How to overcome monkey mind
Parent Post
Most people feel busy
Most people feel busy and distracted throughout the day — calm and focus and a feeling of purpose is fairly rare for most of us.
We’re jumping from messages to social media to email to quick work tasks to a search for something we’re curious about.
The term for this is “monkey mind” — our minds swinging from one branch to the next, jumping around without pause.
This is one of the biggest problems for many people.
Let’s look at a few important ideas.
The monkey mind’s activeness
The monkey mind’s activeness isn’t an enemy to be slain.
We might not like the feeling of constant distractedness, but if we sit with the mind in meditation, we can see that this is just how the mind likes to behave.
It’s a habit, but also a big part of the nature of our mind.
Start accepting the monkey mind, not as something to be battled, but as something to be befriended. Be calm and do not judge it. Gently encourage it to come back to the matter at hand, not smacking it on the nose with a newspaper.
Create a calm space
Create a calm space for the monkey mind to jump around in, it will eventually settle down.
Meditating regularly is a good practice for being more settled and focused during the day.
During meditation, we create a calm space and let the mind settle down in the present moment. Of course, the mind jumps around in this space, but we don’t necessarily engage it too much, and eventually, it might settle down.
We can create spaces like this, in our daily lives too. Our minds will want to run, but we can just let the mind settle down within this space, giving it room to run around but nowhere to go.
The fewer shiny things
The fewer shiny things we give our monkey minds, the less jumpy the mind will be.
Most of us feed the monkey mind by giving it all kinds of shiny things to be distracted by:
- Email, text messages, messaging apps like Slack, WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat.
- Videos on Youtube, Netflix.
- Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit.
- News sites, blogs, other interesting websites we like to visit
- Games, phone apps, doing searches for things
Technology is designed to distract and engage the monkey mind.
The more of that we can hide, the better.
Just putting the phone out of sight, closing tabs, not having notifications on can help calm things down.
Slow down, and pause
Slow down, and pause more often.
That might seem like a simple idea, but how often do we do it? Go slower, not faster.
Breathe and let your nervous system relax. Un-tense your muscles, soften the front of your body, soften the jaw and temples.
Pause in between doing things — in between messages and emails, in between tasks, in between appointments and errands. Pause, breathe and think about what matters right now
A prescription for taming
A prescription for taming the distracted mind.
- Meditate in the morning. Start with 2 minutes at first, feel the breath and come back when the mind wanders.
- Create intentional spaces. Block distractions, stop yourself from following the urge to go do something else.
- Remove distractions. Turn off as many notifications as possible, put your phone away when you’re doing something else.
- Accept and befriend the mind. Notice how the mind acts, and be friendly and compassionate towards it.
- Slow down. Relax your muscles, breathe down the front of your body, and deepen into the moment.
- Add pauses. Between each task, message, appointment, errand pause and take a breath.