How often do you allow yourself to get bored, miss out on an event, or simply relax?

What are you willing to sacrifice in order to make a choice instead, and usually a choice to honour your values, your needs, and what is ‘actually’ important to you in that moment?

I’ve had many a conversation with people in my many years of coaching, about how people ‘rewire their tuning’ from the world rather than what they need to ‘tune into’. What does doing nothing mean to them, what happens when they engage in the news and violence conversations? What happens with they experience JOMO (the joy of missing out) rather than FOMO (fear of missing out).

How do you intentionally relax, and switch off?

We all need down time, but in this crazed ‘on’ world we’re in, it seems we’re constantly being bombarded with information, content, and messages on how to be involved. Sometimes I ask myself, ‘how can I escape?’ We have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, whether we chose to consume it is the way we keep up it seems – there is pride in being the first to know, first to share, first to show-off what we have achieved, where we’ve traveled, and what fun lives we lead.

Admittedly, I can participate in this at times, but I try to limit it, and my exposure to it. But it can be hard to balance participating and consuming in a healthy way.

I question how much our brain capacity can actually take? What is the maximum we can absorb, I often wonder if the feeling that we’re exhausted at the end of the day is due to the sheer amount of information we are taking in rather that what we’ve actually done.

There is a great talk from Andy Puddicombe on TED about the value of doing NOTHING and how to be more mindful of everyday actions – like conversations, driving your car, eating your food and simply paying attention to what you’re doing. Watch it here, and consider for yourself, when was the last time you did absolutely nothing. Literally switch off from all the distractions, and not even set aside time to daydream – literally make yourself bored, stare at a wall… do nothing at all. I bet you can’t remember huh? We’re constantly compelled (and pressured) to be doing, thinking, and justifying how we spend our time effectively.

Experiment a little…

What choices do you make about how much you let in? Prioritise what you want to absorb and sacrifice information you’re unnecessarily sucking up?

Be selective rather than acting like a sponge. Some suggestions – delete the facebook app off your phone, resist the temptation to ‘check’ on the world when you first wake up and instead enjoy the few moments of silence, be grateful for a restful night and just wake up without filling yourself up instantly.

For me, deleting and suspending a whole bunch of subscriptions I had before my big walk on the Camino de Santiago, yes it was in 2013 but I still remind myself before subscribing to anything how this felt. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made. I hadn’t realised how many unread or skimmed emails I was receiving daily, weekly, monthly. I knew when I got back that I couldn’t fathom having to mull through them all, and so I just simply deleted and unsubscribed them all. I’ve been selective to what I re-signed up to and noticed I haven’t missed them – and if I really want to know, or I am researching a topic, its there for me quickly, all within my control.