If you don't know what to do, sleep on it
Posted on 22nd August 2018 at 07:30
We’ve all experienced it at times. Situations – or people – we’ve thought AND thought about, but still don’t know how to deal with them.
Sometimes there are just too many options.
Or, perhaps, conflicting pieces of advice (!).
Other times, we’re completely stumped and don’t have any idea what to do.
If you’ve given something lots of thought and are still stuck, then it’s time to give your logical – conscious – mind a rest and hand it over to your subconscious mind. This is your creative mind, where all those flashes of inspiration and radical new insights come from.
Usually these seem to come out of the blue – “Where on earth did that one come from?” – and, crucially, when you’re thinking about / doing something else.
We’re so used to listening to our conscious mind that it’s easy to miss the whispers from our subconscious mind. Not only is it easily drowned out by the conscious mind – or shouted down (!) – but talks a different language. Of feelings and pictures, rather than words.
It’s the feeling that “x” is “right” or “y” “doesn’t feel good.” Often it seems to be unconnected with whatever it is that we’re stuck with but, in hindsight, is just what was needed.
So, if you’re stuck, why not give your subconscious mind a chance?
Go and do something else or just sleep on it. It’s amazing how often this is enough to set the creative juices flowing and for the answer – usually in a completely unexpected form – to appear like magic.
Sometimes this only takes a few minutes. Or the answer may be waiting for you when you wake up the next morning. Occasionally it may take a bit longer. All you need to do is exercise a little patience (!) and keep focussing on the end result you desire.
Oh and one other thought before we go. All too often we try to micro manage our lives, particularly anything we consider “a problem.” Decide that it MUST happen in such and such a way. But life often has other ideas.
Just as forcing things to happen rarely has the desired effect, often leaving them alone is enough to give them the opportunity to simply resolve themselves. And, it’s amazing how often they do, IF we allow them to.
It may be that other things need to happen before all the pieces fall into place or we simply don’t have all the necessary information to get things moving at the moment.
Either way, a little time can often work wonders, with things resolving themselves unaided or having moved on so we can then deal with them easily.
Life really isn’t complicated, we just seem to have a knack of making it so.
As always, the choice is yours.
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