How disengaging will make you more creative and productive.

Have you ever been up against a deadline at the end of a frantic week at work and found that your brain simply isn’t functioning properly and you can’t seem to get your thoughts together. There is so much adrenalin rushing through you at the thought of the looming deadline that it feels as though your brain is foggy and unable to formulate clear thoughts and ideas.

Time to STOP and disengage! Seriously! I know it sounds crazy and counterintuitive but I can promise you that just 20 minutes of disengaging will change everything. It will improve your focus, clarity, creativity and productivity.

How to do it.

Put everything on pause for 20 minutes and let your phone go to voicemail. Step outside whatever the weather and just let yourself breathe. If you are able to find a green space,

even the smallest amount that is great. Focus on the feel of your feet on the ground. Try and count all the different sounds you can hear. See if you can count up to 20 different sounds. If the weather / space you are in permits, take off your shoes of and place your feet directly on on the earth. Research shows that grounding, connecting our feet to the earth has myriad benefits including; relieving muscle tension and headaches, reducing inflammation by reducing excess positive electrons, increasing energy and mental clarity, lowering stress and promoting calmness.

If you are able to, find a place to sit down and close your eyes. If not, just maintain your place of stillness wherever you are. Feel where that pressure of all the things you need to do is located in your head. Visually imagine it dropping down into your chest space and begin to breathe into your chest and out again from your chest. Imagine your breathe coming into your chest and out from your chest. Breathing into this heart space and then out again. Do this for a minute or so. You will begin to feel very calm, quite quickly. Doing this activates heart coherence, which according to the heart math institute has many demonstrated benefits including, improved short- and long-term memory, providing a greater ability to focus, improved cognitive function, improved blood pressure as well as lowering stress and cortisol. Not bad for a 2 minute exercise! Once you are feeling calmer, think about the issue or deadline demanding your attention and see yourself in your minds eye, having completed it exactly as you wanted to. How does that feel in your body? What can you see, hear and smell as you hand in this work? When you can really feel it, open your eyes. I promise the work will be easier and you will feel as sense of ease as you now go to complete the work. Please let me know how you get on!