The Therapy Edit - On how to get more headspace

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

In this episode of The Therapy Edit, Anna shares a recent realisation that something has been contributing to feelings of overwhelm. This tip will help us find fresh awareness and much needed headspace.

Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit podcast with me, psychotherapist Anna Martha. I'll be bringing you weekly 10 minute episodes to encourage and support your emotional well-being. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time it is where you are today. Today I'm bringing you a little solo episode and it's a reflective one really and a light bulb moment. Love a light bulb moment. You know me that I had. taking a break from work to go on holiday. So we went away, we went abroad. It was an absolute privilege. And I was also incredibly privileged to be able to switch off from work for, I think

it was nearly two weeks. We were away for 10 days. And I completely deleted social media off my phone, completely didn't go on it for that entire time. What else did I do? My emails were incredibly quiet. I checked in, but I have an amazing operations manager called Kate, who was keeping an eye on things there for me. And I'd had to plan it. I'd have to make sure that I didn't have any big jobs or anything to do over that time. So there was a bit of forward planning, which I'm not used to doing, because I normally just kind of wing it, really, with my work diary and taking any kind of break. So I found that from stepping away from work for a while, stepping away from social media. I didn't even realize where my phone was

half the time, although Florence did love a bit of YouTube kids, so I had to often find it for her. And I got home and I remember taking the kids to a little tennis club one morning and I completely left my phone at home. This would normally never happen. I would make sure keys, phone, those would be the two priorities as I step out the door. So it just shows the fact that I even left my phone at home, shows where I was with it. And I'll tell you what, I got so much more headspace. I was a much nicer version of myself without focusing on not only work, but it was more social media and Google. And I had this realization that so much of the noise in my head, is driven by the need to know stuff. Do you like knowing stuff? If there's something to know,

do you like to know it? If you recognise a gap in your knowledge, be it some, for me, it's often, I always wanted to be a doctor. That was one of the things I would have loved to have done. I didn't get very good grades in science, absolutely hated biology. It was mostly to do with plants that we did in A level. So I didn't pursue that. But I had, have such fascination with all things medical. So much so that if my family and extended family have a medical question, they often ask me because I just have this wealth of knowledge that I have gained from just reading and Googling anything that I haven't understood. I will read a medical journal on it. It's just one of those. It's almost a bit like a hobby. But I love

knowing stuff. With each of our three children, I found out their genders before they were born because I could. So why not? If it was there to know, I wanted to know it. And where do you sit with things like that? You know, how do you sit with questions that pop up in daily life? Even so much as, you know, what's the weather going to be like at the weekend? Oh, I'll find out. You know, where's that actor from in that film? I recognize them. I'll find out. And we pick up our phones and we know stuff. So I came back from holiday. And I'm going to get around to a tip on how to get more headspace. But I came back from holiday feeling like I had more headspace and I loved it. My brain just felt calmer and I realized one of the things that I hadn't been doing

on holiday that I would normally do is answer all my own questions. I would pick up my phone, I would Google and I would read something and I would find out the answers. So I made a little rule to put a boundary around doing that because one of the things that is so wonderful for our brains is awe and wonder. You know, the awe that we get from being in nature so often that all that we get when we see a view or a sunset and that moment of, oh, wow,

it might be gazing at your child's face. For me, it's looking in detail at my kids' eyelashes. They have such long eyelashes, and I get this sense of wonder. Oh my goodness. Wow. The other thing is, you know, that wondering, that wandering, that wandering, that daydreaming, that, that, that, just thinking, oh, I wonder. I wonder what the weather is going to be like at the weekend. I wonder. I just wonder. I just wonder. I haven't got the answers. I just wonder. And I realized that on holiday I'd done so much more wondering unless, no,

