5 incredible insights that will enable you to rest during your holidays.
Over the last week or so I seem to have had numerous conversations about how exhausted people feel right now and how they know they need to have a proper rest — a holiday, there is little doubt that the last year has been challenging for many of us. It may be that you have a holiday planned, or perhaps you have school-age children and so you may have one coming up in the form of a school holiday. However, the question on everyone’s lips seems to be how on earth can you make your time away from work restful so that you feel properly recharged and refreshed on your return.
As a recovering high achieving stress junkie, I remember this only too well. On the one hand, I was desperate for a break, I felt exhausted by work (and we had three young children at the time) but on the other, even on holiday, I could never really switch off, and more often than not would return to work feeling I needed another holiday, simply to get over the one that I had just had. However, even back then I had the insight to joke that if only I could leave my own mind at home, then it would be an amazing holiday!
Then about six years ago I was introduced to a simple psychological understanding first articulated by Sydney Banks a well-known author and lecturer. I then began to see for myself what the source of a truly restful holiday was and how I could create that for myself. It’s an understanding that I now share with my clients and in this blog, I would love to share with you 5 incredible insights that I hope will enable you to experience more rest during your forthcoming holiday too.
Noticing when and where you are…
I don’t know about you, but I find that a human trait is to time and space travel in our own minds. You can be lying in front of a toasty roaring fire, watching your favourite film or lying on a beach surrounded by the beautiful ocean yet, in your mind, you are thinking about work (you may-as-well be at your desk), having an imaginary conversation with a colleague or a client, you may be turning over in your mind something that didn’t go to plan, wondering if you’d done something different it would have turned out better, or worrying about a meeting in your diary when you return, the emails you’ll have to answer or calls you’ll have to make.
At no time are you in your present. You are either sometime in the past or in the future or someplace completely different!
Please don’t take this as a criticism, or something that you need to fix, in many ways it’s part of being a human. Our minds are incredible and I find it fascinating that we can be surrounded by beauty on our outside, our perfect day that we would associate with feeling relaxed, yet our imaginations will create a scenario in our minds that evoke completely different feelings!
However, what is equally interesting is what happens when we notice that. Have you ever experienced your mind wandering in this way, but then noticed what you were doing and then brought yourself back to the present moment? It’s a little like waking up from a day dream. That’s our incredible psychological system working to bring you back into a state of calm, the present moment, however, we rarely notice that, we rarely rest there, really being in that moment, preferring to beat ourselves up by generating thoughts of how we shouldn’t have been thinking about work — which you guessed it take us right away from the present moment again!
It’s also interesting to notice what else we have an element of choice about and what we don’t. One thing that we don’t have a choice about is what thoughts pop into our mind; noticing the randomness of our thinking can be quite entertaining as well as illuminating! But more impactful than that, is noticing how much choice we have with what we do with a thought when it does pop into our minds. A thought about work may pop into our mind, but more often than not, we have the choice of whether to add to that thought or not. By our own creation, one thought can turn into a thousand, we can lose minutes if not hours lost in our own mind, triggered by one single thought. Noticing that when we pay less attention to the less helpful thoughts, they pass naturally and on their own, can enable us to create more space in our minds and remain more present in the moment that we are in.
I’ll pass on the guilt bucket thank you…
When discussing how to rest with a group of female professionals recently, one common theme was feeling guilty when on holiday. The type of guilt ranged from feeling guilty about leaving work to others, leaving work unfinished to be away from work, to feeling guilty about working full time and not having more time, or even feeling guilty about working part-time and not contributing equally or more than their partners. Of course, this isn’t an issue that only women experience, in fact, we’re all really good at it.
What I have noticed about guilt is that it commonly is accompanied by an expectation that we have about ourselves and how we should behave. It’s like we create a ‘gold standard’ for ourselves and when we don’t meet it, we feel guilty about that and that we should make changes to ensure we meet it in the future.
So what is that ‘gold standard’? Whilst I could delve into where it comes from, why we adopt it, who told us to behave in this way I prefer to approach it from another level and look at how it is created, what is its nature as opposed to what it’s made up of.
In a similar way that our imaginations can export us to a different time and space, it can also create complete works of fiction that are so believable it would impress a Hollywood film movie maker! Now we know this to be true, think of something that you’re scared of right now, whether it’s spiders, snakes, or tomato sauce, picture it in your mind right now and you’ll know how powerful your imagination is!
Our imagination does the same when it creates a version of ourselves that it thinks we should be — it brings out the big guns and creates such a believable character, like the leading lady (or man) in a blockbuster movie. It then shows it to us in amazing technicolour so we can see, with no doubt, how far short we are falling.
However, so often what we fail to notice is that just like the scary thing that you were imagining just a moment ago was not real, neither is the ‘gold standard’ that your imagination has created of who you should be. It simply isn’t real. That person who you expect to be is not living on this planet, they never have and I guarantee they never will!
Like the distracting thoughts we may have about work, the nature of the thoughts that our imagination creates about us operate in exactly the same way, they may pop in unannounced in our minds, but noticing that most of the time we can simply not pay attention to them is so freeing! When we do this, they simply move along, and a fresh, often kinder thought, will replace it.
The missing piece of the gratitude jigsaw and how we can be kinder to ourselves…
When I was burning out I was introduced to the idea of gratitude and being more compassionate to myself. I’ll be honest I found the whole thing quite hard work. At the time, I didn’t feel particularly grateful, my life felt hard and difficult. Each day I would begrudgingly force myself to think of 5 things that I felt grateful for and then try to be kind to myself. Each time, I had a negative, nagging voice that would counteract the lot of it. All it seemed to do was add to the amount in my head and left me feeling like I couldn’t even do that right!
