PART 1 | Chapter 5 | Taking Back Control

Let's show your brain who's boss

So as I said, there are things you can build in to your life to really help support your brain and keep it in intellectual, Purpose, Peace & Profit mode, rather than in panic, stress and struggle. I’m going to walk you through those now, so you can start to think about where you could be doing more to fill that gas tank without even trying to shift the needle through your thinking.

Let’s get right to the heart of the issue first.

Want to know the best way to start to untangle any problem?  A way to cut though overwhelm like a knife through butter, and make everything feel clear and easy again?  The best way to feel like you can breathe again when you’re drowning in your to do list?

Step AWAY from whatever is triggering you.

Take a wander to your local coffee shop and enjoy the sunlight on your face, the birdsong, the breeze… or even do a bit of decluttering or hang up the washing (if you like that sort of thing!).

Brain breaks are wonderful for blasting through the mental clutter.  Yep, not thinking is the key to unravelling your knots.

Now I know that when you feel up to your neck in it and in a total headspin about all the things you’ve got to get done, stepping away from the to do list can feel like that last thing you’d want to contemplate.  “There’s not enough TIME!!” your brain screams at you.  Just do these 53,001 things and THEN you can take a break. But - bananas as it may seem, continuing to sit there and keep working is probably the least productive thing you can do - because it causes the helpful, intelligent part of your brain to literally grind to a halt. You can FEEL that happening, can’t you?  The more you think, the harder it seems to make any sense of things.  It can feel a lot like wading through treacle.

You see, when we sit there with a furrowed brow, scratching our heads and actively try to solve a problem by thinking hard about it, we expend enormous amounts of energy.  If I hooked you up to a brain scanner when you’re actively ‘thinking’, we’d see that you were producing lots of Beta wave, ‘busy brain’ activity.  That’s exhausting - and stressful.  And we know what stress does for our creativity and focus, don’t we? 

Don’t get me wrong, active thinking is useful - in short bursts!  But what we tend to do instead is force it.  We bypass the warning signs, ignore our natural rhythyms and expect ourselves to keep thinking and performing waaaay past what’s healthy & reasonable (which is a maximum of 90 minutes in one stint).

Instead of listening to ourselves when we reach capacity, and hitting the reset button by taking regular breaks from work, we tend to keep ourselves in Beta mode for really long periods of time - trying to create, forcing ourselves to think of solutions, trying to figure out why nobody commented on our last post.  Or trawling through our inboxes trying to reconcile accounts and having to read things 5 times over before they sink in… uuuugh.

If you’re neurodivergent, like me - or if you’ve struggled with anxiety or OCD - this can be doubly difficult because your brain LOVES to hyperfocus and finds it hard to put things down.  Satisfying in the short-term - but not helpful for us mental wellbeing-wise and not great for keeping our thoughts and feelings in the best place.  

Did I say not great?  I meant terrible.