Being an entrepreneur and a passionate about health and wellness I’ve always been curious about how top-performers enhance and peak their states of mind, and most important handle the day-to-day stress without disrupting their performance.
In a technology-driven, social media-driven and fast pace environment, it becomes almost impossible at times to concentrate and get tasks done. From the moment we wake up to the moment we get to our workplaces early in the morning, we’ve already made a number between 1,500 to 3,000 decisions and by the time the day concludes that number easily climbs to the order of the 30,000.
In words of one of my biggest mentors Tony Robbins “The Quality of Your Life is the Quality of Your Decisions”, however, the biggest challenge here is making quality decisions. As humans, we believe we make active conscious decisions but when we take a closer look we realize we operate under a framework of subconscious patterns that emerge and we end up driving most of our day to day on auto-pilot.
What would happen if you could be more present and more aware of your decision-making process by clearing out all the junk that accumulates throughout the day? Is it possible to actively reduce stress, minimize cortisol levels and have a clear state of mind? Absolutely.
There is no coincidence that top celebrities like Ellen Degeneres, actors like Jerry Seinfeld, and even billionaires like Ray Dalio have come out and openly recognized that the key to their success has been practicing Transcendental Meditation or commonly known TM, but…what Is Transcendental Meditation and why is it so effective?
As soon as someone mentions the word meditation lots of thoughts and concepts come to people’s mind including spiritual beliefs, consciousness, quieting the mind and making an effort to remain calm… but what if none of that was truly what TM represented?
Before jumping into TM, let’s understand how the mind operates. The brain is an organ that creates neural connections and associations, stores concepts and communicates with itself and the mind in the form of images.
Take for instance, while you are reading this text and I write the words RED CAR, you automatically associated these words to an image you are currently seeing in your mind, but even more powerfully what if we swapped the words car and asked you to think about a MONKEY and ask you not to keep thinking about the RED CAR and only focus your thoughts on the MONKEY somehow the RED CAR still is showing up and present, the reason is thoughts are like impressions on the mind and our mind works like a small little monkey that requires tasks and thoughts to keep itself entertained… majority of these thoughts permeate our subconscious layer and stay there…sometimes for hours, now imagine this simple RED CAR does no damage to your state of mind (unless you’ve been traumatized somehow by a red car).
Imagine on the day to day how many images flood your mind to the subconscious layer, some creating micro-traumas or re-living previous traumas. All of these stack and by mid-day without you even noticing you’re already stressed.
Disclaimer:
Transcendental Meditation is not a technique you can learn on your own, it has to be taught 1 on 1, by a certified trainer, it’s usually a 2 day very simple process. My goal here is not to explain the technique but rather give a big picture and mention why it’s so effective. More can be learned directly at (https://www.tm.org)
In a nutshell, how does TM Work? Remember we talked about images? Well what if we could learn a specific sound – let’s call it a Mantra – that we could repeat within our mind that didn’t evoke a single image, that when you heard it in your head you could not put a picture to it? What if we could repeat over and over that sound for 20 minutes – how and what would the mind do?
Well, research has shown that it is easier to keep the mind entertained with a task than to quiet it down and not only that, keeping the mind entertained with something that doesn’t mean anything actually helps you reduce the processing happening allowing other biochemical processes to override and actually repair the body within minutes.
TM is one of the most studied methods due to its consistent proof of results in the fields of anxiety and depression, better heart health, clarity, PTSD, and insomnia in people who practice it. Still, you might think, why should you implement this twice a day for 20 minutes?
Simple, success leaves clues. Model what successful people do and you’ll be on the right track to get similar outcomes.
Ray Dalio, one of the world’s richest men, founder of the largest hedge fund in the entire planet describes TM as “Transcendental Meditation has probably been the single most important reason for whatever success I’ve had. It is certainly the greatest gift I can give anyone…”
Visualize for a moment how would the quality of your day improve if you would take 20 minutes off, unplug and focus on a technique that could clear the mind so you could resume performing at your business, your meetings, your sales calls or before holding a team meeting.
How would those activities change if you were in a clearer state of mind instead of frustrated, anxious or angry?