To live happily and fully, we do not need all the information that comes from outside. Therefore, many get rid of televisions or refuse to read the news. But what if the supplier of depressing (and obviously superfluous) information is people around, and often close people?
Information can be useful, interesting, superfluous and – I can say with confidence – even dangerous. A simple example. I teach women’s Taoist practices – exercises that affect the hormonal background, allow it to normalize.
One participant in my course worked for many years with her endocrinologist to restore her ovarian hormone levels. After a seminar and a few weeks of regular practice, she once again went for tests and found that her hormone levels had returned to normal – for the first time in four years. Inspired, she ran to her endocrinologist: “Doctor, look, I am recovering!”
And you know what the doctor said to her? “Rejoice early!” And as we know, the hormonal background depends on hundreds of factors that are not fully understood – in particular, on the emotional state and quality of sleep. After such a reaction from the doctor, the emotional background, as expected, collapsed, sleep worsened – and it took us several more weeks of active work to send the body back on the path to recovery. Now everything is fine with the girl, she is healthy and goes to another endocrinologist for preventive examinations. But because of a few words of “specialist” a lot of time was lost.
Of course, it is difficult to kill with a word (although this happens), but, for example, to worsen health is quite real. And such messages that make us weaker, more vulnerable, we must learn to ignore. How? For this I have a simple exercise.
What kind of communication is good for me?
I have chosen for myself the criterion of useful communication: this is such communication that makes me happier, healthier and stronger (some friends insist that I still need to add “rich”). And I apply this formulation to any statement that makes me doubt.
If they tell me about some conditional norm that I must comply with, or they cite ancient wisdom (which usually begins with the words “a woman is obliged”) as an example, I ask myself the question: how can this information make me happier, healthier and stronger ? And if the answer is “no way”, then the statement is sent “to spam” – and I can get excited about something else, really useful and interesting.
Setting up a spam filter
We all know how spam that falls into the mail interferes. To avoid contact with him, we set up a spam filter: everything that is not interesting is automatically sent to the trash.
I propose to build a similar system of interaction with information in the head. Remember the moment when someone told you absolute nonsense, and you politely nodded and even said something like “well, yes, of course,” but this information physically could not get inside and assimilate.
Remember this state? Immerse yourself in it and imagine the icon of a trash can – and the sound with which everything superfluous goes there. Repeat this exercise several times: sensation, icon, sound – thrown out!
After that, before going to bed, ask yourself to learn to quickly recognize any information that does not make you stronger, healthier, happier, and ignore it, remove it from your thoughts – and at the same time get involved in what is important, can be interesting and useful.
Do this for a week before falling asleep: very soon you will be surprised at how easily you can stop paying attention to painful conversations and all that interfered before.