Mary was two minutes late for our zoom call. Again.
She arrived out of breath, chomping on the last of her Nutrigrain bar.
“Sorry,” she exhaled. “There was traffic on the way back from the gym.”
I don’t make a fuss about being two minutes late or five minutes. (It happens to me, too.) But when it shows up as a pattern, I take notice.
Mary brought it up.
“I’m always rushing,” she said. “I don’t know how long things take, and then I’m late, or worried about being late.”
Can you relate to Mary’s situation?
Mary is suffering from Hamster Mind.
A quick story about hamsters, that will be relevant in a minute.
When I was seven years old, I had a hamster called Elvis. (Technically, I had two hamsters, until Elvis killed and ate his brother. 😬)
Anyway, Elvis was fat and lazy. So we got him a hamster wheel for exercise.
Elvis would get on the wheel and move his little feet, spinning the wheel round. He would run and run and run until he wore himself out, without ever going anywhere.
Getting on a hamster wheel is a wonderful tool for lazy hamsters, but not so great for a human mind.
You know you have a case of Hamster Mind if:
- Your mind is constantly racing, urgently prodding you from one task to the next.
- You’re chronically worried about being late.
- You frequently overlap tasks: eating while checking email, talking on the phone while cooking dinner, painting your nails while watching TV.
It’s as if there is never enough time to do what needs doing, and you have to squeeze tasks into every available moment.
Hamster Mind keeps running, creating the feeling of busyness, and yet at the end of the day, it seems as if nothing has been done.
I’m going to say that Hamster Mind doesn’t come from your busy calendar or even your bad sense of timing. It comes from having more thinking than your little mind was built to handle.
Your mind is revving up like an engine with more and more thoughts, until your RPMs are burning your fuel and consuming all your power.
Hamster Mind thinking is exhausting, and it makes you less productive.
There is a solution to Hamster Mind, but you might not like it.
Are you ready?
Slow down.
Slow your breathing and your movements. Stop everything.
Get off the hamster wheel of your thinking, and let the engine of your mind cool down.
When you’ve got a bad case of Hamster Mind, slowing down might be challenging. Hamster Mind urgently screams, “More, more, more! Faster, faster!” and it really looks like rushing will solve the problem.
But it won’t.
Humans burn out quickly with too much thinking, and all of us do better with less of it. In fact, just the right amount of thinking creates the Flow State where a lot of action is happening, with very little on your mind.
Spending time with us in REFLECT: Rediscover Joyful Direction, Focus and Ease will ease your Hamster Mind, and help slow it down for good.
Together, we’ll create the time and space to pause and slow down. We’ll review where we’ve been, celebrate the learnings, and allow the space to listen to our inner direction about what’s next.
The clarity, focus and direction you’re looking for comes from within, and it will be your guide.
You can get the details about everything that’s included in REFLECT and exactly what we cover at the link below.
