Running on Empty
Running on Empty?
It never ceases to amaze me that we’ve managed to survive as a species. Despite the best efforts of our primitive emotional mind to keep us out of life threatening danger we seem to repeatedly push ourselves to our physical and mental limits. We cram in more and more into our days or agendas – just one more thing. We manage not to go to the loo even though we’ve been desperate to go for the last 3 hours. We finally get ourselves our drink when our parched throat is too uncomfortable to ignore for another 15 minutes whilst we just finish something……We are hungry but we haven’t got round to eating lunch and then we absolutely have to fall into bed, exhausted our minds spinning with things not done and things to do!
Sound Familiar?
We’re exhausted but we are getting by aren’t we? In fact we are running on empty and training our mind, by repeatedly behaving in this way, that it’s not a problem, it’s not life threatening. So, we set up a vicious cycle of stretching ourselves more and more. And our primitive mind believes this is okay because this is what we did yesterday and we are not dead so it must be alright to do the same thing again and again. Doesn’t sound good does it?
Imagine if Your Car was You
We have reminders about the car needing a service – in fact many of our cars actually tell us it’s time to service them. So we do – don’t we? We don’t want the car breaking down. We want our car in good running order so we can do the things we want to do. Are you in good running order so you can do the things you want to do?
Love your Mobile?
Imagine if you were a mobile phone. What percentage charge would you have showing? It’s funny how we make sure our phone is fully charged before we head out for the day having skipped breakfast, meditation and a cuddle with the dog isn’t it? It may be part of your bedtime routine to check if your phone needs charging with not a single thought that you are responsible for recharging yourself too! Imagine if your phone ran out of charge during the day – hellish for many of us as we rely on it working for calls, texts, gaming, checking the traffic etc. Imagine if you ran out of charge – hellish for all the people who rely on you at work, at home, in the community.
Put Your Needs First
- Put time for you into your diary – time to rest or time to do things you love doing.
- Focus on what you do want to do instead of what you don’t want to do. Give your mind a clear instruction. Keep it simple and paint a picture.
- Imagine Yourself with this new habit. Make it a rich, colourful picture with lots of detail eg. when you’ll do it, how you’ll do it, what reminds you to do it, what’s going on around you, what you can see and hear.
- Commit to the Change. Rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 on how committed you are to this change. If you score 8 or less consider what you can do to increase your level of commitment to this change. If you can’t increase your score then consider maybe you don’t want this change enough and perhaps you are doing it because it’s “the right thing to do” or someone else wants you to do it.
Looking after you and your health, your wellbeing as your No.1 priority isn’t selfish. In fact it’s selfless as then you’ll have the resources you require to be there for other people when you choose to. It’s selfless as you’ll be able to look after yourself and make good decisions for yourself so you are not a burden to others.
So true, simple steps, but very effective!
Thanks for reading Pooja.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this over the weekend and made some resolutions to make more time to look after myself and do things I enjoy. Life has somewhat taken over recently and I need to reclaim some time for me!
I’m delighted that you’ve made that first step of pausing and reviewing life. Things can just run out of control and just noticing that is the start followed by small changes. That’s all we need to start with – small changes which will then create the impetus of other change. I wish you joy and success.