If you’re always tired, you need more sleep. If you’re always stressed, you need to meditate. If you’re always feeling lonely, you need to make plans. If you’re always feeling lost, you need to set actionable goals. If you’re always focusing on the negative, you need gratitude journaling. If you’re lacking motivation, you need to exercise. If you’re lacking energy, you need to change your diet. If you’re lacking passion, you need to connect with a higher purpose. If you’re experiencing grief, you need to cry. If you’re processing trauma, you need therapy. What you need right now is different for every individual person… But making one small adjustment or addition to your current life, can be the catalyst to taking your wellbeing to the next level. The first step is to identify what you’re feeling, here and now. Get still, somewhere quiet, close your eyes, and turn your focus inwards. Notice what emotion you’re feeling, give it a label, and notice what physical sensations make up that emotion. Once we have identified how we’re feeling, then we can then identify and implement the change we most need to make right now. Blog #146

Roughly two rows behind me at the football, there is a man in his 40s who loves to complain… Every decision from the referees, players, or manager is met with intense complaints of incompetence, favouritism, and conspiracy… If our team were winning 7-0, I guarantee he’d still find something to complain about… I think we all probably have someone like this in our lives… Someone who if they won the lottery, would be complaining about the tax they had to pay on it… This focus on the negative isn’t the result of genetics; it’s the result of years of repetitive patterns of thought. The human brain is the most complex and efficient piece of kit ever created. ​ So efficient in fact, that anything we do repeatedly gets its own shortcut on our neural pathways. ​ We call this a habit. ​ We typically think about habits in a physical sense, such as automatically reaching for our phones, even though there is nothing to check... ​ But habits can also be psychological. When we repeatedly focus on the things we can complain about, we’re effectively training our brains to become masters of negativity.... Thanks to the efficiency of the human brain, the more we do this, the stronger those neural pathways in our brains become. And complaining doesn’t even solve our problems; solving our problems requires either acceptance or action… ​ Despite this, some of us still habitually complain at every opportunity. ​ “Every cloud has a silver lining” is an overused (and often uncompassionately used) saying, essentially suggesting that we can find the positive in every situation. ​ This is an overblown take; obviously, not every situation has a positive... However, the other side of the coin is also true; not every situation has a negative. ​ Most of us have become masters of finding the negative, but refuse to look for the positives. This is why practices such as gratitude journaling can be so effective... ​ Instead of passively training our brains to find things to complain about, we're actively training our brains to search for the real positives present in our lives today.

Once we’ve overcome being chronically stressed or depressed, and we’ve mentally passed the feeling of being “stuck”... We then have the mental capacity to take our lives from good to great. And the way we do this is by finding the gap. If we’re feeling good most days, we’re doing something right. We’re probably sleeping well, not mentally beating ourselves up, and probably have some stable, genuine social connections... So what’s going to take our wellbeing to that next level? That feeling where we’re excited to wake up every morning... A good practice to identify this gap is what I’m going to call The Perfect Tuesday exercise... This is where we sit down with a pen and paper, and write out the timetable of our perfect Tuesday. This is different from our perfect day.... Our perfect day would probably consist of waking up on holiday, no real commitments, a cocktail with breakfast, etc... The perfect Tuesday exercise is about identifying what our perfect, regular working weekday looks like... What time do we wake up? What does our morning routine look like? What job do we do? And what hours do we attend work? What activities do we do after work? And who do we do them with? What does our wind-down routine look like? And what time do we go to bed? The surprising thing about this exercise is that (assuming we’re already ok with our lives), our perfect day is typically not too far from our current routine. There are usually one or two standout items in the timetable that we’re not giving enough energy to. Maybe we’re always skipping the workout routine we’d love to implement, or not organising the social events that we’d love to experience on a regular basis. Do the exercise, and “the gap” will likely become very obvious. For some additional context of what this might look like, I’ve included my perfect Tuesday timetable below: 7:00: Wake up and get dressed. 7:15: Walk to morning yoga class. 7:30: Yoga. 8:30: Write and schedule this blog. 10:00: Walk home and shower.

Regular meditation helps us to calm our nervous system… ​ Reduce anxiety… ​ Recognise our destructive thought patterns… ​ Experience more presence… ​ And experience emotions without letting them consume us… ​ But it’s not a cure-all; it doesn’t change our behaviour. ​ It may help us recognise the changes that need to be made, but it doesn’t create those changes. ​ Changes in our behaviour come from changing our environment, social groups, and the commitments we make to building new habits and pursuing goals. ​ If we’re stressed or depressed, meditation will likely help (this is backed by plenty of scientific research)... ​ If we overthink every little mistake, meditation will likely help… ​ If small emotional changes spiral into overwhelming giants, meditation will likely help… ​ However, if we want to become more efficient at work, change our diet, or build new genuine connections... Having increased awareness might help, but changing our workflow, emptying all the processed rubbish out of the cupboards, or joining a new social group are the factors that will really drive these changes in our life situation. ​ Meditation changes our perception of our life situation, making us grateful and grounded… ​ But changing our life situation requires action. #142