Tag Archives: present moment

How To Overcome Time Stress

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Time stress is a major stress factor in everyday life. We need to meet deadlines in almost every aspect of our lives: from completing certain tasks in our work, catching a bus, to cooking our dinner. In contemporary living, in spite of the advancement of modern technology, we find ourselves having too much to cram into the twenty-four hours of a day.

Time stress is a major stress factor, detrimental to both physical and mental health. How can one overcome time stress?

The solution is surprisingly quite simple: deliberate non-doing. Yes, you simply do nothing. It is just that simple!

Do not let the constrains of your life mold your time. To be able to do this, you need to change your perceptions of time.

Time is all in your mind – a result of your own thinking. Everybody has only twenty-four hours a day. Come to think of it, time is an equalizer of men. Do you really have more work that needs to be done than everyone else? Do you need to be a “thief of time” by sleeping much less than others so that you have more time than others to do what needs to be done?

Deliberate non-doing gives you a sense of inner calmness that enables you to re-consider the importance of doing only what is most important, to see in perspective what is most important in your life. Only when you start doing what is the most important to you, then you will begin to have enough time for everything. This may sound stranger than fiction, but this is the truth to overcome time stress.

This evening, when you get home, you may feel you are overwhelmed and pressed for time, such as there is a TV program that you want to watch, a dinner you need to cook for your family, some laundry you need to do, some phone calls you need to make, or your kids’ homework you need to attend to.

At that very moment, when you think you are going to go crazy, stop short of doing anything – that is, do nothing! Be mindful of only that present moment. Live in the present moment. Sit down and meditate for fifteen to twenty minutes: you just sidestep the flow of time. If you don’t know meditation techniques, just close your eyes, and pay attention to your breathing; if thoughts come to your mind, do not deliberately dismiss them, but just continue to concentrate on your breathing.

After the meditation, you may have a totally different perspective of you needs and wants in life. If you have missed the TV show, so what? If you haven’t made those phone calls, that is not the end of the world. If you haven’t helped your kids with their homework, it doesn’t mean they would never go to Harvard. What is most important to you is your inner calm, which is the absence of time stress. Maybe you have just avoided a heart attack due to time stress.

Remember, time stress occurs when you are spread too thin. So, prioritize and simplify your life. The first step to achieve this is deliberate non-doing amidst the hustle and bustle of life.
 

For more information on stress, go to Stephen Lau’s web page:Anger and Stress Management. Stephen Lau is a writer and researcher with books and websites on health, Chinese healing, eating disorders, golf, and money matters. Visit his most recent website: Are You Healthy?

The Dangers of Recognition

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1162149_colour_explosionWe all have the ability to recognise – someone we already know, a difficult situation when we see one, an opportunity that’s staring us in the face or a problem that needs our attention. However, our psychological ability to recognise is just as much a curse as it is a blessing. We take in raw data through our body’s five senses – a psychologist would term this “bottom up” data – through the process of cognition. At this point, the data, of itself is meaningless – we need to interpret it. This is done by adding our “stored knowledge” or “top down information” to the raw data and, in this way, we make sense of what is going on. This is the process of re-cognition.

As I said, this process enables us to make sense of the present moment. Or does it? The big problem with our stored knowledge or top down information is that, generally speaking, it is decades out of date. We generally start storing key elements of that “knowledge” between 12 and 18 months – when we create “schemata” (or pigeonholes) into which we then fit anything similar that we might encounter in later life. From an evolutionary perspective, this gave us a huge advantage – we didn’t have to waste our precious attention on routine day-to-day stuff – we needed that attention to watch out for the next man-eating tiger that might otherwise devour us!

But the result is that, in the modern day, we pay little or no attention to what our senses are actually telling us in the present moment – we prefer, automatically and subconsciously of course, to let our top down information make sense of what’s going on for us. And, in the process, we make nonsense of the present moment and react accordingly.


Somewhere between 12 and 25 years (adolescence), we generally stop taking in new top down information. That has drastic implications for the rest of our lives because, for the rest of our lives, we live in an illusory world of make believe – we create what we think is going on based on out of date information. As a result, so-called “normal” people never really appreciate what is actually happening – everything is “filtered” through their stored knowledge – and, as result, they react to what they think is going on. And, as you and I know, reacting generally makes matters worse, not better.

Quick example. Somebody at work asks you to do something. Because of the way we automatically pigeonhole people, you will have made up your mind whether you like or dislike the person who’s doing the asking within four minutes of meeting them for the first time. Say, for example, she reminds you of your sister-in-law (and you hate your sister-in-law because she reminds you of someone who bullied you at school thirty years ago). Also, the thing you’ve been asked to do is something that you think you don’t like doing – you might, for example, have a hang-up about putting together some sales figures because, when you were small, your father gave you grief over how awful your math marks were (these are all true client stories, by the way).

So, someone, who not only could be the nicest person in the world but who might also have a major impact on your career and on your life, asks you to do a simple task – and you snarl at them in return. It’s an automatic reaction. The request is the raw data – but you’ve made nonsense of the request based on a load of out-dated notions that are stored deeply on your subconscious. And that’s the process of recognition.

