Imagine a day in which you feel generally fine. After waking up, you spend a few minutes in bed lightly thinking ahead about some of the people you will see and the things you will do. You hit traffic on the way to work, but you don’t fight it; you just listen to the radio and don’t let the other drivers bother you. You may not be excited about your job, but today you’re focusing on the sense of accomplishment you feel as you complete each task. On the way home, your partner calls and asks you to stop at the store; it’s not your favorite thing to do after work, but you remind yourself it’s just fifteen extra minutes. In the evening, you look forward to a TV show and you enjoy watching it. Now let’s look at the same day, but imagine approaching it in a different way. After waking up, you spend a few minutes in bed pessimistically anticipating the day ahead and thinking about how boring work will be. Today, the traffic really gets under your skin, and when a car cuts you off, you get angry and honk your horn. You’re still rankled by the incident when you start work, and to make matters worse, you have an unbelievable number of rote tasks to get through. By the time you’re driving home, you feel fried and don’t want to do a single extra thing. Your partner calls to ask you to stop at the store. You feel put upon but don’t say anything and go to the store. Then you spend much of the evening quietly seething that you do all the work around the house. Your favorite show is on, but it’s hard to enjoy watching it, you feel so tired and irritated. Over these two imaginary days, the same exact things happened. All that was different was how your brain dealt with them — the setting that it used.
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if you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur. Only the confidence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow. Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.
I drive from home to my office, a small apartment on the river in the center of Dublin. I write there from 9 a.m. to lunchtime, I take a simple lunch—bread, cheese, nice cup of tea—work until 6 p.m., then home for dinner. Viewed from outside my head it is a singularly dull and uneventful day, but inside my head … aaah.
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What if, just for today, you did not worry just for tonight, you set aside your cares tomorrow you can worry you can worry about everything on your list you can worry for every hour you’re awake but what if just for today you decided you’d worry tomorrow and then you woke up tomorrow and did the same thing
Your mind is a suggestion engine. Every thought you have is a suggestion, not an order.
Sometimes your mind suggests that you are tired, that you should give up, or that you should take an easier path.
But if you pause, you can discover new suggestions. For example, that you will feel good once the work is done or that you have the ability to finish things even when you don't feel like it.
Your thoughts are not orders. Merely suggestions. You have the power to choose which option to follow.
Phase 5: The Perfect Day Knowing what you want your life to look like three years from now, what do you need to do today to make this happen? This phase brings you to your perfect day — today — and you can see how you’d like your day to unfold: starting your morning alert and excited, having a great meeting with amazing colleagues, feeling full of ideas, nailing that presentation, meeting up with friends after work, having a delicious dinner with your mate, playing with your kid before bed. When you see your perfect day unfolding, you’re priming your brain’s reticular activating system (RAS) to notice the positives. The RAS is that component of your brain that helps you notice patterns. In a common example, when you buy a new car, say, a white Tesla Model S, all of a sudden you start to notice more Model S cars on the roads. The same effect happens here. So, let’s say you imagine your lunch meeting today going well — great ideas, wonderful food, amazing ambiance. A few hours later, you’re actually at that meeting — and the waiter screws up your order. Because you’ve imagined a beautiful reality, your RAS is more likely to pay attention to the ambiance, the company, and the food than to the screw-up, because you told it to. You see? You’re training your brain to ignore the negative and embrace the positive. You don’t have to change the world. You just have to change what you pay attention to in the world. And that, it turns out, is hugely powerful.
Your brain is programmed to seek out the negative — dwindling resources, destructive weather, whatever’s out to hurt you. So when you switch on that radio on the way to work and get bombarded with all those reports about robberies, fires, attacks, the tanking economy, your brain lights up — it now will spend all day chewing
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
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