What I love about human beings is that the way in which we work is incredibly simple — but that we get caught up in knots trying to work out how we can feel in a certain way. We know that feeling grateful and compassionate feels nice, but how can we manufacture it? Can we think our way into it?
In my mind, trying to think our way into it, only creates more thinking and often more negative thinking as we end up with an argument in our head!
The secret to all of this is as beautiful as it is impactful and it lies in noticing how transient our thinking is. I’ve yet to find someone who never has an insecure thought of some kind or other, whether it’s about themselves, the future, other people, or in any of the flavours that we have already explored. However, what we have discussed is that the key is in what we do with that thought once it has arrived rather than trying to avoid or stop it.
Paying less attention to those less helpful thoughts creates space, a small pause if you like, a space where often a fresher, more helpful thought will replace it. However, what so often happens is that in that space you will experience a sense of peace. It may only be for a moment, maybe only a microsecond to start with, but it will undoubtedly be there.
Noticing that moment of peace can be transformational. When we pay more attention to that, and really notice it, (and pay less attention to the less helpful thinking) so often what happens is the space in between the insecure thinking grows. We naturally start to switch our attention paying more attention to the feeling that feels good, rather than the one that didn’t.
It’s in this peaceful feeling that we then experience more gratitude and compassion. It’s simply a natural consequence of the space that we are in, there’s no need to think ourselves into it, it simply happens naturally.
Being ok with what is in your head…
I’ve lost count of the number of conversations that I have had over the years about how we work as human beings and so often the next question is ‘yes, but how do I stop feeling like this’ ‘what do I need to do’.
Sadly we live in a society that focuses on how we need to fix our thinking, how some thinking is better than others, how we should stop thinking in a certain way, striving to have the most perfect mindset! In my experience this ‘not being ok’ with how we think, innocently creates even more unhelpful thinking that we then feel we have to manage!
As human beings, we experience a whole rainbow of different thoughts, from happy to sad, joyful to frustrating, ambivalent to angry. In my mind none of these are good or bad, they are simply different, and they all create different experiences for us, creating a rich and diverse life.
However, so often I see a client who will not want to experience a particular thought and will then innocently create even more thinking trying to fix it, feeling guilty about having it, frustrated that it popped into their mind, maybe thinking they should know better by now. They can spend minutes, hours, sometimes days all on the same train of thought.
I love the approach of a very experienced teacher and mentor of mine Elsie Spittle, when a thought that we don’t particularly like pops into our mind, her approach is quite simple, she shrugs her shoulders and says ‘so what!’ As soon as we’ve had the thought, leave it alone, it’s gone, so what that it popped by?
I have to say that now I agree wholeheartedly, why waste the precious moment we’ve been brought back to with pondering over a thought that has been?
Following what you feel…
Often when we start a holiday we innocently create an expectation (with that wonderful imagination of ours) of what it should be like or perhaps what we should do. We then may spend a lot of our holidays trying to recreate what we have imagined, being frustrated when it doesn’t quite work out that way.
Noticing that that is what we so often do and knowing that we don’t have to do that can be very liberating!
There is one feature of every human being that can be incredibly useful to know when navigating our everyday lives. So often I will have a conversation with a client that starts with ‘I know what to do but…’ and then they will share with me a whole heap of reasons why they can’t do the thing they know they need to do!
It’s like we have two parts to us in our minds, an overthinking, loud, noisy, often emotional part, a bit like a little terrier dog and a more steady, calmer, more common sense part, more like a St Bernard dog. Often they hold opposing views and it sometimes feels like we are holding a battle between the two in the privacy of our own minds.
We often have different ways to describe this, we may call one our ‘head’ or ‘intellect’ or ‘ego’ and the other our ‘heart’ or our ‘gut’ or ‘deeper intelligence’; we may know that when we follow our heart/gut/deeper intelligence it usually works out — unlike when we follow our head/intellect/ego, and you may even have examples of this in your own life! However, what I find is that whilst we are happy to rely on our heart/gut/intelligence for the big decisions in life like who to marry or which house to buy, we are often reluctant to even notice our heart/gut/intelligence in the smaller, everyday decisions that we make.
So what does this have to do with the holidays? In my mind, in our everyday, especially in our work, decisions as to what to do can next are often made by our ‘head/intellect/ego’; our lives are dictated by what we ‘should’ be doing, what are others doing, comparing, contrasting, we may create scenarios about what will happen if we don’t do something, we pull on experience to try to predict our future, preferring to ‘think it through or work it out’ creating endless amounts of thinking.
It’s then easy to use the same strategy when we are away from work to create our holidays.
So I’m inviting you to take a break from all of that thinking during your holiday, to take a fresh approach, and to follow your heart/gut/deeper intelligence more. If you find it hard to hear that deeper knowing, ask yourself what would you love to do right now? What feels right for you to do? Allow yourself to let go of all the thinking about what this holiday should look like or what you think everyone else is doing and simply focus on that deeper feeling of what feels right for you right now, in this moment — and go and do that!
I have found that when we allow ourselves to follow that deeper intelligence/gut/heart more, it allows us to relax more into the present moment, our minds settle more and it allows our days to unfold in the way they are meant to (rather than how we think they should) often bringing about a more restful, peaceful and often joyful experience.
Andrea Morrison is a Transformational coach, speaker and writer, who challenges the traditional Alpha ideology, encouraging her clients to become courageous, acting from their heart not their head. She is passionate about freeing the human mind to achieve potential whilst retaining life balance and enjoyment.
To find out more about Andrea you can visit her website at andreamorrison.co.uk or watch her captivating TedX talk ‘When I stopped trying to be confident I became unstoppable!’
