Treat unhelpful thoughts like buses... and don’t get on board

THE OTHER day I came across a really funny Michael MacIntyre sketch – ‘I can’t believe it’s November’– and I roared because it’s just me at the moment. It seems unbelievable that we are here and it’s only (I won’t say how many days) until the big C day. Let alone the end of the year.

It seems that each year I do exactly the same thing, I buy one or two presents in September, feel enormously smug that I’m feeling ahead of the game; then I seem to momentarily nod off and wake up at mid-November – which then always seems to be incredibly busy – and wonder how on earth I’m going to fit in everything that I need to do before the holidays.

Sound familiar? Do you just wish that we could create more time? However, often people ask me how do I manage to juggle as much as I do and get so much done? Well I’m not super woman, and I do have days when I don’t get as much done as perhaps I could do but during my journey I have noticed a couple of things along the way that have literally enabled me to create more time.

The first thing that I noticed was the amount of noise we create about the stuff we have to do. Just imagine if you added up all the times you said throughout the day ‘I have so much to do’, ‘I’ll never get all this done’ or ‘I can’t believe it’s November’. Even though it may only take a couple of seconds, we then add a bit more thinking to it, so we engage in the thought, we may remember a time when we didn’t get it all done, or a time when we felt equally overwhelmed, so it’s rarely just the one thought and more of a conversation with ourselves. Once you are aware that you are doing this, you’ll then notice just how many times you do it and just how much time this takes up.

We work so much better when our minds are clear, because we are more focused on the task that we have to do, our minds aren’t constantly being distracted.

In truth, we can’t control the thoughts that pop in our mind, but we can decide which thoughts to pay attention to – think of them like buses – if a ‘I can’t get all of this done’ bus comes along, that’s okay, but we can choose not to get on it; because we know that if we do, we’ll lose a chunk of time whilst we are telling ourselves just how overwhelmed we are and create lots of other unnecessary, unhelpful thoughts associated with it. In my experience, the less attention we pay to these types of thoughts, eventually they come less and less frequently.

The second thing is that if something doesn’t get done, it doesn’t get done. I realised that I didn’t need to add anything to that either. So in the same way, a thought might pop in my head that was ‘I should have done that’ and then I might have a conversation in my head about it, which often wouldn’t make me feel great. When I saw that these thoughts were like buses as well, I didn’t need to get on them either, I could just wave them on by, enabling me to feel calmer about what happened and allow myself to simply move on.

So all in all, if we want to create more time and feel calmer, it’s often not a case of being more organised on the outside, but on the inside.

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