I woke up this morning and my whole mind and body wanted to feel tired–I didn’t want to be tired, though! I had big plans for the day! To be honest,with the fast-paced life I have been living lately, I could have found many reasons to deserve to stay tired. Instead, I told myself “No, I don’t want to feel tired today!” and I made a conscious choice to look for reasons to find energy.
- I started with my morning meditation, which includes scriptures and other good, inspirational books, journaling, and prayer.
- I found some of my favorite music, went down into my basement, and I danced. I got my blood pumping in a way that’s fun for me—not force, just free fun.
- I gave my husband a really big hug and thought of all the reasons I am grateful to have him in my life.
By finding all the reasons that I could have energy today, I also found reasons that I could feel excited about the day–even with all the things on my to-do list– without needing to feel tired or overwhelmed about it.
It’s so cool how that works, isn’t it?
To some it may seem like it could be coincidence or a “fluke thing,” but I’m going to tell you why it works. Basically, it’s because our brains are cool! Our brains are programmed to only see the things we look for. According to Darren Hardy in the Compound Effect:
“We are bombarded with billions of sensory bites of information each day. To keep ourselves from going insane, we ignore 99.9 percent of them, only really seeing, hearing, or experiencing those upon which our mind focuses.”
And thank goodness!! Think about it, if we had to notice and process every single piece of information that came our way, we would be overwhelmed with information! There are sights, sounds, smells, and life going on around us all the time! There’s always something coming at us and wanting our attention, so our brains are wired to ignore a lot of things. I don’t have to notice every time I need to take a breath, I don’t need to tell my body how to move. My brain does that habitually, and it also shuts out information habitually. Yours does too!
- If you’re a parent and you’ve ever been in a room full of kids making all kinds of noise and the only sound you notice is your own child’s cry, it’s because you’ve been trained to only listen for the noises that you need to hear.
- If you’ve ever bought a new car or learned a new word and suddenly you notice them everywhere, was it a serendipitous coincidence that all of a sudden everyone has learned the word or bought the car? I mean, maybe—but most likely, it’s just you didn’t notice it before; it wasn’t in your awareness.
Incredible, right?!
Just imagine! if we understand just this little piece about how our brains work, we could program it to notice more of the things we want to see!
Which brings up another important point: do you know what you want to see?
If we could know for sure what we value–things that are virtuous, lovely, praiseworthy, of good report, perhaps–then we can choose to see those things.
When I woke up this morning, I could have chosen to focus on all I had to do. I could have chosen to focus on all the reasons why I deserved to be tired; I could have focused on the fog on my brain, I could have focused on my eyes being heavy—and, to be honest, Sometimes I DO! Today, however, I didn’t want to. So I chose to focus on reasons to be excited and to have energy, and it really made all the difference.
How do you want to feel today? What if you could choose to live the life that you value every single day?
