If You Have 20 Minutes a Day I Guarantee a Miracle in Your Life

Your diet is not only what you eat. It is what you watch, what you listen to, what you read, and the people you hang around. Pay attention to what you feed your soul, not just your stomach.

The neural circuitry in your brain makes up (much of) who you are. which means taking care of your brain is crucial to taking care of yourself. ~ Roberta Brinton, neuroscientist

Rest is the ultimate form of self-care.

Rest is a weapon. ~ Jason Bourne

It seems rest is disappearing from our world. If rest was an animal, if might well be on the endangered species list. This comes at a terrible price - we often become impatient, frazzled, short-tempered, anxious, dissatisfied, and unhappy.

It seems rest is under siege these days. We rush to work, to meetings, then rush-hour traffic, the news, devices, sports, shopping, and on and on it goes. Brains need rest - time for quiet reflection, pondering, thinking, unwinding. Time to carry out the neural-trash.

When busyness is left unchecked, rest can become boredom.

Roy Williams puts it this way, "Do we think it no longer necessary to our mental and emotional well-being. I believe joy and contentment will continue to elude us until we claim the gift of rest."

The Cleveland Clinic has this to say, "Some regions of the brain get more active when you aren’t focused on processing information. The best known of those brain areas is the default mode network (DMN). The DMN seems to play an important role when you’re focusing attention inward, rather than focusing on the external world. The DMN has been linked to things like ethics, memories, creativity and how we define our sense of self."

It's easy for the tyranny of the urgent to crowd out the important. When we are used to being over-scheduled it can be hard to figure out how to let our brains just ..... be. 

So, what to do? "NO" is my new favourite word. I use it once a day to carve out 20 minutes of rest. I schedule it. (Yes, I do get the irony here.) I pick something that doesn't require me to process information: nature walking, biking, weeding, vacuuming, sitting and staring, closing my eyes and listening to baroque music, anything that requires the brain not to do much work. I let my brain roam and meander.

It might be an understatement to say this produced a miracle in my life. And, you can do the same. Your brain will thank you.

This article was first published on terrysmall.com

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