Chapter 4

There is no time to waste

Practice 4.1: Mindfulness right now!

Practice 4.2: Mindfulness right now!

Lap it up!

We are so preoccupied with all that we have to get done that, even if we do find we have five minutes to kill here and there, we usually use that time to think through what we should be doing or where we should be next or to replay some past encounter or mishap over and over in our mind or worry about what is coming up. We miss out on so much of our experience this way. What about coffee breaks? How often have you really enjoyed a ‘break’?

These mini intervals throughout the day are rarely that, or moments of any form of rest or coffee satisfaction. In fact, often, they are just another habit, full of other mini habits being lived out on autopilot (without much awareness) at the same time. Also, often, we are doing more things at the same time, such as tweeting, getting dressed, reading some paperwork, checking emails, talking to someone, watching TV or listening to the radio. How many times do you really just sit and have a cup of coffee, for no other reason at all than just that?

The purpose of the next exercise is to begin to show you just how you can bring and incorporate mindfulness into your everyday activities (we will be doing much more of this throughout the remainder of the book), such as drinking coffee. It will show you how you have the power to break old habits and live a more meaningful and enjoyable life. This exercise will allow you to start to use your coffee interludes for the reason they were intended – to have a break from the endless rushing around that you do all day long – often inside your head.

If you do not drink coffee, you can try this exercise with any other drink you choose (or even a cigarette, if you smoke – just be aware and curious in the same way as outlined below). If you drink your coffee in public, do not worry about anyone noticing what you are doing, as you drink it mindfully, they will just think that you are deep in thought – which is what most of them will be doing anyway and secretly what you are not doing! Remember, there is no agenda to have any particular experience of drinking your coffee – the only goal is to pay attention to whatever your experience is.

So, go and get a cup of coffee (or whatever your vice may be) and try this exercise out now or as soon as you can.

Practice 4.3: I haven’t got time for this!

Busy, tricky minds

The truth is that there is nothing else to blame for our busyness, no one else, no endless emails, no after-school activities, no relentless work projects, no annoying friends, uncaring partners, demanding bosses or slack colleagues – in fact, nothing else at all is responsible for our escalating stress levels, frantic rushing, gruesome schedules and general busyness, except our busy thinking minds! Now, that does not mean that you are to blame, that you are at fault or that there is something fundamentally wrong with you or your mind. This is just how our minds have evolved and they are doing just what they are designed to do (more on this later in this chapter). However, we can do something about all this. We can take responsibility for managing our minds and choose how we respond to them when they are busy, keeping us busy. Try making a list or having a think right now of all the things that you assume make you more stressed and busier in life. We have listed a few of our own recurring rants to help you get started.

Practice 4.4: Mindfulness right now!

Time is ticking away!

As we rush around amidst our busyness, all too often it seems as if there simply is not enough time in the day to get everything done. However, time simply ticks away at the same pace for everyone, every day, whether it feels like it is going faster or not. The reason that on some days it seems to whizz past us faster than the speed of light is often all down to our worry about it slipping away, our worry that there just never is enough time in the day. While we are worrying in this way, we are simply not present or ‘awake’ enough to experience real time at all. Take Sandra in the following case example, for instance. She worried that she had no time for herself (and it is fair to say, like the rest of us, she had a lot on and to take care of ) but, in all her worry about this, she missed the point that she had lots of time for herself – the same amount of time that we all have.

All time is my time!

When our life is so busy, we feel the need to allocate time to tasks, which can, of course, be helpful, but we must try to remember that all this time is, in fact, our time. It is only when we are wanting something different from right now that we are not having any me time. You can learn to bring awareness to your everyday experiences with mindfulness and, inasmuch, feel that you have ample and unlimited time to spend with yourself. Everywhere you are, everywhere you go, whatever you are doing and whomever you are with – surprise, surprise, you are also there, experiencing life just as it is! As you go about your everyday busy routine, make a conscious effort to check in with your experience of that moment – you might run through a quick list of short questions as outlined in the following exercise, to silently answer to yourself that will help you to feel present, taken care of (by yourself!) and attended to.

