Get your mind around the morning blues
St Francis Bay freelance journalist Beth Cooper Howell reaps the benefit of being mindful on a Monday.
My Monday morning habit has been, for years, to feel blue about it being a Monday morning. In this, I’m unconventionally conventional, since I’ve yet to meet anybody who is authentically happy when Sunday ends. I am, however, a morning person, so getting out of bed and pacing the regular routine isn’t devilishly difficult. The problem isn’t the physical act of brushing teeth or harrying several people out of the door – the issue is my head. While my body and soul are ready to rock and roll, my mind is a dozen steps ahead, worrying about things that haven’t happened yet, or need to happen, but might not, since I’m likely to forget, or plan improperly, if I don’t worry at them long enough, mentally, to make them stick. I don’t like that feeling – butterflies and mild panic, bringing on a wrinkled brow. The mind is as much of a pulled muscle as any other; and it’s the part of ourselves over which we appear to have the least control. Innovation strategist Matthew E May is a superhero expert on dealing with mind matters. I’ve recently read some of his work, which focuses on re-training your brain to behave. The first step is acknowledging the need for change. Change is something everybody grapples with, explains May, whether it’s kicking a bad habit, changing a behaviour, or leaving a job. “Change at any level requires at least some dose of refreshing and resetting the brain,” he says. “The good news is that neuroscience now confirms that you can effectively and sustainably do just that with a few proven steps that centre on thinking, because when you change the way you think, you actually (chemically) change the connections in your brain.” These studied, proven “mindful” approaches to altering the way you react to whatever raises your blood pressure or anxiety levels are not only useful for exploding Monday morning blues, but eventually, with practise, have a knock-on effect on every facet of your life. The first step is to re-label a thought, feeling or behaviour as something else, says May. An unwanted thought could be relabelled “false message” or ‘brain glitch’. This literally programmes your mind by training you to “clearly recognise and identify what is real and what isn’t, refusing to be tricked by your own thoughts”. I tried that on Monday, employing his script: “This is just my brain playing games on me”. Immediately, any feelings of doom and gloom lifted, albeit momentarily, as one steps back from the problem. Step two is to “reattribute”, which is simply answering the question of why the thoughts keep boomeranging back (and in my case, always on a Monday morning). You could answer that your brain is misfiring, stuck in gear, creating mental noise, and sending false messages. In short, you palm off the hysteria as a brain glitch – because that’s what it is. The third step is the most difficult. It requires that you refocus; and this is the point at which behaviour must actually change. Says May: “You now have to replace the old behaviour with new things to do – positive, desirable things, things you enjoy doing and can do consistently every time.“This is where the change in brain chemistry occurs, because you are creating new patterns, new mindsets.” By refusing to be misled by old messages, your mind is now in charge of your brain, he explains. On Monday morning, for example, I focused on the fact that the sun rose, that I did have tea and milk in the house, and that my alarm went off. Assuming something actually did go wrong on a Monday (the alarm didn’t go off, or I forgot to buy milk), I would change gears to a positive outcome. There’s petrol in the car, and I will thus have milk within the hour; plus, I’m awake, despite the alarm malfunction. Pulling together your brilliant brain acrobatics is step four, which is to “revalue” the old, habit-forming behaviours by seeing them as they really are – “simple distractions” which are worthless. Getting up after a weekend is still bluesy for me, as I become overwhelmed by my to-do list. However, I reminded myself that I always get through the lists, regardless of how I feel about them. As I ran through May’s four-step process on Monday, something enchanting happened. Taking a moment to look out of the window, rather than frowning at my feet, I saw a nyala buck on the driveway; it looked up as I looked at it, and swish-swayed its head from side to side, before ambling, in the royal way that nyalas do, into the fynbos.
