Wake up and banish the first negative thought of the day

THERE’S NOTHING more likely to guarantee a moan of despair than waking up at 7am to a dark morning, followed by the day not really ever getting light. Add into the mix some drizzle and you’ve got the perfect recipe for not wanting to do anything at all.

I was pondering this the other morning, quite by chance, as I had awoken at 4am, except I didn’t know it was 4am. I had slept really deeply and I had thought long too, so when I awoke I thought it was 7am. There was a moment, just before I thought I knew what time it was, where I felt completely peaceful, it was momentary but it was there. Then came the thought ‘oh it’s so dark, can’t believe it’s this dark’. Instantly I had a different feeling, one that felt heavier and a bit fed up. I then looked at my watch and realised it was only 4am. I had three more hours to go. Suddenly I felt more hopeful, so grateful, almost excited that I could snuggle back down under my duvet and go back to sleep.

Now this would normally pass me by without a second thought, but then when I woke up at 7am, I repeated the whole thing again. First, I had the momentary peaceful feeling followed by the first lot of thinking and along with it came the deflated feeling – and then it struck me exactly what was happening. My thinking was creating how I was feeling, not the time, nor the darkness, the time of year nor even the weather.

I love spotting the nature of how our thinking creates our reality moment to moment.

Now, you may think, ‘she shouldn’t be doing this, she’s a coach, she should be springing out of bed every day. She should know better.’ Well, being a coach doesn’t stop me from being human, but it does enable me to understand the nature of my thinking more, so with any luck I may spot sooner what I’m doing and fall out of it.

Often I’m asked ‘what do I do if I don’t like the feeling that I have?’ ‘What do I do to get rid of it?’ ‘How can I stop the thinking?’ ‘How can I feel more motivated when the day is like this?’

What I found interesting, on that morning, was that all it took was for me was to notice that it was a thought that I had. I didn’t have to do anything at all, I didn’t have to convince myself to think differently, or try to think positively, or force myself to be motivated. It was far more subtle than that, simply a recognition that a thought had popped into my mind and that it had created the feeling I was experiencing.

And before I had paid attention to that thought, I’d felt completely fine – peaceful and hopeful. I recognised that the thought I’d had about how the day would be, or how I felt, knew nothing in reality about either of those things. It was simply a thought. I didn’t have to add to that thought either. I normally would have a conversation in my head about how I don’t like this time of year, or how it’s so hard to be motivated when it’s dark but it occurred to me that I could simply leave the thought where it was without this.

And with that, the thought simply moved on, because that’s what thoughts do when we leave them alone and I returned back to the moment, and the feelings of peacefulness returned.