Is your mind constantly buzzing? (Copy)
One of the most common problems people share with me is their busy mind.
Running a million miles an hour, unable to wind down or struggling to concentrate. I am not surprised. We live in a world designed for distraction.
With social media, ChatGPT and Google at our fingertips, we connect with our friends and family through our thumbs and glass screens.
We are bombarded with constant information, more than we have brain capacity to decipher.
Every time our phone gets a notification and we respond, we are task switching.
Despite the common perception that multi-tasking is a prized ability, switching between tasks creates a ‘lag time’ in the brain and reduces productivity related to the task at hand.
Whenever we have to refocus our attention, we have lost ‘brain time’. It takes a little while for our mind to catch up again.
Not surprisingly, when our minds are constantly managing multiple inputs, distracted or interrupted, it is hard to feel like we have clarity.
If clarity is something you crave in your life, health or personal situation – there are three major considerations as first steps.
1. Sense of relative safety
2. Spaciousness
3. Values clarification
Today we will focus on why a sense of safety is important for clarity of mind.
When we are in distress, our autonomic nervous system is activated into a threat response. Under threat, our bodies produce hormones that mobilise towards neutralising threats. We become ‘on alert’ in either:
- Fight (get rid of a threat by pushing it away or extinguishing it)
- Flight (run away from it)
- Freeze (do nothing and hope it goes away)
- Fawn (appease the source of the threat, usually in a way that is damaging to us)
When we are responding to a sense of threat, both our body and brain is geared towards dealing with this first, before anything.
Imagine you are in a Savannah in Africa. You sit down to eat lunch and ponder a solution to a problem. You see something moving in the grass. Immediately your association is ‘this could be a lion’. You may tell yourself ‘Oh no, it's not; and go back to eating your lunch. But your body will still be on high alert and you will be hyper aware of your surroundings.
If you notice the grass moving again and you see a tail – it is going to be very difficult for you to eat your lunch and ponder. You will probably need to run off and find a new lunch spot, fight off the lion, hide until it moves on or somehow convince the lion you are its friend rather than food.
Our minds and bodies respond to day-to-day threats, including emails, news and personal interactions in the same way they do to a predator like a lion (just with varying intensities).
In our constantly connected world, we are exposed to perceived and actual threats often. More than humans have ever before in our history.
Although we aren’t usually under constant life threat, sometimes our minds and bodies haven’t realised that the threat isn’t right here, right now or that the threat that did occur is actually over.
Unless we have a sense of relative safety in a moment, we cannot expect our mind to have clarity. It needs to know that there’s not a lion about to interrupt lunch.
Practicing clarity of mind then becomes a process of identifying potential threats and focusing specifically on developing awareness of safety in a moment.
Understanding what is a threat and what is relative safety involves understanding and attuning to our body’s signals.
In other words, we need to be able to understand and detect when we are in distress and when we are settled.
If we are often argumentative, frustrated, annoyed or snappy – we could be in ‘fight mode’.
If we are constantly busy, thoughts buzzing around, running from one thing to the next and unable to sit still – we could be in ‘flight mode’.
If we tend to run away or put things off – we could be in ‘freeze’.
If we only ever do things for the benefit of others and not take care of ourselves, this could be a form of ‘fawning’ or appeasing.
In these situations, if the threat is imminent, of course it needs to be dealt with before we can consider other work on clarity.
If the threat is not imminent, refocusing our awareness and attention in the ‘right here, right now’ experience allows us to attune to a sense of safety. This helps to activate the opposite sight of the stress response – the relaxation response.
In this state, it is much easier to concentrate. To be aware of what’s important. To have a sense of inner peace.
Anecdotally, when I work with people on identifying this, they report their minds slow down. That they are more aware of the present moment. That there is more understanding in what needs to happen next. Or at least what the issues are. It opens the doors to clarity.
That is not to say that you can’t have clarity under stress or that if you’re feeling safe that your mind won’t race. It’s just part of the picture. Without it, finding spaciousness or being clear on your values is much harder.
So, working on nervous system regulation is a major player in clarity of mind. It is the first thing we will focus on developing in our work together with the mind. Otherwise it’s like trying to eat lunch when a lion is stalking you for lunch.
Next time we will talk about why spaciousness is important. I’ll define what spaciousness is and what strategies are useful.
If you’re curious about working together to develop your own clarity of mind – from slowing down your busy brain to making decisions more confidently or feeling aligned with your values – you know how to find me.