Stop simply doing and start being.
To just be is a concept not always easy to comprehend in an ever-increasingly busy world that reflects values of working ‘til you get yours. Yet, what would happen if you show up for yourself in a more whole way?
A lot of times people are too busy too bogged down with the many valid, yet often overwhelming burdens that are keeping them in a holding pattern of busyness and neglectfulness that robs them from enjoying the present day, which is found in the “being.”
“Think we all get too caught up in doing instead of just being sometimes,” novelist Anne Rivers Siddons once said.
According to an article at www.mindful.org, there is a big difference between “being” and “doing” based primarily on goal-setting that starts with a mindset.
“The activities of the mind are related to patterns of brain activity,” according to the article. “Different mental activities, such as reading a book, painting a picture or talking to a loved one, each involve different patterns of interaction between networks of nerve cells in the brain. The networks involved in one activity are often different from those involved in another activity. Networks can also be linked together in different patterns.”
If people take a peek into the brain, they could see the “activity of networks and in their connections” with individuals as the mind goes from one point to the other.
“Over time, we would see the different activities of the mind reflected in continually shifting and evolving patterns of interaction between brain networks,” the article added. “If we looked long enough, we would see that a limited number of core patterns of brain activity and interaction seem to crop up as recurring features in a wide variety of different mental activities. These core patterns reflect some basic ‘modes of mind.’”
When people are doing things, they are trying to accomplish certain tasks, meet deadlines, work on projects and the like, yet constantly doing won’t necessarily achieve the results we would like based on a strategy to achieve goals that involve something called the “discrepancy monitor.”
This is a method that “continually monitors and evaluates our current situation against a model or standard—an idea of what is desired, required, expected or feared. Once this discrepancy monitor is switched on, it will find mismatches between how things are and how we think they should be.”
The article adds that identifying these “mismatches” encourages people, even more, to try to minimize those discrepancies.
“But, crucially, dwelling on how things are not as we want them to be can, naturally enough, create further negative mood,” per the article. “In this way, our attempts to solve a ‘problem’ by endlessly thinking about it can keep us locked into the state of mind from which we are doing our best to escape.”
How the Discrepancy Monitor operates:
1) First think of an idea of how you want things to be, or how you think they should be.
2) Then, compare that with your idea of how things are going currently.
3) If there is a gap in how you want things to be and how things presently are, people create thoughts and actions or plans to attempt to remove that space.
4) Then, we look at the “progress” to determine if the gap is growing or shrinking and we adapt actions based on that.
5) We learn then that we have accomplished our goal when our concept of how things are going aligns with our thoughts on how they should be.
According to the article, there is “nothing inherently wrong with this doing mode” but it is not always in the present, per se, and just being in that mindset of doing can, well, do a bit of damage.
“In being mode, the mind has ‘nothing to do, nowhere to go’ and can focus fully on moment-by-moment experience, allowing us to be fully present and aware of whatever is here, right now,” according to the article.
In the doing mode, the mind relentlessly dwells on the differences between what we could have and what we currently have and makes people “feel worse,” which draws people even further from their goals.
The opposite of doing is being, which is described as “accepting” and “allowing” for the things that are.
“The being mode involves a shift in our relation to thoughts and feelings,” according to the article, which adds that there is some freedom behind adopting this mindset when slowing down. “We can be responsive to the richness and complexity of the unique patterns that each moment presents.”
In 2022, it’s time to start being and be less driven by the “being.”
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