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Are you interested in improving your listening skills and looking after your brain?

Our minds wander but need training. A new puppy needs training or it will lead you.Your mind needs training or it will wander incessantly.

You and I may need to improve our attention. When our focus wanders, we need to nudge it back to what we are focusing on. We can do this by sharpening our intention. Why are we listening?  Are we helping this person to say what they are saying to us or are we looking for an opportunity to disagree?

The final sharpening of our intention will improve with kind intention. We listen with kind ears. This way we hear more and don’t get distracted by attributing negative motives. ” They are lying to me”. Kind listening allows us to delay judgement, listen more closely as well as keeping our mind open and our brain balanced.

Try it now. Think of a person who you don’t like much. Revisit your opinion through kind lenses. See if it calms your mind and helps you to listen better. You will benefit more than they do.

Have you ever had a conversation when time stopped? Have you ever engaged in an activity when the same thing happened? There are two sorts of time. Clock time and psychological time. Clock time is when you are very aware of the exact time on your watch. You are early or late. If running late you can get stressed. Psychological time is when you wander into the past or future and lose awareness of clock time. It can be called the zone or in flow. If you are really enjoying yourself you can suddenly be jerked into clock time. ‘OMG…look at the time’.

When speaking to a group, you need to get into the zone and away from your clock. Make sure you have some way of reminding yourself that you have a finish time. Maybe an alarm or ask someone in the audience to wave their hands when you have five minutes to go, discretely. Now that clock time is being looked after, you can focus on enjoying yourself.

Try taking your watch off when doing something you enjoy. You don’t need to be aware of the exact clock time all the time. It can be enjoyable to let time stop.

Do you know that you have a default mode network in your brain? It’s where your awareness goes to rest. Ideally, it is a calm place and you can leave it to do other brain activities. If you do a lot of thinking or worrying, this can become your default mode network and you will spend most of your time there. You have a choice. The more time you spend in the calm place, the more it becomes your resting  or default place. Just sitting quietly for brief periods will strengthen the calm default mode network. Just focusing on what you are doing also helps. If thoughts interrupt, let them pass.

Eventually, when something goes wrong you can immediately take action without the time wasted in worrying or wishing something didn’t happen.

Train your brain and strengthen your default mode network by sitting quietly before going to bed. Keep your mind free by focusing on your breathing. Let any distracting thoughts drift by like clouds. Just keep coming back to your breathing.

The benefits are huge but you need to practise daily.

Allostatic load is the wear and tear on our body caused by stress and worry. We can get stressed by dealing with actual events. We can also get stressed by imaginary events. Our body reacts the same to real or imagined events. Mark Twain wrote that we all have tragedies in our lives…some of which actually happen.

Managing your thoughts will lessen the wear and tear of imagined events. A good practice is to treat your thoughts as thoughts. Say to yourself ‘ I am having the thoughts that I can’t deal with this much pressure’. Decide what is real and what is imagined and treat them differently. If you focus on the present you won’t have to worry about an uncertain future. The present is certain. You can regret the past but not the present.

There is still time to establish your new normal. We are likely to get past coronavirus this year and settle back into what we call normal. There is still time to decide what we want this normal to look like. Do we go back to what we did before or do we deliberately decide what we want to change or do differently? New habits are difficult to get started but become our friends with use. What can you do differently to care for your health and wellbeing? How can we listen better? Build stronger relationships? View everything through kind lenses? What have you enjoyed during the restrictions that you want to continue doing?

It will be easy to rush back to the old normal but then we won’t have learned anything from lockdown. Make the changes now and get the benefits for the rest of your life. Don’t rush back to the old normal. Design your future.

One of our body functions that we can control, to some extent, is breathing. We can calm down or agitate ourselves with our breathing. If you feel anxious about speaking to a large group, you can calm yourself down by slowing down your breathing. Your body will speed up your breathing when necessary. I suspect that we breath more deeply and more quickly than we need to. When at rest we can slow down considerably.

Try this exercise.

Breath in slowly to the count of 4

Hold the breath to the count of 4

Breathe out slowly to the count of 4

Wait to the count of 4 before starting the cycle again.

If you feel that you need to breath more deeply or quickly to catch, you probably don’t.

This process will calm you down before going to sleep or before an activity or situation that is likely to cause stress.

Try it even for a few minutes each day or just before going to sleep.