Do the rigid rules written into your brain by a younger self (still) serve your mental well-being?

Holidays are great opportunities to step out of automatic pilot and ask yourself if old patterns of thought are still of benefit to you. I was forced to do so on mine.

I have been on holiday! A fabulous holiday. I went to an all-inclusive sports camp. No, not the typical all-inclusive holiday. Instead of I stuffing myself will food and drinks by the pool, I treated my body to a week of physical activities. But here is the thing, I got sick the week before and was still recovering while on holiday. It meant I could not participate in the planned hard-core body-pump classes or go for runs in the hot sun. I had to take it easy – and it wasn´t easy. I have always considered myself to be the sporty person in our family and  this week I had to watch my son and husband be more active than me. It took me a few days to accept this new situation. It forced me to take some of my own medicine. In my book Ageing Upwards, I write about how we think that our thoughts and beliefs are actual facts, but that in reality they are simply constructions of the mind. Sometimes they serve our well-being, sometimes they don´t.

Here is an excerpt from my book:

When I teach mindfulness to adolescents, I ask them to picture themselves standing in the middle of a field of tall grass. There is a significant restructuring happening in the adolescent brain, consisting of rapid growth of brain matter, formation of new connections and pruning of unused connections. Whenever an adolescent thinks a thought or reacts in a certain way (usually because they have heard or seen others do it), they are moving out into the field and creating various pathways of downtrodden grass. It could be an angry, self-pitying path, based on the thought ‘everybody is out to get me’, or a more optimistic path, with the person thinking ‘shit happens but I will get through this too’. The more they use one path, the wider and smoother it becomes, until it is a highway that they will choose for the rest of their lives.

Now it is probably a long time since you were an adolescent, but you are still going down the pathways you created then. Do you know what they are? Can you name a few? They have been there for a very long time and they are so downtrodden that you probably don’t notice them. You might even consider them to be facts. Most of us think our thoughts are facts, but the truth is that most of them are highly subjective judgements based on emotions. The good news, however, is that although our brains become less neuroplastic as we age, it is still possible to rearrange our inner landscape of pathways. Mindfulness can help us become aware of our personal trails in the grass and start to question them, and then maybe start to make new, potentially healthier ones. We do this simply by choosing to go down new pathways whenever we notice that the old ones are not working for us. With persistence, the new pathways will, over time, become our preferred trails to follow.

It is not a given that the beliefs that served us well when we were younger still fit the body, mind and life of who we are now. For instance, at 40, you might believe that hiking for seven hours is good for you, but at 80, a full day of hiking will probably overexert your body. Mindfulness helps us to listen and adapt continually.

So there I was on my holiday – noticing my inner highway of thought patterns telling me to push myself; get out there, join the body-pump class. But after exhausting myself the first day, I realised that those thoughts didn´t actually help me heal and recover. For the rest of the week I mainly opted for yoga, stretches, meditation and gentle kayaking – and I accepted that I don’t always have to push myself. It was a hard pill to swallow, but it relieved me of a lot of secondary sufferings and I could enjoy the holiday.

I am curious to hear, what old thought patterns you challenged on your holiday?

Before I leave you, I just wanted to mention three things:

First, something VERY exciting. Ageing Upwards has been shortlisted in the Business Book Award in the International Books category. Winners will be revealed Thursday 19th September, where I get to go to a fancy Winner ceremony in London. Please cross your fingers for me. I was interviewed by my fantastic publisher Alison Jones from Practical Inspiration Publishing on LinkedIn earlier this week about it. You can see it here if you missed it.

Something else and exciting is brewing. I have partnered up with the fabulous Behavioural Scientist Uliana Shchelgacheva, founder of Phronetiq, a digital platform set to revolutionize how organizations and employees handle retirement transitions. Together we are currently in the process of developing a pilot course, that will use the evidence-based methods of behavioural science and mindfulness to plan for and thrive in (semi) retirement. We will be inviting participants for the online pilot within the next couple of weeks. Send me an email, if you want to be kept informed about it.

And finally, I am offering the next 8 weeks Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course at Tribes in Leiden, Netherlands on Tuesday September the 10th at 19.00. It is not a quick and easy fix to challenges, but it is an investment for life. For more information and sign-up