On Saturday afternoon, I (Nikki) found myself with some spare time (if you’ve heard of it). Kevin was at his final event as a lululemon ambassador, and for the first time in a LONG time, I actually had nothing pressing I needed to do. My initial reaction was to rack my brain in an attempt to create a list of anything that was tucked away somewhere. Catching myself, I laughed at the absurdity of my monkey mind and forced myself to stop.
It got me thinking about how we have come to wear ‘busy” as a badge of honour. We complain about how packed our lives are – between work, family events, social arrangements, picking up the kids, running errands, managing finances, keeping fit, and the list never ends. Yet at the same time, we have come to secretly enjoy it. Even depend on it. We feel accomplished when we are constantly doing, and lazy when we are simply being. So much so, that from the second our heads lift off the pillow in the morning to the moment they fall back down on it at night, we just don’t stop. Even when we find ourselves with a few minutes to spare, we fill them! We check our emails on the toilet, read the news during breakfast, scroll through social media on commute, call our friend in our lunch break, shop online on the way home, and watch TV during dinner. Sound familiar?
The question we need to ask ourselves is, at what cost? At the cost of our mental health? Our physical wellbeing? Our inner happiness? Our relationships? Our sanity?
It’s so important to give ourselves permission to just be. To pause. Breathe. Meditate. Get centred. Unless we actively remind ourselves to press the stop button every so often, we just won’t. So our advice to you, as funny as it sounds, is to schedule in DEAB time where you ‘Drop Everything And Breathe’. (Or drink a tea, or listen to music, or have a bath…Anything that gets you centred). The point is, by scheduling DEAB time into your diary, you make a ‘being’ activity look like a ‘doing’ one. And you might just successfully trick yourself into taking a break. Observe the profound difference that pausing regularly begins to make in your everyday quality of life 🙂
