- How do you deal with a confused mind?
(upbeat music)
Journaling and gut feeling are the two things
that come to mind.
And journaling to me takes two forms, right?
You can journal as in you write or type something
and you can journal as in speaking something.
For a lot of people, they have to think out loud, right?
And so I'm definitely this type of person
that if I just sit there
and I try and work it out in my brain,
the way my ADHD brain works is I'm trying to solve a problem
and then my brain goes off on this tangent
and it goes down this avenue
and it goes down this path.
And if I am speaking out loud to somebody,
it tends not to do that as much,
because I have to focus my brain to form the words.
And as I hear the words out loud, I can work through,
"Okay, this is starting to make more sense as I hear it.
This is starting to make more sense as I walk down this path
and go further down this train of thought."
Journaling does the same thing.
Journaling forces you
to focus your mind in on just right here,
what I'm writing right here.
And then as you see,
I mean because our brains work through visual stimuli,
through auditory stimuli,
as you see your own writing,
that triggers the next thought,
that triggers the next piece of the puzzle falls into place,
and then another one comes into place.
And this happens.
Either speaking or writing can help you to build this mosaic
and see things for as they really are.
And this is one of the reasons why people go to therapy.
This is one of the reasons why people have counselors.
Yes, counselors exist to give you new skills and tools
that you didn't have before.
Yes, counselors exist so that you have someone
who empathizes with you and that you feel heard.
A big reason for a counselor is
so that you can talk out loud and think out loud
and get things out into the air
so you can process them
or have someone to hold a mirror up
or ask you questions that get you thinking
of things that you hadn't thought of before,
that alleviates the confusion and the clouds dissipate.
What about gut feeling?
The beautiful thing about gut feeling,
people discount it
because they think it's just a bunch of hoo-ey,
but psychologically, your subconscious thinks through
and processes things that your conscious mind has not yet.
That's why you could see a person
and have a gut feeling
that there's something off about them,
even though you don't observe anything specifically
or consciously that would suggest
that there's just something fishy,
there's just something wrong.
Subconsciously, your eyes and your ears
or your nose have observed something
that is setting off a warning to you, right?
It's the reason why horses can sense danger
when the rest of us can't.
It's all gut feeling.
And it's not magic. It's not hokum.
It's the subconscious
or it's something that we have observed.
But because our brains,
through our eyes and our nose and our mouths and our ears
and our hands,
we're observing and taking in input
and stimuli like a thousand things at once.
Consciously, we tune out most of that
because it would just be too overwhelming.
But subconsciously, it's still all coming in.
So check your gut feeling.
If something doesn't make sense,
what does your instincts tell you to do?
What does your gut feeling tell you to do?
And that may mean you need to act on your gut feeling
or it may mean,
"Okay, my gut is telling me this.
So this is the avenue I'm gonna walk down consciously
and try and figure out why it's telling me this."
Either way, this is how we clear up confusion.
I find that when I'm learning something new,
reminding myself that I've learned hard things before,
that I've picked up habits that were new to me
and confusing to me,
and now they're second nature and easy,
that I've done this before, helps me to do it again.
Whenever I think I can't do this
or I don't know how to do this,
I just remind myself,
"No, this is just one more new thing
that you will conquer and pick up this skill."
We alleviate confusion by getting into that headset
and then by educating ourselves.
Alicia likes to tell me
that we live in the glorious age of YouTube
where almost anything that you're trying to do,
there's a YouTube video for that.
Before you ask somebody, "Can you show me how to do this?"
see if someone posted on YouTube how to do it.
Reading books, listening to podcasts,
watching how-tos, working with a mentor,
or simply just sitting down with something
and using your brain to figure it out.
I struggle with furniture assembly.
And just last month, I assembled a couch.
And I was so proud of myself. (laughs)
I was confused by the pieces.
All of it was new.
It was foreign to me. And then I figured it out.
You have that capacity.
So work through confusion by journaling,
by speaking out loud, by checking your gut feeling,
by reminding yourself that you can understand this
even if you don't at the moment,
and then taking the time to learn how to do things.
That's how we work through confusion.
Thank you for joining me
as we learn more about our emotions,
how to process them, how to work through them,
and how to arrive at the places we want to arrive at.
I will see you next time. I will. I will.
(upbeat music)