminders everywhere. I put it on my Always-on display, my wallpaper, and my desk. Don’t try to self deceive yourself. Your mind is going to tell you that you can remember these concepts. That you are going to apply it every day. But keep in mind that we have short term memory and unless those principles are applied daily, you are going to forget about them.
Hopefully, these steps help you break your addiction to chaos. Feel free to contribute and leave a comment below.
You can download the Mind Map by going here
https://youtu.be/3xIbAqGRJLg
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