About 8 months ago I was in the thick of a frenzied “push” on LinkedIn.

That’s right.  LinkedIn. 

I try to stay away from the poodle-infested waters of Dimstagram and the other trendy & more in vogue social media platforms.

During this LinkedIn push, I made a post sharing a surprising way I'd found to feel less annoyed, frustrated & overwhelmed.

The main idea in the post might’ve sounded simple to some and counterintuitive to others.

But it was quite the revelation for me when I discovered how I’d taken feelings like frustration & overwhelm and unknowingly deepened, prolonged & intensified them for years of my life.

Here’s what I realised:

*** I don’t need to feel down about feeling down

*** I don’t need to feel annoyed about feeling annoyed

*** I don’t need to feel frustrated about feeling frustrated

*** I don’t need to feel concerned about feeling concerned 

*** I don’t need to feel overwhelmed about feeling overwhelmed

This was the basis of my LinkedIn post.

As I discovered after I made the post, Buddhists call this the second arrow of suffering.  It’s the idea that we can still choose how we react & relate to reactions we haven’t chosen.

But what I didn’t say on LinkedIn was this:

Thoughts and feelings come as a package deal.  Just like you can’t have Ant without Dec, you can’t have a thought without a feeling or a feeling without a thought.

And thus unbeknownst to me, this second arrow was also ramping up my frenzied busy-mind, my thinking and my thinking about my thinking.

Some of this overthinking was undoubtedly subconscious.

But a chunk of it was as conscious as it comes.

So conscious, in fact, that there were days when I was so in my head that I had very little awareness of what was happening in the real, physical world.

I remember sitting at Pizza Express with my team one lunchtime a few years ago and despite colleagues nattering away all around me I barely heard a word, so distracting and relentless were my thoughts.

This is a lot better now.

And in the LinkedIn post I shared the number one thing which helped me to stop firing that second arrow.

I use the word “thing” deliberately as it’s not an action or a "how to".

And this one thing might be so obvious as to be a non-point.

Yet I can directly trace feeling much calmer (emotionally and mentally) straight back to this.

The "thing" I shared which helped me stop firing the second arrow?

Simply realising it was possible.

That might sound strange.  But I never even thought I could feel down without feeling down about feeling down, and so on.

The takeaway from all of this?

When it comes to mental wellbeing, realisation is the key to the castle. 

Yet realisation flies under the radar somewhat.

This is why those who’ve signed up to my Mind over Matter webinar tomorrow won’t find me handing out homework or asking them to try various techniques or practices.

Instead, I’ll simply be sharing what I’ve seen about using our minds as intended and turning down our mental chatter if and where we can.

The webinar is based on a series of Mindset Workshops I’ve run for 10 weeks for colleagues in my team at work.

Now that these 10 weeks are almost finished, I’m cherry-picking some of the most relevant and useful parts for Mind over Matter.

The webinar will take place on Zoom tomorrow, Wednesday 15^th May 2024, at 10am PST/1pm EST/6pm UK Time.  It will last about an hour.

If you’d like to join, hit reply and I’ll send the details straight over.

That’s all for today.

 - Tom