How To Get Out Of Your Head - Calming A Busy Mind

This talk answers a listener's question on how to get out of your head when you have a racing/busy mind. I provide two perspectives on how to do this - one from an energetic POV and one from a scientific POV.

Transcript

Hey this is Ish and I just got a topic request from a viewer who wanted to know how to get out of his own head.

So it seems like a lot of thoughts were overwhelming him and it seems that his mind has control over him than the other way around.

And what is some advice and some tips on getting out of there.

So I'll give you some solution both from an energetic standpoint and also a scientific standpoint as well.

So from the energetic side,

If we start to look at the term being stuck in your head,

You can probably assume and notice that your attention is stuck in your head area.

So this is pretty common nowadays especially with jobs that require us to be on computers all day or perhaps we're checking social media or on our phones.

So our attention is always in our mind,

In our eyesight,

Taking on new things and that's where we live out of.

And if we take a look at our breathing as well,

That also tends to be higher up on our body so we tend to breathe from our chest area or just our neck and not lower down into our belly or really breathing deep and lower into our body.

So as a result,

Our energy will be stuck up in our head and chest area and what we want to do is bring our energy down.

So this is a process called grounding.

So quite simply,

If you are in those moments where your energy is stuck up in the top part of your body,

You want to start to bring it down by focusing on either your lower belly or your feet firmly planted against the mat and this will start to draw that energy down.

So some practical tips is to,

If you're sitting in a chair right now,

See if you can focus on your feet.

So you can do this while you're listening to me as well.

So you're just noticing your foot pressed up against the ground or mat beneath you and just noticing the texture of the ground and how it feels against your feet and furthermore you can also take deep conscious breaths and you'll start to notice that you start to calm down as well.

And there's also an intimate link between your breath and your thoughts as well and the ancient yogis have known this for centuries now where they have this thing called pranayama which is the different breath practices that you take on to actually calm your mind down so you can sit for meditation.

So the same thing will apply if you know how to control your breath and breathe deeper,

You'll be able to calm your mind down.

So that's another energetic aspect,

Part of this.

The second piece of advice is to take on some kind of physical movement because like you said you're stuck in your head so what you want to do is get out of your head and the way to do that is to do some physical exercise like running,

Lifting weights,

Doing martial art,

Dancing,

Whatever it is that allows you to get out of your head and into your body you'll start to notice that your thoughts will disappear.

And specifically do something that is very strenuous because you'll find that if you're doing something very light and casual you'll still be able to think a lot but if you're doing something that requires all of your concentration like rock climbing for example or running really fast on a treadmill you really have no time to start ruminating over your thoughts because if you do you'll obviously be injured very fast.

So do something that's strenuous and that will allow you to get out of your head.

And then on a similar vein if you take a lot of action you will find that your thinking mind and thinking brain will shut off and this is typically under looked in the self-help community because people like to analyze their problems and think about their problems and talk about it with their friends and do releases and deep dives and all this fancy talk but in reality you'll start to notice that they get more and more in their head and they start to make those thoughts deeper and deeper when in reality if they start to take a lot of action towards their goals they'll find that the strength of the thoughts will start to disappear and they get into a nice place of being emptied out so to speak where they don't have this obsession because they've already taken enough action and that actually tells their brain to calm down a bit.

So focus on different areas which you can control in your life and start to take action towards it and you'll find that you will worry less once you've taken real life action steps towards whatever issues you're facing.

So it's as the saying goes that action kills worry and that definitely applies here.

So now if you look on a scientific side we have our brain and there is a certain network in our brain called the default mode network which is responsible for the mindless chatter that we have and rumination so we'll be like sitting there and thinking about something we did in the past and how that connects to this and that and we'll just go on in loops or we'll come up with stories about how we're not good enough and that'll keep going on and that's actually from our default mode network so that's the rumination I talked about.

And there's been studies that have shown that the practice of meditation and those insight specific meditations where you focus on a specific object over and over again actually help quieten these areas during your meditation.

So you'll actually notice this yourself.

I mean definitely try it out.

You'll notice that before meditation session when you have a lot of thoughts and you go into it and compare that to your state from before to after and you'll notice that after meditation sitting you'll have considerably less thoughts circulating around your head.

And they're found in longer term meditators so people who've done it for a couple of years the areas and networks associated with this mindless self chatter actually shrink in size.

So that's actually really cool and also encouraging if you think about it because these long term meditators actually walk around their day with less thoughts in their head so they actually don't relate to the thoughts and they don't come up with different identities like most people and baggage and that actually starts to disappear.

So that's actually something that's very inspirational and something you can work towards.

You can start off meditating at least an hour a day and try to do that every single day and you'll dramatically notice a huge shift in your well being and the fact that you'll have a lot more spaciousness where you aren't clinging to your thoughts and you don't have a lot of thoughts circulating in your head as much.

So again these are just a couple of tips to help out.

So again focus on grounding,

Focus on breathing deeper and getting out of your head through action,

Physical exercise and moving your body and also taking appropriate action where needed and then at the same time also doing incorporating practices like meditation which will actually shrink these areas in your brain which are responsible for rumination.

So I hope this helps,

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Thank you.

Reviews

Brilliant talk. Lots of great information here to think about (!) which helps me understand and contextualise what happens. I will return and listen again. Thanks

Very helpful!

Sound advice. Thank you. I have a chronic condition that prevents me from doing strenuous exercise though. I need to manage my energy levels very carefully and have a lot of down time. Would be useful to know what happens then? Thanks again 🙏

Thank you for the insight.

Very interesting and helpful! Thank you!