Mind Time: How ten mindful minutes can enhance your work, health and happiness
IT TAKES JUST TEN MINUTES a day train your mind – you will feel more awake, more alive and more creative. Using these carefully researched exercises you can increase your attention span, realise your potential and use your mind to its full capacity. Yes, just ten…short … minutes.Nearly half of our waking hours are spent thinking about something other than what we are doing. We are only aware of a tiny fraction of what we are thinking, feeling and sensing – so we’re barely conscious of how and why we behave the way we do. This book sets out to help you get your mind out of automatic more often.The human mind is an extraordinary thing. It determines the way we experience and respond to whatever life throws at us. Yet most of us live as though we have no control over our minds. This is simply not true. If we want to change our lives in any way, the most effective way to do that is to change the way our mind is shaped – the way in which we interpret and respond to everyday events as well as to our own thoughts and feelings.Mind Time contains simple, clear exercises that take only ten minutes per day and our research tells us that if you do these exercises, your life will change. The exercises build three core capacities – curiosity, self-awareness and acceptance. If you do them, and build these capacities, you will become less reactive and more responsive. This will lead to positive benefits in several key areas: your relationships, your ability to deal with unexpected events and your capacity to stay purposeful and to see your life as a matter of choices rather than seemingly impossible challenges.Just set aside ten minutes each day to engage in a few simple practices, then after a short while you will start to see a transformation for the better. That’s our promise to you. Isn’t it time we learned to shape our minds – not be shaped by them?
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Text © Michael Chaskalson and Megan Reitz 2018
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Source ISBN: 9780008252809
Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008252816
Version: 2018-01-12
Michael
For Annette –
and for Ellie, Chloe, Ollie and Scarlett
Megan
For Steve, Mia and Lottie –
and John, Rachel and Doug Goodge
Contents
Chapter 3: AIM for Better Relationships
Chapter 5: AIM for Effective Work
Chapter 6: AIM for Better Health
Chapter 7: AIM for Better Work–Life Balance
Your mind is extraordinary. Your mind. The mind that, right now, sees black marks on white paper and effortlessly turns them into bundles of meaning. The same mind that sees the word ‘sunset’ and fluently converts it into an inner vision of colours and shades. Without even trying.
How extraordinary. How miraculous.
To perform its amazing feats, your mind has an information-processing capacity greater than the combined power of all the computers, routers and Internet connections on Earth. Did you know, for example, that a tiny piece of your brain, the size of a grain of sand, contains 100,000 neurons and 1 billion synapses all communicating with each other.1 The brain is the mind’s supercomputer. It can connect 100 trillion bits of information.
So with this amazing capacity available to us, how do we use our minds?
The simple answer is, not as well as we might. For a start, about half the time we are awake we are thinking about something other than what is going on at the time.2 And we keep trying to multitask – ordering a pizza while walking the dog and Skyping a cousin in Australia. Recent research, however, shows multitasking significantly reduces our overall performance.3
Then there are all the things our minds do on autopilot. Do you wake up in the morning and reach for your phone, blearily checking your emails while still lying in bed? Do you sit in traffic on your way to work scowling when someone beeps their horn, without even considering that they might be trying to tell you something useful?
The fact is that we are only aware of a tiny fraction of what we are thinking, feeling and sensing – so we’re barely conscious of how and why we behave the way we do. It’s as if we have a large, elegant, state-of-the-art ocean-going cruise liner at our command and all we use it for is chugging about the harbour.
The problem is that although we have all that enormous potential at our disposal, our minds don’t come with an instruction manual. As miraculous as they are, we don’t know how to use them to anything like their full capacity. All we get is some rudimentary guidance.
We’ve all been educated to some extent. We’ve learned to do calculations and construct sentences; we’ve maybe learned history, geography, science, technology, languages or commerce. We can cook and shop, work the Internet and drive a car. We can do our jobs. We might even have mastered some of these to a very high level. But it’s not the same. We still don’t use or direct our minds effectively. And that affects the way we relate to others, the way we feel, the way we think and the way we experience the world around us.
Most of the time our minds just run on automatic and we’re barely aware that they’re doing that. This keeps us confined in the narrow space of our habits. Mentally, emotionally and in our behaviours, we keep doing what we’ve always done – and we keep getting what we’ve always got. Sometimes we manage to break out into new ways of doing things. But often, with a sad predictability, these new resolutions and good intentions don’t last and we flip back to automatic again.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can do so much better, and it’s not that hard. We just need to know how to use our minds more effectively.
