Have you ever noticed how great you feel after doing something that you have enjoyed? Or how things feel just that little bit easier when you have taken a bit of time to relax?
When we take time to do anything that we enjoy or that helps us to relax we automatically shift into a broader perspective of life. We calm our over reactive fight or flight mode down and start to feel that things are manageable. The mountain comes back into the molehill and we once again see and feel the light.
When life has a lot going on it can seem like we don’t have time for things that don’t seem important. We fall into the trap of feeling that unless it is ‘productive’ it is pointless and there are far more important things that need our time. This could prove to be false economy though as we start to become rather tunnel visioned in our approach to life and often can’t see the wood for the trees. Rather than being mindful we end up mindless. Each day flies by in a bit of a blur and we never feel like we are on top of things.
Whilst we like a challenge in life to help us to feel purposeful and being slightly outside of our comfort zone is perhaps a part of this, this positive stress can turn into negative stress if we lose sight of the bigger picture in life.
The direct route to seeing the bigger picture is to take time to enjoy life, even a brief amount of time will bring benefits. Enjoyment helps to boost our self belief and our confidence whilst relaxation helps to bring our nervous system more into balance and to shrink that mountain to a molehill.
If you feel like life is too much like hard work, if you feel depressed, tired, or stuck then ask yourself if you are making time to do something that you either enjoy or that helps you to relax. It needs to be something that you find engages you in the moment whilst you are doing it. It also needs to be something that helps you to put mobile devices to the side for a while.
And most importantly, you have to give yourself the permission to spend the time doing it.
If you find that difficult then surely it’s at least worth the experiment isn’t it? Why don’t you run your own test on it’s benefits and for one month try to make a commitment to spend a bit more time doing something relaxing and/or enjoyable and see for yourself what happens in the rest of your life.
We often can’t change the bigger things in life until we first learn to make our immediate life a little more manageable. This is the first step in doing so. Once we learn to do that then we will find our path to changing the bigger things that we want to change.
I will be running a series of Inspiring Events on this very topic along with how to create more of what you want in life. The first event takes place on Sunday, 14th May so visit my Inspiring Events page for more info!
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