Mindset Monday - Managing Monkey Mind

This is episode 106 of the Empowered Athlete podcast. This is the Empowered Athlete podcast Mindset Monday. 10 minutes with Kari Schneider to learn new mindset tactics and tricks to optimize your performance in sport, business, and life.

Hello, hello, hello. Happy Monday. Hey, welcome to Mindset Monday. It has been a little while. I have missed you a ton. Get your body moving, get yourself wakened up for Monday because it's the beginning of your week. So it's this fresh start. We all get a fresh start on a Monday or a morning or a new month, new day, all of those things. So today is one of those scenarios where it is Monday, so we have a new fresh start. We're talking today about managing monkey mind. I don't know if you've ever heard or if you've ever thought of this before, but it's that thing. What is monkey mind? I call it monkey mind, but it's that thing where your brain is just going and going and going. And this happens to me when I go to sleep sometimes and there are unfinished thoughts or unfinished tasks that are running in my mind, and it usually involves replaying something that went on or rehearsing something that's coming up. And that's what I call monkey mind, where you can't quite shut it down and maybe it wakes you up at night. So this happened to me recently and I thought, okay, if this is happening to me, it's likely happening to a bunch of other people who are, you know, love to get things done, have a lot on the go. Maybe there's some things that are unsettled. So I thought this might help for you. So monkey mind, for me, how this started most recently is that we've been going through our 21 day reset. We just wrapped it up yesterday. And because all of this is going on, there were last coaching calls, all of the communications, all the prep, and I got a phone call that I missed from a family member. And in that phone call, they left a message. And the message was about changing a flow flight or not traveling and Covid related. So there was all kinds of tension in the message. And so I thought, oh, crap, you know, And I couldn't deal with it at the time because it was late, so I couldn't return the call. So I went to bed. And as soon as. And this happens to me quite often, as soon as I get just enough sleep to kind of recover my brain enough, then my brain turns back on and starts to go through the unfinished business. So I wake up with my mind running on the conversation that I'm rehearsing that hasn't happened yet, and my mind just keeps going. So I'm going to give you three ways to combat these types of situations. It could happen in the middle of the day for you, where you're ruminating on a certain thing. It could happen in the middle of the night for you, like it did for me in that example. Or it could be something that you know this is happens infrequently for you, but when it does, it really keeps you up or distracts you during your day. Day when you want to be focused. So here are the three things that I do, and they work for me now every time I can use one of them or all three of them, but inevitably I will get beyond that, get back to sleep, or get refocused on whatever I need to. Number one is what we call, in our kind of reset language or our empowered language, we call this a circuit breaker. So number one is a circuit breaker. All it is is a pattern interrupt. So what I might do, especially if it's in the middle of the night and I realize my mind is running and it could just keep going and get worse. Then I get up and I go to the washroom. I have a drink of water and I go right back to bed. I don't even turn a light on. I don't do anything like that. I just get up and do something different that breaks the pattern and goes back to bed and signals my brain to say, hey, we're not doing this right now. It's time to use the washroom, have a drink of water, go back to sleep. And that's just a pattern interrupt. So I'm not rolling over or obsessing or ruminating about whatever that thing unfinished business is. So that's number one. That's what we call a circuit breaker. And it's just breaking the pattern, either physically. We often use a physical change in order to break the mind change. So that's number one. Number two, this might be a little unusual for you, but number two is it's a conversation that you would have from your highest self to your brain. So my brain simply decided that I was rested enough and now it was going to start to fix the things that were unfinished. But my highest self, the best version of me, knows that it's not something I need to do right now, and I do need my sleep. So I simply had a conversation with my brain that sounded something like this. Thank you for bringing this up. I realize that this is unfinished, and we're not going to have this conversation yet. So it's literally telling my brain that it's okay, we're going to get to this tomorrow and we're not going to manage this right now. Almost like talking to a two year old because that's how our brains can act sometimes. So that was the conversation I had just this short little couple liners. We're not going to have this conversation right now. Thank you for bringing it up and we will deal with this tomorrow. And that allowed me to settle. Okay, so that would be number two, that simple confirmation. And lastly, the third thing would be some sort of. It might even be in a mantra or an affirmation, but something that redirects your mind to something that is less left brain focused, less all consuming or, or ruminating in nature. So in last night's scenario it could be something like I'm inhaling peace, I'm exhaling tension, I'm inhaling peace, I'm exhaling tension. Something like that. If I'm repeating that, it simply gives more of a focus on what I would like to focus on like relaxation and less of a focus on the thing that my brain wanted to run on. So that can be a tool as well to manage that, that monkey brain or that monkey mind. So those are the three things. Number one, the circuit breaker, number two, going into the conversation, just saying, hey, we're not going to deal with this right now, we're going to focus on this. And number three, some sort of affirmation or mantra. Those are the three ways that work the best for me and some of my clients as well in order to mitigate that monkey mind. So if you're just popping into this now, just back it up and listen to all of the things here. And this will allow you to manage some of the times where you feel like you're ruminating, your mind is running and it's getting out of control. Because we want the clarity, we want the peace, we want the ability to focus on what we have intentionally focused on in front of us. So have a fantastic rest of your day. Let this kick start your week powerfully with the things that you want that light you up. Not just a running monkey mind that's controlling your focus. Have a great day guys.