Our Personal Backpacks Can Be Exhausting

Our Personal Backpacks Can Be Exhausting...Now what in the world do I mean.

I thought of an analogy one day when thinking about the amount of thinking we can have on a daily basis. Imagine walking around all day while wearing a backpack. An empty backpack may weigh a pound or maybe two so wearing it all day and walking around with it all day wouldn't be a big deal. A one or two pound backpack would probably go unnoticed after a while.

Now imagine that backpack carried our thoughts. Imagine it carried our personal thinking that we had from moment to moment. Imagine you start having some stressful or anxious thinking and that backpack begins to fill up with those thoughts. As the backpack starts to fill up it gets heavier and heavier. Your body becomes more tired the heavier the backpack gets and the longer you carry it around. If you have lots of extra thinking in a day and that backpack continues to fill up, you will be physically exhausted by the end of the day carrying around that thought filled backpack. 

Now think of your mind as the backpack. As you get stuck in your thoughts, as you worry, have stressful and anxious thinking, your mind fills up with these thoughts. Your mind works harder and harder to keep thinking these thoughts and you become mentally tired. By the end of the day you are mentally exhausted from all that thinking.

I remember telling a coach that I had for a year, that most days I felt mentally exhausted by the end of the day. When I would get home I had nothing left in the tank (mentally that is) because my head had been filled with so many thoughts during the day. I obviously was not present in most things I was doing but boy oh boy was I creating all kinds of realities in my own head.

If you find yourself being mentally tired at the end of the day, take note of how your thinking was during the day. Just notice if you were present throughout the day or if you were caught up in your thinking. Noticing it is one of the first steps. Here is a quote that has always stuck with me and I have no idea where I heard it and maybe just maybe I made it up myself. But, here it is...

Get out of your head and into your life.

I'll leave you with this. We create our realities from moment to moment based on our thinking. Our circumstances have NOTHING to do with how we feel. Once I understood that at a deep level, my life instantly became so much better and easier. We feel our thinking from moment tot moment. We feel our thinking NOT our circumstances. When we understand that, we are no longer a victim to life and we are no longer helpless. 

Keep your backpack light. Stay in your life and out of your head. Understand your thoughts are just passing thoughts. Nothing more. They don't mean anything and are neither good nor bad. They are just thoughts.

Until next time,

Jackson