By Carole Fogarty

Detox and de-stress: A regular feature:

Are you wasting your precious energy reserves and valuable time with an on-going compulsion to checking? You check, double check, triple check and continue checking when there is absolutely no logical reason that you need to be doing this. I’m suggesting that without realizing it, life with computers has led us blindly into the unhealthy habit of over checking and over watching.

Whether its a little over checking or allot of over checking either way over checking is not energy efficient to our bodies, mind and life. Then there is also the stress that might be added to our day when we unrealistically believe there is a sense of urgency or have too, attached to all our watching and checking. Or the stress when our ability to check something is taken away from us e.g you don’t have access to a computer or the time.

Be afraid, be very afraid of the over checking disease that potentially lurks inside all of us. It doesn’t take long to progress from a single checker, to a double checker, to a triple checker then into a quadruple checker and higher.

Over checking depletes our energy, disrupts the flow of our day, can easily lead to distractions, gives power to our wandering mind and takes us further away from our intentions and dreams. Over checking doesn’t change anything or add value to our life in any way. It just keeps our mind and ego busy.

Daily habits:

At a closer examination of my daily habits I soon realized that I was in fact rather addicted to the curiosity and sometimes excitement factor of checking and then re-checking my blog statistics, emails and comments. All the essential checking tasks could quite easily be done once a day with perhaps emails and comments twice a day. Over checking is certainly not a habit aligned with my vision for living more simply, lightly and happily.

Imagine how much more time and precious energy I would save over a week, month and year. Ok, so let’s imagine I waste two hours a week over checking, thats eight hours a month which is ninety six hours a year. What a waste of days over checking for absolutely no reason.

The proven energy inefficiency of over checking emails:

It was while writing this post that I came across an article from Gretchen at the Happiness Project. Gretchen mentioned a Microsoft report that revealed their staff took 15 minutes to re-focus again back onto a serious task after they had responded to an email. I’m assuming two things here; one the mind takes a little while to find out where it left off with the original task and two; distractions happen all too easily when checking emails with a simple click of a button.

Checking emails 5, 6, 8 or 10 times a day creates an unhealthy awkwardness to your day by pushing you towards a stop, start habit and taking you even further away from your priorities, dreams and visions.

Over checking gives power to your mind and encourages it to wander:

Over checking creates a loose, sloppy, floppy, lazy mind. The mind reacts and the soul creates. The mind is not in charge you are. If you let it, the mind will happily wander and flit about as it chooses. It doesn’t care about your visions and dreams it simply wants to be kept amused. The sooner you take charge of your wandering mind the more energy and time you will have.

Six simple ways to detox yourself from over thinking and over checking:

1. Get out of your head. It’s not running the show you are. Wiggle your toes, feet, hands and arms. Jump up and down if you need too. You view life in a far more balanced when all your energy is not focused in and around your head.
2. Calm your thoughts. A calmer mind is an emptier mind. When your mind is calmer you are less scattered and not so easily distracted with mindless activities such as over checking. Read my article on how to calm your mind in two and a half minutes for a simple solution.
   
3. Create space between your thoughts. An overcrowded head finds it very difficult to stay focused on the task at hand. Focus on your breathe. Breathing takes your mind away from your head and back into your body. Make sure you breathing is gentle and deep and not shallow and short. Calm deep breathing flows onto calm thoughts which then flows onto a proactive mind rather than reactive mind. Over checking is simply a symptom of a reactive mind.
4. Not being grounded or centered is one of the main reason you might be constantly living from your head and not your heart and intuition. Read my article “Get grounded or get pushed around by life. In the meantime eat and drink water to ground your body.
5. Never check stats first thing in the morning as this can easily change in an instant how you feel, along with your mood and approach to your day ahead. Good news will obviously give a boost to your day but bad news may adversely effect your productivity and creativity for the day. Not to mention the potential for distracting you elsewhere. There is a time and place for focusing on your stats. I personally found my days were far more productive if I checked in the afternoon and not in the morning.
6. Make an agreement with your mind as to what realistically needs to be checked daily and what needs to be checked twice daily. Write your intentions on a “post it” note and near your computer. I promise to only check ……… once a day.

Think I will need to modify my prenuptial agreement between myself and my blog which I wrote and signed last month.

Thanks for reading my article.

Peace, love and jingle bells to you all, Carole.

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