This is why your entrepreneurial brain is exhausted
By: Tricia Scott
Tags: Entrepreneur, Women In Business, Entrepreneurship, Thoughts, Busyness

Image Credit: Styled Stock Photography

How to: Stop mopping the floor while the tap is still running

How often have you gotten so busy in the ‘doing’ of something that you forget to address the source issue? I have found this to be true in every single area of my life. Go forward, push on, it is what it is, work harder, work through it. Sound familiar?

That’s because it is.

We are conditioned, as humans to numb out and push on, and we all do it, all the time. We carry on regardless, often unconsciously and always at our detriment. We push harder instead of taking a breath (literally) and actually at what’s going on inside of us. When we start to register fear or pain or discontent, we kick it to the curb with work, food, shopping, alcohol, drugs or whatever it might be in an attempt not to feel the way we feel, and it works. It works… and it works… and it works… until it doesn’t.

When it stops working we need more time at the office, more money to shop, more food to comfort, more alcohol to forget and all the while we become more and more desensitised to the world around us. We live by the mantra, it is what it is, we don’t feel that we can change it, so we carry on. We never stop, never feel, never question our behaviour and all the while we’re still furiously mopping, and the tap is still running.

Stop.

The next time you feel the urge to immerse yourself in something that ultimately isn’t for your pleasure but to cover your pain, ask yourself. Why am I feeling like this? What thought are you thinking that is causing this feeling? It’s not easy to catch. We are so used to not observing our beliefs that it will feel strange at first. Eavesdropping on your own thoughts, imagine that?!

This isn’t about judgement, far from it. This is purely an exercise in observation. Here’s what I hear pretty much every time I bring this up with people ‘Tricia, we have between 60,000 and 80,000 thoughts per day. You expect me to monitor them? I can barely find time to pee during the day, never mind observe 80,000 thoughts!’

Obviously, I’m not suggesting you sit and monitor every thought you have. Most thoughts pass by totally unconsciously, and they’re harmless. Observations, to-do lists, reminders and on and on BUT some thoughts are not benign. Some thoughts, while passing by unconsciously, are causing us pain.

But if they’re mostly unconscious thoughts, how are you supposed to notice them?

By the way you feel.

It’s that simple. A thought that is causing you pain will make you feel bad. You may not notice the thought itself, but you will register the feeling it creates in your body, and that’s where we’ve typically learned to numb out. Another drink to cover your nerves, more couch pizza to relive your boredom, another episode of Netflix to not have to think about work tomorrow, another credit card to fill another wardrobe to get the momentary shopping high but, here’s the thing, what are we left with? Just a load of hangovers, discontent, and debt. So what do we do?

Usually, we do it all again because anything other would mean registering the feeling and facing it, but this is where it stops. Right now you can put a beginning to the end of this not-so-merry-go-round and say enough is enough.

Pain is inevitable, it happens. As Glennon Doyle so fabulously puts it ‘The only way out of pain is through it’ when the feelings come up ask yourself ‘What do I need to know?’ It could be that the feeling is the result of a thought that’s completely false but has run wild in your brain for so long you don’t even notice it anymore. Know that it’s not true, acknowledge it and evict it, pronto. It could be that you see that in fact, you cast harsh or mean judgements on yourself. Sit with that. Would you say those things to your best friend? The answer is likely, absolutely not! So why say them to yourself? It could be past trauma reliving itself over and over again, you can’t change the past, but you can change your thought about the circumstance — in fact, its the only power over the past that you have.

In all of the above circumstances, you don’t have to leap the entire staircase in one shot. Allow it to be a process, a forgiving, a rebirth of better thoughts and watch how the world changes around you to meet with your new reality.

Turn off the tap before you pick up the mop, and I promise you, you’ll feel a whole lot better.

I believe in you.