How To Close The Unnecessary Mental Tabs That Distract You

You are about to listen to a simple, and yet powerful, exercise, called Mental Tabs, which will help you to regain focus on what is important in your life, fell lighter, and reduce stress. The exercise consists of two parts and I will guide you through the whole exercise step by step.

Transcript

Good morning or good evening and welcome.

My name is Spiros and today I will talk to you about one of my favorite exercises called mental tabs.

And you want to use this tool when you want to regain focus on what is important and when you want to feel lighter and reduce your stress.

But you cannot because you feel overwhelmed by the volume of information and tasks constantly bombarding you when you are consumed by financial worries,

Chores and obligations at work and life.

If you haven't been to this podcast before,

It's a place for people who don't have much time so I aim for audios of 10 minutes or so.

And here we will talk about personal development,

Mindset,

Mental health,

Psychology,

Philosophy,

All the interesting stuff.

And as I said,

Today we explore the mental tabs tool.

This tool is so simple and yet powerful and you will love to use it again and again when the pressure of work and life arises.

One of the first times I personally used the mental tabs exercise was on September 2022 and it helped me tremendously.

My son has just started primary school so he had homework to do.

We had one month old baby.

I had started two new collaborations plus I had my own coaching practice.

And on top of that,

I wanted to perform in my role as father,

Husband,

Son,

Friend.

Have you noticed that I have not even mentioned anything about my personal time,

Hobbies,

Interests,

Exercising and so on?

Well,

This is because during that period I didn't have the time to consider myself,

To put myself in the equation that we call life.

So I was stressed.

I couldn't sleep well in the night.

I had stopped exercising and I started noticing the consequences of stress like nausea,

Insomnia,

Anxiety,

Explosions of anger.

Can you relate to my state?

Hopefully not,

But if you do,

Then mental tabs that I will describe to you shortly will definitely help you to improve your physical,

Mental and emotional state.

Because you will start putting things into place.

Well,

The point is that when there are so many tasks,

Chores or projects that need our attention,

Which is the norm today,

Then those tasks quite often control our life and our health.

If we don't take over,

That could lead to low performance and serious health issues like loss of appetite,

Shortness of breath,

High blood pressure,

Chest pain,

Heart attack,

You name it.

Since we don't want that and we prefer to remain healthy and next to our loved ones and also perform,

Let's try out this exercise,

The mental tabs.

This exercise is about downloading everything from our head on a piece of paper and then removing some of them using coaching questions.

Then we will end up with a few tasks and the to-do list will become more manageable.

So,

This exercise consists of two parts.

First,

We are going to make a list of all our open mental tabs and then second we start to close them.

I don't know if you are like me but when I want to search for something I google it and then I start to open tabs and then I open some more tabs from those initial ones.

The result is that I end up with so many open tabs in so many windows all around and later I cannot go back and find what was useful and to be honest sometimes my laptop also crashes.

Something similar happens in our life.

Every moment we receive so many information,

We start to open tabs,

Mental tabs to hold all this information there and it becomes so difficult to process them all and sometimes we also crash,

Like our computers.

So,

At this point I would like you to make a list of all your mental tabs you currently have open.

Tasks,

Worries,

Chores,

Projects,

Whatever it is.

It's about downloading everything from your head on a piece of paper.

You see,

Our thoughts are like spaghetti so when we externalize them they take a linear form instead of being all over the place inside our heads and they are much easier to handle them.

That way we also free space in our heads and I don't know if you are familiar with Brian Tracy but he always suggests to write things down.

Goals,

Tasks,

Vision,

Everything.

Write it down,

Just externalize it,

Put it in a linear form instead of being a spaghetti in your head.

Also,

By starting writing stuff down you will realize that more tasks or to-dos comes up,

Things that your unconscious was holding.

Another reason that we want to write things down is that when you put a task on your paper you start seeing it more objectively.

It's not an idea anymore but it's something you can actually look at it on the paper and do something about it.

The way we will do this is to take a piece of paper and a pen and start to write down all the things that stress you right now in your life,

In different areas of your life,

Like career,

Health,

Money,

Relationships,

Your free time.

Alternatively you could do that on a specific project and write down all the things that you have to do about it,

All the things that stress you,

Your worries,

Your tasks,

Everything.

And it does not matter if it's a small thing like I forgot to buy milk for my son or I have to pay the mortgage by the end of the week and I don't have the money.

It does not matter how big or small it is,

It does not matter what it is exactly,

As long as you write the thing down that you hold in your head,

That occupies a piece of your headspace.

Now I would like you to pause this podcast and take 5 to 10 minutes and make a list of all your mental tabs,

Of everything that you hold in your head currently.

And then return back to tell you the way we will close those open mental tabs using some coaching questions.

Now that you have created the list of your open mental tabs,

Let's go and start to analyze them and see which one of them we can close.

And here is where we enter the field of coaching,

Where we help our clients to analyze their challenges in a deeper level,

So they find solutions.

First I'm gonna mention the coaching questions and then you can go to each of one of your mental open tabs,

Analyze them using those coaching questions and decide whether you need to close them or not.

Okay,

So let's start.

The first question.

Is it urgent?

You know,

Many times we stress for things that do not belong in the present moment.

An example from my personal life.

Sundays are the days of the week that I completely dedicate to my family and on a particular Sunday morning I was playing with my son.

But then an email came from Google about a change in their services that would affect my website after two months.

Now,

As a classic Spiros,

I dropped everything,

I stopped playing with my son and I went on my laptop to fix this.

And as you can imagine I spent the rest of my Sunday trying to solve this.

And then on Monday I could not concentrate on my work because I was feeling bad that I didn't play with my son after all.

Other times we stress for things that are not so important.

But what is the worst thing that could happen?

Let me repeat this so it sinks in.

What is the worst thing that could happen?

Sometimes just this question is enough,

Because it relaxes us,

Since most of the times we realize that things are not so serious.

But whatever is this that stresses us out and we keep in our head,

We need to check whether the solution is in our control,

Because only then we can do something about it.

Some time ago I was coaching a client who was feeling extremely stressed with his job for months to the point that he got ill.

And when I asked him what is in your control,

He realized that he could actually quit.

He couldn't change the workload or how was his relationship with his manager at work,

But he could actually go and find another job.

So now I would like you to go back to your open mental tabs list and in the next 5 minutes remove all the items you have written down that do not belong to the present moment or to the immediate future,

They are not important and they are not in your control.

So let me repeat,

Remove all your open mental tabs,

The things that you have written down in your list,

That do not belong to the present moment or to the immediate future,

They are not important and they are not in your control.

Thank you guys for joining me on this journey to explore the power of mental tabs.

And remember by taking a few moments to clear our mental clutter and prioritize our tasks we can actually reduce stress,

Increase productivity and reclaim the control over our lives.

I encourage you to continue practicing the mental tabs exercise regularly.

And by the way feel free to share your experience with the rest of us.

Have a lovely day or evening and until next time stay mindful,

Stay focused and stay well.