Listen to the warning light in your mind and start to refuel
THERE SEEMS to have been a theme running over the last few weeks in my calls with clients, conversations with friends, even observing myself and my family. There is a tiredness, a lack of energy, a general can’t be botheredness.
It wasn’t that those I was talking to simply said ‘ I’m tired’, it was more that I noticed that they were sharing more insecure thinking, more stress, more worry, more fear, their heads were so full of negative thoughts, they simply couldn’t see the wood for the trees. They felt they needed to ‘ sort that out’ because it was getting in their way.
On top of that was a layer of frustration with themselves because they knew how much they had to do, but couldn’t do it, because they simply couldn’t think straight, and even if they could, they couldn’t be bothered to do it.
In more than one conversation, I literally said, ‘ if you put to one side everything you had to do, as if you didn’t have to do it, what would you love to do right now?’
The reply was unequivocal ‘ I just want to go to bed, to sleep’. Even though it wasn’t a normal time for such an activity, I stopped the conversation and encouraged them to do just that.
What I have noticed, after years of observing human behaviour, is that there is so often a correlation between our state of mind and how much energy that we have in the tank.
However, the tendency is when our head is full of insecure, rubbishy thinking, to want to fix that, innocently thinking that if we do we will magically feel so much better and back on our game, so that we can plough through with our to- do list, unaware that that in itself is creating even more of the same thought.
However, when we really listen deeply to what we really need, we can find a truer picture of how to find that equilibrium in our minds again.
In many ways what I have seen is that pattern of insecure thinking is no more than an indication that our energy is running low. A little bit like when the fuel warning light appears on your car; we wouldn’t seek to fix the fact that the light has gone on, or get frustrated with it, it’s simply doing a job of telling us what the car needs in that moment. Once we have attended to it, our car is good to go again, as if the light had never come on.
When we see that our minds work in a similar way, sending us messages of where our state of mind is, rather than the state of the world around us or our ability to manage it, we start to notice the patterns of thinking that we do.
When we’re tired we tend to think the same things, feel the same way, even act in a certain way. That in my mind is our fuel light, when we notice it for what it is, our frustration with it falls away, and it allows us a little space to listen a little deeper and to hear what we need to refuel.