Decision Fatigue and stress in today’s society
You will most likely stop by the grocery store on your way home. You’ve worked hard all week and all day and you’re tired of making decisions. You most likely will just grab the most easy, quick and therefore not always the most healthy options for dinner this evening.
When you get home after a stressful day, you most likely will eat a meal in front of the TV.Watching TV or a movie has a purpose, it’s supposed to calm you down, numbing you. When the commercial comes on, they want you to buy their products. Due to the lack of consciousness we often buy into whatever they are selling, because it’s easier for you to make an unconscious decision when you are not fully present.
When you try to catch up with the news from all the different social media you get a feeling of being overwhelmed and maybe even depressed. It’s getting harder and harder to make decisions in what you want to do and who you want to be.
Previously we had other people or services doing things for us, but now we can literally find an app for everything we need. It takes a lot of work and it is very stressful to make decisions every day, and we don’t want to give the control away to someone else.
Stress is all about perception, based on previous experiences, our understanding of these experiences and how we handled them. The underlined stress wears on us, it leads to cognitive fatigue and it is one of the biggest factors in aging. As we progress in age we may not be able or are less able to handle it because we have maximized our reserves. Our flexibility is not that flexible anymore and we, as a race, have never had to deal with this amount of stress before.
Living a fast life has become the norm, therefore we don’t really realize the amount of stress nor the consequences it has on our cells, our body and our mind. We have created a world where everybody is dis-empowered.
That chaos is causing the diseases we see in the world. There is a staggering overload which we need to quiet down. And even if our subconscious takes care of 95 % of the thinking and the processing, the overload is leading to stress.
Let’s take a deep breath … and another one … because here is the good part!
The solution is a body/mind practice aka mindfulness and meditation!
Take a moment – or as many as you feel needed – to just sit down, take a deep breath and feel. Think about how you are feeling and why you are having those emotions, often suppressed but very tangible. Ask yourself these questions:
Who am I? Who am I really?
What do I want? (not what society says I should want)?
What do I know is true, based on what I’ve experienced and figured out myself?
What do I know is true because the world around me tells me so?
How do I stay true to myself? Who do I want to be?
The benefit of meditation is that it moves us out of the Fight-or-Flight modus. We enter a state of consciousness where it is much easier to use the executive function of our brain. It gives us the option of conscious choosing every decision, which is not really possible when we find ourselves in the Fight-or-Flight modus. Acting or reacting from a Fight-or-Flight state makes our body reaching out for sugars, fat and quickly accessible food because it is looking for as much comfort as it can find.
At that point our body’s survival mechanism is the one taking the control of our decision making. Since this is a primal mechanism that has developed over million and million of years it has nothing to do with will power, but it is making it very difficult: we will not win the fight when we are tired, stressed and numbed.
But something amazing happens when we start to meditate. We go from the sympathetic state to the parasympathetic state. We allow the executive function of our brain lead our decisions.
By creating that moment of meditation we not only give our body a deep and rejuvenating rest, we give ourselves the space and the moment to breath. We give ourselves the opportunity to lower the cortisol levels (our stress hormone), come to ourselves and ask questions and … listen. We enter a state of awakening, a state of bliss where we give ourselves a chance to truly feel who we really are.
Being in that state, thinking and speaking from that state makes it much easier for us to make ‘the right and good choices’. The insights and inspiration that are available to every human being will have a chance to surface and unfold themselves, leading to actions and solutions not only for ourselves but for the common good of the collective.
Remind yourself often: You are enough! You do enough!
Text from: createyourteam.net