wing. And this is a challenge for me, but actually it felt quite fine because I guess I had just gotten into the habit of it. So I decided that I was going to put some boundaries around my phone use. So I wasn't going to, I was going to halt social media, work, anything work related between 8pm and 9am. And you know I've done this before and I found it really helpful. But life happens, things slip. We all know this. It's just the way it is. But I wanted to re-implement it to kind of hold on to some of this. space. So on the first morning of doing this, I think by 7am, I had stopped myself from finding out who Katie Price's new boyfriend was, researching symptoms of a disease that I had not heard

of before. I think I'd gone on to the news and I, yeah, it just led to me wanting to Google these different things and checking Facebook to see if any other neighbours have been woken up at 4.30 a.m. by a barking dog. So those three things I would have done. All of these things I'd lay in bed wondering. And I thought, well, why wonder when I can just get the info? While I hear wondering who Katie Price's new boyfriend is, one with a quick Google, I can find out. You know, and I think there is so much that we can know, isn't there? There is so much that we can know. But there is so much that we can know, is also so much that we can never know. The biggest questions of life are ones that we likely don't have the answers for. Will everything be okay? Will my loved one who's just been

diagnosed? Will it be okay? You know, when, how are we going to cope with this change? How is my son going to cope with changing school? Is it going to be okay? Am I going to be safe? Am my family going to be okay? You know, my son's going away. for a night, is that going to be okay? You know, all of these massive questions that we do not have the answers for, sometimes I wonder if to try and quell that dis-ease that we have, we then just try and find ways to know everything else, even if it's completely insignificant, even if really if we think about it, we do not care about what the answer is, it's not adding to us. You know, perhaps sometimes the reason for wanting to know everything is because some of the

biggest questions we will never know. So I wanted to become a little bit, a little bit more comfortable with just wondering, with letting my brain wonder instead of filling my brain with more information because what happens when we read, when we trawl through forums and articles trying to find the answers, we are, it is a deluge of information into our brains that we're putting there. And our brains have to process that. Our brains have to, You know, it's like having a desk, imagine that if someone just came and put like 10 documents on my desk, I'd have to go through them, I'd have to work out what's important. Do I need to do anything with them? Do I need to farther them away? Do some of them need to be recycled? I'd have to go through, physically go through it all. And when we're kind of feasting on this information, we're getting so full. You know, our brain's capacity is not unlimited. But the amount of information, information we have access to is. So where do we draw the line? Where do we get to a point where we actually just let ourselves wonder, wonder what the weather is going to be like at the weekend,

wonder. Sometimes the symptoms, perhaps I have a headache and, you know, I'm thinking, I'm going to Google this. Dr. Google is not your friend. But what am I then filling my mind with? What would it be like just to wonder, I wonder why I've got this headache and see what happens. And most likely it will just pass. And I have given my brain the ability to have to retain that headspace. You know, we might do really amazingly in a pub quiz, but we struggle to switch off at night. Yeah. Our brain's slogging to process the overindulgence of information in the way that our stomachs struggle to process after a too heavy and too large a meal. What looks like power, and this is something I wrote the other day, what looks like power

can feel like overwhelm. We feel that it's a, you know, giving us a sense of control to take in all this information, but actually it can feel like overwhelm, adding fuel to anxiety and speeding up the wheels of burnout. What if we were to let our minds wonder a little bit more to save some of our headspace for the stuff that we are actually interested in. So there's a little thought. I thought I would pass on with you. Letting your mind wonder. Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. If you enjoyed it, please do share, subscribe or review because it makes a massive difference to how many people it can reach. You can find more from me on Instagram at Anna Martha. You might like to check out my three books, Mind Oven

Mother, Know Your Worth and my new book, The Little Book of Calm for New Mums, grounding words for the highs, the lows and the moments in between. It's a little book you don't need to read it from front to back. You just pick whatever emotion resonates to find a mantra, a tip and some supportive words to bring comfort and clarity. You can also find all my resources, guides and videos all with the sole focus of supporting your emotional and mental well-being as a month. They are all 12 pounds and you can find them on anamatha.com. I look forward to speaking with you soon.