For the longest time, I thought I was the worlds least productive person. I could never hurry up, could never get through tasks quite fast enough and my mind would not shut up about other things I absolutely needed to do before I could get to my actual task. I was a major procrastinator and productivity failure.
Does that mean I never got anything done? Oh no, I got plenty done, but to my own standards (which tend to be ridiculously high) it wasn’t nearly good enough. My work always came first and my personal tasks, business administration and agenda management never even came at all.
The monkey brain
I have a pretty active monkey brain. That’s the part of the brain trying to seduce you to not work but to do fun things. It likes to play around, goof a little and look at shiny things. For me, those things often involve new clothes, vintage designer items and all kinds of random facts I just háve to know. It used to not be uncommon for me to Google things such as: how many youngsters do bumblebees get, are bell pepper seeds poisonous and my personal favorite: an image of the old Anne Hathaway who was married to William Shakespeare compared to modern day Anne whose husband looks a lot like the old writer. I mean, how?!
How you should deal with a monkey brain
Now through hours and hours of meditation, yoga and mindfulness, I’ve learned how to deal with this part of my brain pretty well. But to say that I mastered this, is a serious overestimation of my yogic abilities. Sirsanana into Pike position? No problem. Telling my mind not to source an old Chanel Classic Flap I can’t afford? Major problem.
Guru’s and scientists like to tell us that we should train the monkey mind, into staying quiet and cooperating with us. Well, my little monkey wasn’t about to do anything, except scream, throw things at me and point at a new coat. Yet according to many sources (like this 2017 Forbes article) meditation is a science based method helping to quiet the chatter in our minds.
What am I doing wrong here?
Stop feeding the brain
I thought it was just me, until I made a decision that would radically change the way I work, live and spend my time.
I decided to quit Instagram.
Not entirely of course, since I work in the realm of social media marketing. But I changed the settings of my account to private and dragged the Instagram icon into a folder on the third page of my phone where I never ever look. It’s filled with apps I don’t need, don’t use and probably should delete at some point.
The first few days my thumb kept going over the empty spot on my homescreen where Instagram used to be. But after a week or so, I’d forgotten it was ever there. I wasn’t prompted to make a story of my every move and I did not feel the sudden urge to watch millennial content on reels anymore. The feeling of Instagram quietly ebbed away. And with it, the monkey in my mind ran out of things to talk about.
New input and Fomo
Turns out, I’ve been feeding my chatty brain all along. With pictures of other people doing and owning things I also wanted. Which is why they flitted around in my brain non-stop. The more I saw, the more my brain had to think about. The more it wanted, the more it was filled with things I never even thought of before.
But when the constant input of new things stopped, I ran out of new things to think about. And only the things that really mattered stayed. Such as filing my VAT-returns. Writing blogposts I never got round to because of said Chanel that I still want but now don’t see every day anymore. Which makes the urge to want it and NEED it a lot less.
I’d been living with new input since I got Instagram in 2014. It had been so long, I thought it was normal. It took a social media diet for me to see that I am not a lazy procrastinator. I’ve been a victim of the algorithms this whole time. Slave to consumerism. Supporter of many influencers and their lifestyle (no judgement, they do amazing work inspiring us all). So much so that it took over my entire brain and left very little room for me to think about anything else.
Time and space are plentiful
So now that I have only my own life to think about and the people around me to look at, I feel like I have a plethora of extra time that I can fill with whatever I set my mind to. And I have to say, that feels a whole lot better than keeping up with Instagram all day every day.