Practice 4.5: I haven’t got time for this!

Letting time slip away

Keeping a track of time does not interfere with being present in any given moment or the practice of mindfulness whatsoever, please do be assured of that. That said, time itself and our relationship to it are entirely part of our constructions of the world, they are no more ‘real’ than days of the week, months or years. Time is simply a useful construct to help orient ourselves and coordinate ourselves with others. Just like any event in the world, we can make various meanings from this and judge ourselves and others in relation to these. Being ‘punctual’, ‘rushing’, ‘late’, ‘slovenly’ or ‘lazy’ usually all entail some concept of time, as do many other ideas of our identity, such as our time in history, age and sense of achievement or milestones.

Sometimes, it is helpful to reflect on how time serves us in these ways, or whether it can feed into habitual patterns of our thinking mind (more of this to come) that take us away from the present and away from the moment we are in. This can give us an overwhelming sense of time slipping away further, adding to a sense of always trying to play catch-up. However, if you bring more present, focused awareness to your experience at any given moment (as outlined in the exercise above), you will find that time does not seem to slip away so often.

One of the best ways to develop a more helpful relationship with time is to practise mindfulness of a watch or clock. A dial watch, rather than a digital watch, is much easier to start to practise with. We do not have to think about it, work the time out or how much more time we may have left to do what we are doing – usually, we visualise and know all this by observing where the hands of the clock are – we just simply know the time. By contrast, when we read the time from a digital display, often we start to think about and calculate the time and how much time we have left to do something or get somewhere. If you tend to check the time on your phone, set the time display to a dial (maybe download an app for this) also.

Practice 4.6: I haven’t got time for this!

Slowing time down

You may have noticed that, with each passing year, time seems to pass by much more quickly. One explanation for this phenomenon is that the older we get, the fewer new experiences we have and the world becomes more familiar, so less information needs to be wired in to our brains. And, when we want to speed up time, perhaps we are at the dentist, in a boring meeting, taking a long flight to somewhere sunny and relaxing, then we tend to busy our minds with distractions. So, another way to slow down time is by not comparing our current experience with our past or future, not relying on distractions to avoid unpleasant feelings and, instead, to really live in the present.

Making comparisons and narrowing our sense of the world around us (been there, done that, got the T-shirt), decreases our curiosity, our openness to wonder and capacity for new experiences. And, if instead, we choose to increase our opportunity for new experiences, simply by being mindful of the uniqueness of even one breath, or sip of coffee, we can experience time more slowly, too. By replacing old habits with new habits, you can also slow down time, without taking up any time at all. This also allows a sense of spaciousness to emerge within the mind, a new and restful openness to life and a sense that we do, in fact, have time. From this place, we can begin to establish contact with life as it unfolds, in more meaningful, wonderful, less stressful ways.

Practice 4.7: Mindfulness right now!

It all began with a ‘busy’ caveman

As we rush around frantically and tirelessly, busily pursuing everlasting happiness, we are using the same part of our brain as our cave-dwelling ancestors used when they strove for survival amidst an unfamiliar and threatening world – our flight or fight response.

Sure, unlike cavemen, we may not be running from wild animals today, but we are ‘running’ towards perfection, success, happiness and relaxation and, simultaneously, we are ‘running away’ from the opposite (imperfection, failure, unhappiness, busyness) – a threat, in the same way that wild animals were to our cavemen ancestors.

Today, striving for complete perfection, relaxation and happiness via our endless attempts at thinking through and analysing our life problems, evaluating our lives and how we would prefer them to be and then acting on the back of all these thoughts, the more our bodies release the same amount of cortisol and adrenalin, our stress hormones, and the more we come to experience the same level of anxiety and stress throughout much of our daily lives as our ancestors did running from wild animals. The less busy we try to become, the busier we are!

