Attention is fertilizer. It doesn’t matter who planted the seed nor how evil or nice the seed is; what ever we pay attention to, will grow.
One of the best, universally sound tools that can fit into any Stress Management Toolbox, is learning to become disciplined when it comes to knowing where we put our attention.
If we attend to the pain of the past, we can easily become depressed. If we attend to possible pain of future we can become anxious. Essentially lassoing tomorrow’s stress, combining with yesterday’s stress and stacking it all on top of today’s stress. Overwhelming and overloading the system.
Becoming present and learning to attend mostly to positive things is a refreshing new level of PEACE. Peace feels a lot like happiness by the way.
If we fill the brain with garbage, it will never produce fruit. We all love a good harvest, so we must acknowledge that it starts with attention.
I apologize in advance if this becomes unsettling inside for you; However, I want to challenge you to sit down with two pieces of paper.
On the first, write “Things I am paying attention to that I shouldn’t be” . On the other, write “Things I SHOULD be paying attention to but I am not”.
Do some deep soul searching and jot down everything you can think of that fits into each category.
This is a high quality exercise even though it may be uncomfortable at first… just like any other situation that calls on us to become vulnerable… but it really works!
Getting our heart and mind in alignment with an exercise like this, can easily motivate someone to carry out better actions and will also illuminate the areas of life, that are causing the most pain.
These two papers can become your roadmap to less stress and more moments of true happiness; if you will continue to record, then make adjustments to where you are putting your attention.