Resilience Tips: How to Un-Mind Your Own Business
By Sandy Davis, a.k.a. "The Resilience Guy"
The Stress of Minding Your Own Business
Most of us spend most of our time “in our head.” We listen continuously to the ceaseless chatter that goes on in our mind. Rarely do we take time to turn off the chatter, to come to a place of inner stillness, and to enjoy the resulting sense of refreshment that comes from “getting completely out of our head” or “un-minding our own business.”
Over time, the constant chatter running our mind most often becomes wearing, and, if our chatter has negative components, it can also become a source of constant stress. That’s why we need to find ways to intentionally stop the endless chatter and enjoy moments of relief from it.
How to Get Out of Your Mind
The best, quickest, and most reliable way to get out of your head is to get into your body. This works because you can’t be in two places at once.
The best way to get fully into your body is to exercise vigorously. When you are exercising hard enough to elevate your heart rate up into what is called your aerobic zone*, you cannot NOT be in your body. Why? Because you need to keep your attention on how you are moving your body, where you are going, what you are doing, and what you are perceiving both inside and out. While you are paying close attention to these facets of exercising, it is relatively easy to suspend all the rest of your “mental shenanigans.”
In other words, continuous vigorous exercise enables you to get out of your cognitive mind. It sets you up to drop into a kind of trance state in which you can simultaneously be in full motion physically, even as your mind becomes still inside. Athletes call this delightful state “being in the flow.”
How to Reap Other Valuable Benefits from Exercising
When you exercise continuously at a level of exertion that keeps your heart rate up in your aerobic zone, all kinds of other valuable benefits accrue.
One is that you can use your exercise as a “moving meditation.” In those moments when your body is in full motion and your mind simultaneously becomes still, you can re-center your spiritual energy. You can let go of everything else for a brief while, and thereby experience the simple joy of just “being in motion.”
Aerobic exercise can also serve to increase the rate at which your body burns calories. In combination with eating well, this increase in your metabolic rate can result in healthy and sustainable weight loss.
The multiple and overlapping medical/health benefits that accrue from regular vigorous exercise are almost too long to list. Regular vigorous exercise has been shown to prevent all sorts of diseases, to provide cures for many ailments, including depression, to preserve the health of your brain, and to extend both the quality and the length of your life.
All It Takes is Self-Discipline
Exercising is relatively easy. Having the self-discipline to actually do it (as in every day, or every other day) can be more of a challenge. It takes clear intentions and an ongoing commitment to make this a daily practice that you pursue without fail.
Developing the self-discipline to exercise regularly leads to your having much more confidence in your ability to keep your self-care agreements. Regular exercise will also increase your physical strength, your stamina, your flexibility, your balance, the tone of your muscles, the shape of our body, etc.
Over time, regular physical exercise is the only “magic pill” I know of. It will cure most ailments, whether they are physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual. Exercise simply works.
So How Come We Don’t Exercise?
We mostly don’t take advantage of the curative and restorative effects of regular exercise because it requires (1) that we sustain an ongoing commitment to our own self-care; (2) that we make time every day (or every other day) to honor this commitment; and (3) that we make an ongoing investment in something other than what’s going on in our head.
As a result, most of us don’t take good care of our physical body—even though exercising regularly can cost next to nothing, requires no prescription, has no dangerous chemical side effects, and is fabulously re-vitalizing. The problem is simply that we fail make it a regular daily practice.
Call to Action
If you want relief from the stresses created by your ever-chattering mind, start to explore easy ways to “un-mind your own business” via regular aerobic exercise. Start to exert yourself physically—as though your health and welfare depend on it. They do.
Once you start to exercise vigorously every day for 15 minutes, or every other day for 30 minutes, everything else in your life will start to shift in positive ways. You’ll discover that you have a reliable revitalization process right at your fingertips. You just need to make it an intentional daily practice.
Taking time to get of your mind and into your body is a surefire way to increase your resilience-readiness.
WARNING: Before you take on a new daily exercise practice (or ratchet up your existing exercise routines), consult with your physician to make sure that there is nothing in your medical history or your present physical condition that would counter-indicate incorporating regular aerobic exercise into your daily life. Be prudent. Have fun. And live a long and healthy life.
Footnote: * The easiest way to calculate your approximate aerobic zone is first to subtract your age in years from the number 220. The lower end of your aerobic zone will be 60% of this number, and the upper end of your aerobic zone will be 85% of this number. For example, if you were 50 years old, your lower limit of your aerobic zone would be approximately102 heartbeats per minute [ (220-50) * 0.60 = 102 ], and your upper limit would be approximately 145 heartbeats per minute [ (220-50) * 0.85 = 144.5 ]. If you were to exert yourself hard enough to elevate your resting heart rate and maintain it in a range between 102 and 145 beats per minute, you would be exercising aerobically.
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Copyright © 2009 Alexander M. (Sandy) Davis. To find out more about Sandy Davis and the resilience-related manuals and services he offers, visit http://www.ResilienceWorks.com. To subscribe to his free monthly e-newsletter, send an e-mail to Subscribe@ResilienceWorks.com. To reach Sandy directly, send an e-mail to Sandy@ResilenceWorks.com. FYI, he’s “The Resilience Guy.”
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