If nothing changes, nothing changes.
The average person spends 48 days a year browsing their phone. Over a lifetime that’s about 6 years, or 52,596 hours. The average person spends 7 hours a lifetime upgrading the software on their phone. In context, that’s shy of 1% a day spent on software updates over the course of your entire life. Now, imagine spending just 1% a day updating your mind?
In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear states that if you get 1% better each day for one year, you’ll end up 37 times better within 10 years. Mind blown! The mind is 5% conscious, 95% subconscious. Simply paying attention to your everyday thoughts allows you to access your subconscious mind.
Where attention goes, energy flows.
Becoming conscious of your subconscious allows for new thoughts to be generated. A new thought will lead to a new emotion. A new emotion will lead to a new feeling. A new feeling will lead to a new behaviour. And a new behaviour will lead to a new reality.
Your personality is your personal reality.
John Connor in Terminator said, “there is no fate but what we make for ourselves”. A Back to the Future line would have been more fitting perhaps, but I couldn’t find one ☹
The subconscious is your hard drive, storing data of everything ever experienced. The 5% awake side of your mind is therefore heavily influenced by the past. But when conscious thoughts about the future occur, your mind can’t identify whether these thoughts are fictional or factual. Example, just thinking about falling of a cliff can elicit adrenaline in the body. To flip that, just thinking about a sunny beach on a holiday you are about to go on can elicit serotonin, the “feel-good” chemical.
Afterall, the body is just the puppet of the mind.
The key to connecting your mind to the future Is embracing the present. Living within an eternal now is embracing each moment in granularity.
Gift yourself the present.
As Jack Johnson sang in Angel: “she gives me presents, with her presence alone”.
In this modern world, we’re constantly battling with distractions. Attention span is at an all time low, resulting in a major attention span deficit. Research shows that in the year 2000 the average attention span was 12 seconds. Fast forward to 2022 and this has reduced to 8 seconds. That’s 1 second less than a goldfish! Speaking of goldfish, there are two goldfish in a tank, one says to the other, “how do you drive this thing?”… I digress.
Distractions deviate our attention from what is in front of us. In fact, it takes nearly 30 minutes to refocus attention span after a distraction. Focusing the mind back to the present moment is the essence of meta-awareness; the knowledge of what our mind is doing. Against a backdrop of multiple distractions, understanding the narrative of our mind is compounded with obstacles. Self-awareness through the conscious efforts to understand this narrative brings us closer to our thoughts. Being in the present is being one with your mind. By organising the constellation of thoughts in a particular moment, we begin to process information in a linear form.
For example, right now I am concentrating on this post. My mind is pushing thoughts to pay attention to such as; what am I having for dinner tonight? How long has the heater been on for? This coffee is cold so I need a top-up, I need to order some clothes within the sale.. and so on. None of these are productive to my task at hand as they add zero value. So, when I begin to look through this mesh of thoughts through a linear lens, I can begin to prioritise what tasks need to be done and assign an appropriate time.
Compartmentalising thoughts allows to set boundaries.
It begins to limit the convergence of thoughts and enhances the ability to create perspective. When looking at our thoughts through a perspective lens, we begin to see what is important in the here and now. This isolation mechanism can be used to realign back to the present.
The practice of being present in your present is referred to as mindfulness. I interpret this word as the fullness of the mind.
Anything complete can be viewed as being full. A complete glass of water Is a full glass of water. Completion is only achievable once the required attention has been spent. A deficiency in attention will result in incompleteness. A fullness of the mind requires to pay attention.
The philosopher Ken Wilber wrote that “in order for higher development to occur, temporary states must become permanent states”. States are levels of consciousness. When we can stabilise a state of consciousness, such as sleeping, walking, eating, we attract our surroundings towards us and merge into the present moment.
Research has proven a positive correlation between being in the present to happiness.
When applied to the measurement of time which in actuality is forever moving forward, a wandering mind takes you away from the present time, and into either a past or future state. It is preventing you from making the most of the time period you are psychically in – the present. It’s strange to think how finite time we actually have, yet we spend more time thinking about things unrelated to our present state of being.
As Brand proclaimed in the film Interstellar (love that film), “time is relative, okay. It can stretch, and it can squeeze but, it can’t run backwards. Just can’t”. That’s as much quantum psychics as I know!
Our mind is our gateway to experiences. Fine tuning our minds to the present state will enhance our experiences. I’m a big burger fan. To the point where I have to close my eyes when taking that first big juicy tasty bite into a fried chicken burger. A bit of mayonnaise, lettuce, turkey rashes, BBQ sauce, seeded bun ever so lightly grilled (Just Eat order in progress!). The less external stimuli my mind absorbs in that moment before my first bite, the tastier that sensation tends to be. Try it yourself.
The logic of honing your senses to the present invariably increases the enjoyment of that moment, and what is life if not an ordonnance of moments. Learning to heighten the experience of a moment by choosing not to be distracted allows for a greater return of pleasure. By investing your attention into your daily life, you begin to reap the rewards of a happier state of mind.