In their necessary survival mode, our cave-dwelling ancestors evolved to develop a strong sense of fear to keep them on high alert for the next potential danger. They felt uneasy most of the time, as a result, as they constantly scanned their environment for threats. Most animals, say like a zebra that has been chased by a lion and lived to see another day, quite quickly will be able to go back to its usual calm state once it has reached safety. Our cave-dwelling ancestors, on the other hand, would continue to think about the threat after they had managed to escape the lion’s jaws, and probably also continue to think about how and when a similar attack might happen to them again. A great survival tool we are sure you would agree, as all the while they could keep their arousal levels high, ready for fight or flight when needed again.

Our brains today have not evolved much over this time and, in this respect, we continue to be on high alert to the next potential looming problem or danger that may bring about our very own modern-day downfalls. Of course, thankfully, there are fewer physical threats to our survival these days but, nonetheless, we do still inherently scan our present-day, busy lives for potential threats to our survival – and, let us face it, there is still a lot of stuff that poses a threat these days! As we mentioned earlier, there is work to get done, there are jobs to keep, bills to pay, children to get to school and feed, homework and housework to be done, emails to answer, friends and family to keep happy, health and fitness to maintain, etc. Thinking about getting all this done can leave us feeling highly stressed, exhausted and, not to mention, defeated when everything is not ticked off the to-do list at the end of each day.

Our preoccupation with these threats is learned and driven by our attempts to eradicate any feelings of failure and rejection in life – or, in other words, to avoid our modern-day downfall and ensure our survival, just as our ancestors did many years ago. We have learned from our ancient, scatty predecessors that the feelings of failure and rejection are connected to our decline, our ceasing to survive – they are scary and must be avoided at all costs (more of this to come in the next part of this book) so we try anything and everything we can to eradicate or escape from these scary feelings (which is not possible) as much as we can.

The learned survival ‘gift’ from our ancestors is never asleep and is constantly ticking away in our thoughts in the form of our worrying, reminiscing, problem-solving, analysing, planning and evaluating. It is constantly alert to all that we do not have, all that we have not done, all that might go horribly wrong, all that we cannot cope with due to the way that we feel and others’ negative appraisals of us. If we remain unaware of it and our automatic tendency to become caught up in it, then we run the risk of going into overdrive, leading to more stress and physical aches and pains, more inefficiency and all the life discomfort and dissatisfaction that we will, inevitably, come to experience as a result.

Down the stress well

Our experience of stress comes in all shapes and sizes. We experience racing thoughts, painful emotions, uncomfortable bodily sensations and we also find ourselves doing lots of busy behaviours. These experiences are just that, experiences that come and go. What usually happens is that we over-identify with them as if they are us. We might hear ourselves saying stuff like; ‘I am stressed’ or ‘I am exhausted’ – well, the truth is that you are neither, you are you and you are experiencing stressful feelings in your emotions and sensations of tiredness in your body in that moment – there is a big difference.

With mindful awareness, we can stand back from and give space to our experiences, such as thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and behaviours and see them for what they are, fleeting experiences that come and go naturally. When we do not do this and, instead, get caught up in struggling with them, trying to eradicate them, and judging ourselves for having them, we simply exacerbate our distress. Take Clare, for example, the more she over-identified and struggled with her experiences of stress the more she escalated them.

As we can see from Clare’s example, she experienced stress in four different ways: in her thoughts (I cannot do this), her emotions (anxiety), her bodily sensations (racing heart and trembling hands) and her behaviour (lying on the bed). Instead of allowing these experiences to come and go as they naturally would, she got too caught up with them, tried to get rid of them and judged herself for having them. All this just seemed to lead to higher levels of stress and anxiety.

This habitual reaction to our experiences of stress is common to all of us. If we remain unaware of this automatic response, it is likely to increase our overall stress levels until, eventually, we become completely burnt-out or more depressed and/or anxious. We need to stand back and give space to these experiences (in the form of our thoughts, emotions, sensations and behaviours), take a perspective on them and notice them for what they really are – they are not us, but simply passing experiences that we can observe. Mindfulness is exactly how we do just that.

Practice 4.8: I haven’t got time for this!