And that’s what gets normal adults into trouble. Conflict breaks out at work and at home – not because of what’s actually going on but because of what normal people think is going on. But, worse than that, real opportunities are missed because they are never spotted in the first place. The opportunity could be staring you in the face and, because of your top down data, you wouldn’t recognize it for what it truly is.

Normal people need to stop recognizing and start cognizing all over again. That’s why so many business and sports people meditate – it enables them stop recognizing and start experiencing what is actually and really going on, using their five senses, in the present moment. Watch your TVs – all the great sports people “meditate” before a field kick or a tee shot, before a penalty or a serve in tennis. And I meditation was good enough for someone as prolifically successful in business as Thomas Edison well then, it’s good enough for me. Start paying attention to what your five senses are actually telling you. Stop analyzing, judging, adding your top down out of date information. Whether it’s through some form of formal meditation or just “stopping to smell the roses” – break the vicious cycle of the normal repetitive behaviour that normal recognition automatically produces.

Copyright © 2009 Willie Horton; Willie’s work in the area of self-improvement and meditation has been described as “life-changing” and “phenomenal” by clients from every walk of life. His acclaimed two-day personal development workshop is now available online at Gurdy.Net

Photo: martyn rice


A Clear and Present Mind – Meditation and Flow

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Copyright © 2009 Willie Horton

1155076_arizona_cactus_3Most people lead normal lives. Those lives are, generally speaking, repetitive – where anything spectacular rarely happens. Of course, the normal life is punctuated by the spectacular – falling in love, marriage, the birth of a child, the odd special holiday. But, generally speaking, normal lives plod along.

Research tells us that at least 96% of us are normal and that normal people are rarely really engaged in or attentive to what they are doing in the here and now – research estimates that the normal person is only 1% engaged. In other words, the normal person is only 1% present in the only place and time we have – the here and now. If you consider the findings of quantum physics, that the universe works on the basis of energy exchange – that is universal energy responds to our input of energy – it is little wonder that the spectacular is a rare occurrence in the normal life. After all, universal energy will hardly notice if one only invests 1% energy in the present moment.

The same research indicates that normal people rarely experience “peak performance” – that’s the spectacular that I was talking about a moment ago. However, we also know that we can experience peak performance or peak experience if we become more engaged or more attentive in the present moment. You see, a peak experience is peak because it is so out-of-the-ordinary that it grabs more than 1% of our attention – an abnormal amount of our attention. When our attention is that engaged, parts of our brain that are otherwise inactive become highly activated. It also works the other way around. If we deliberately pay more attention to the present moment, if we deliberately become more engaged in the here and now, those same parts of our brain become highly activated and, as a result of our own choice, we experience a peak moment. Or, to put it in terms of the University of Chicago, we experience “flow”.

When we are in flow, universal energy flows with us. Because we are abnormally present to the moment, universal energy notices and gives us an abnormal return on our investment. Life flows – we seem to be the right person in the right place at the right time. Things we need to happen simply fall into place. We stumble across opportunities that take us in the right direction. Carl Jung would have called that synchronicity. A quantum physicist would explain it in terms of universal energy’s ability to respond to our intentions.

Many of us have experienced that type of “flow” – at some point in many lives it comes naturally. But, the more burdened we become by the cares of everyday life, the less likely we are to experience flow. That’s when many of my clients meet me for the first time. They either find themselves at a crossroads in their professional or personal lives and hanker after that “flow” that they may have once experienced or that they inherently know is “out there”.


In fact, flow is “in there” – it is within. Flow is found by calming one’s mind. Research tells us that the normal mind has 50,000 random thoughts – most of them useless – each day. That noise in our heads distracts us, takes us away from the moment, disables our desire to be more present and focused, more effective and “turned on” in the here and now. As a result, flow doesn’t flow! We get stuck in the rut that is repetitive normal living – where flow is no longer experienced, where life becomes mundane and routine.

To re-experience flow, you have to take an inner journey, one which involves switching off that useless distractive noise. It’s as simple and as challenging as that! Because our thoughts will always be with us, we have to learn how to let them pass, we have to learn how not to give them our energy. In doing so, we begin to learn how to invest an abnormal amount of our energy in the present moment. In doing so, we activate those otherwise dormant areas of our brain and, once again, experience flow.

How does one turn off that incessant inner chatter? I give my clients a variety of “mental tools” – but the one that’s most effective is meditation. Meditation is like a multi-purpose power tool – it gives you the ability to ignore the mental noise completely and not only enter into flow whilst meditating – but enables that clear and present state of mind become your default state of mind as you go through your normal day. In that way, your normal day becomes abnormal, your ordinary life becomes extra-ordinary.

Many people meditate – and, for many, it makes precious little difference in their lives. But meditation, practiced with the purpose of disciplining the mind to pay attention to the here and now, will bring you into flow, will change your life – beyond recognition.

But, be under no illusion. Meditation is a lifelong journey requiring discipline and daily commitment. However, for the investment of a few minutes in each twenty four hours, the returns are more than well worth it.

Willie’s work in the area of self-improvement and meditation has been described as “life-changing” and “phenomenal” by clients from every walk of life. His acclaimed two-day personal development workshop is now available online at Gurdy.Net

Photo: Gayle Lindgren