The Power of a Thoughtless Mind

The other day when I was out in the water with a friend of mine who is learning how to surf, he asked me what I’d been thinking about for the last 4 hours. I told him that I couldn’t remember a single thought, other than “wow, the girl surfing next to us is really hot.” Lately I’ve been noticing something when I surf and I probably even made reference to it in the post I wrote about the health and mental benefits of surfing. I’ve noticed that right after I take off on a wave, my mind goes completely blank. Thought ceases to exist. Since many of you might not be able to surf, I want to talk about something that can give you some of the benefits I gain from surfing. It’s the importance of a quiet mind.

Some of you may or may not know that there was a period in my life where I was fairly depressed, even taking anti-anxiety medication and just worried about everything possible that could go wrong. Somewhere along the way that changed and I realize it’s because I had found a way to quiet my mind.

The world we live in today is one of heavy information overload. It’s likely from an evolutionary standpoint we were never meant to spend this much time indoors or staring at computer screens. To add to that, we have our life to deal with. As a result you have a steady stream of mental chatter:

• Worrying about what you have to do for the day
• Worrying about tomorrow
• Worrying about what happened yesterday
• Opinions on the article you just read
• Opinions on somebody’s tweet
• Opinions on your friends facebook status update
• Thinking about recent conversations you had
• etc, etc

This list really does go on and on. It’s pretty much endless.  Imagine if you had a car that you drove continually, and you never did any maintenance on it and every night somebody else took it and drove it all night. Eventually it would break down much faster. I think that our brains are kind of the same way. They weren’t possibly meant for incessant thought. Even when you sleep you are still thinking. My friend Karol Gajda wrote a really great article on active relaxation which I think you should read. I tried what he suggested and it was amazing.

Meditation

Meditation doesn’t have to be the challenge so many people have made it out to be. As you all know I have ADHD so the idea of spending an extended period of time doing damn near anything, especially nothing, drives me crazy.  But, it doesn’t have to because you can just shut yourself off for about 5 mins.

Basically all you need to do is close your eyes, focus on your breathing, and take long deep breaths. If you keep the focus of your thought on breathing, you’ve more or less shut down the stream of information which is the whole point. Believe it or not this is more effective than an hour nap because you’ll come out even more refreshed.

A thoughtless mind can be incredibly powerful in so many areas of your life. Have you ever noticed when you stop thinking about a problem, a few hours later you have the solution? In my own experience I’ve found that a thoughtless mind enables some of the most creative things you’ll ever do.  85-90% of my ideas for this blog and everything I do in social media are usually developed while I’m in the water. Ironic huh? I’m not even thinking about anything, yet dozens of new ideas are coming to fruition. Embrace the power of a thoughtless mind for the next 10 days, and see what happens.