Take Time to Process

A lot of things happened today, and the day before, and last week, well come to think of it last month as well and we have been really busy. And that is the problem, we have been so busy and inundated with information and events, and we have not had time to process all of it.

By some estimates we see over 5,000 advertisements per day. Some of us receive well over 100 emails per day. Then there are the tweets, text messages, news stories on the Internet, 24 hour cable news and commentaries; some of which we agreed with and other we found unsettling. In addition there were the comments made by friends and acquaintances that we did not fully internalize, then there was that comment from the boss, and that peculiar look from across the room to the comment we made. Wonder what that was about?

That is a lot of communication with a lot of information and that was just today. Each day is similar, from the time we get up to the time we go to bed we are flooded with incoming communications. What is worse we are enabling this flood by maximizing our exposure through the use of our technological devices such as smartphones, tablets, computers, laptops, television, radio, podcasts, video sharing and more. We have communications input devices in front of our faces most of our conscious hours.

Here is another thought, when was the last time we were bored? I mean really bored with nothing to do? We are so addicted to this flood of input that a recent study indicates that some of us would rather receive an electric shock than spend 15 minutes alone with ourselves. We have shortened our span of attention to the point we do not even know what to do when we have a few minutes to ourselves.

We need time to process. When in all of this busyness do we get the time to process all of this input? When do we get the chance to reconcile all of the various conflicting information, or consider the important things that were said or reflect on the things that did not seem to fit with our thinking or understand the strange reaction to something that was said?

And then when do we have the time to deal with the emotions as we start to analyze today’s happenings, when do we purge the things that do not matter and put away the thoughts that we want to keep?

Pretty soon we find that we are not the people we want to be. We are stressed, confused, tired, anxious and impatient. We find ourselves surprised at our own overreaction to what should be minor annoyances and are unnerved at how unprepared we feel for everything.

Processing time is essential to our well being. We need time alone with our own thoughts to think through our experiences and deal with the emotional baggage. Some of our thoughts are helpful for the future and need to be placed in our long-term storage. Others need to be considered and discarded. We need time to live through the emotional replay of the input and deal with the implications. Once the emotions are played out we need time to resolve the outcome into new actions or opinions. We need time to let the bad emotions out and go away. We need time to straighten up our mental house, put things away and to take out the trash.

Some of this can be dealt with by our subconscious while we sleep but there is a portion that we have to process while we are awake. These thoughts cannot be ignored. We are hard-wired to make the connection between our conscious thinking and our subconscious. We can’t solve or let go of problems if we don’t allow ourselves time to think about them.

Our creativity stems from our ability to put new ideas together when we are not processing the past. Our deepest thinking happens when we are able to empty our minds and let it roam through our experiences to help us rationalize our reality and apply new approaches. We have to be able to empty our minds of the inputs we have backlogged to be able to have forward thinking. When we do not provide sufficient time for thinking and processing we are actually lowering our productivity. Our busyness and multi-tasking actually produce less than if we take some time just to process.

So how do we get more time to process? Here are 4 tips to make time for processing:

1) Take a shower. Yep. Though it sounds strange, most of us do some good processing in the shower. It is a soothing and relaxing environment of gentle massage and there is not much else to do there.

2) Find a quiet place. Look for a comfortable place in the house or even outside where we will not be bothered. Watch the cars go by, look at the sunset, listen to the birds, just be there.

3) Go for a run or walk without an electronic device in our ear. Just take a walk or run without new information coming in and let our thoughts flow. Exercise and thinking go together well.

4) Journal. Write down our thoughts as fast as they pour out of us and then reflect on what we have written. This can be amazingly therapeutic and help facilitate our mental processing.

The bottom line is that we need time to process our thoughts. We are overloaded with input each day and with the combination of the convenience of our tech gadgets and a rapid-fire culture, we are overwhelmed. We need to plan the time to process our thoughts. We will feel better and be more productive if we do.

I don’t know about you, but I need to take some time to process this. Please share with the rest of us how you go about providing time for processing.

Thanks,

Skip Gilbert