Feeling Lost in Lockdown? A Ten Minute Routine to help increase your Clarity and Creativity

For Mental Health Awareness Week, our friends at The Health Lodge has provided us with the following article, which aims to help ease any Lockdown negativity and promote our inner creativity.

“Your subconscious mind works continuously, while you are awake, and while you sleep.” – Napoleon Hill

With so much bombardment of negativity and stress in the news in our current situation and that all around the world, it’s no wonder we are losing our inner creativity, our inner purpose and for some our inner balance. Our entire normal “routine” has been changed to meet this challenge and we need a different strategy to cope than what we would normally be able to do automatically.

Here’s a 10-minute routine I found written by Benjamin Hardy to help find the calm and focus you need:

“Your subconscious never rests and is always on duty because it controls your heartbeat, blood circulation, and digestion. It controls all the vital processes and functions of your body and knows the answers to all your problems.
What happens on your subconscious level influences what happens on your conscious level. In other words, what goes on internally, even unconsciously, eventually affects your reality.
“The goal, then, is to master how to utilize your unconscious mind and how you not only tap into it, but also how to feed it the thoughts and reality you want to create. When you learn how to master your unconscious, you quite literally become the creator of your world.”
“When you change your unconscious, EVERYTHING in your world immediately shifts to meet your unconscious level.”

Ten Minutes Before Going to Sleep

“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”— Thomas Edison

It’s common practice for many of the world’s most successful people to intentionally direct the workings of their subconscious mind while they’re sleeping.

How?

Take a few moments before you go to bed to meditate on and write down the things you’re trying to accomplish. Write down your goals and dreams and ambitions.

Meditation and journal writing both have two core purposes:

• self-awareness: You gain self-awareness and clarity as you reflect and ponder on your life and your goals.
• imagination: You increase your imagination by allowing yourself to see possibilities in your life beyond your current circumstances.

Albert Einstein said:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

“Right before bed, play with the possibility in your mind and on paper. Then, let your subconscious mind turn that imagination into reality. While you sleep, and particularly in REM, your subconscious rewires itself. You can train your brain to rewire itself to match your future desires so that organically and naturally, they unfold in your life.”

Ten Minutes After Waking Up

Benjamin states that “Research confirms the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, is most active and readily creative immediately following sleep. Your subconscious mind has been loosely mind-wandering while you slept, making contextual and temporal connections. Creativity, after all, is making connections between different parts of the brain.”

Try this morning routine to tap into the subconscious breakthroughs and connections experienced while you are sleeping.

Unlike 90 percent of people between the ages of 18–44 who check their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up, go to a quiet place, do some meditation and grab a journal.

He asks you to “Dump your thoughts for several minutes. Rather than getting sucked back into a mindless distraction – which is how most people start their day – be highly mindful of yourself and your psyche.” At this point just be an observer to your thoughts, don’t be yourself, don’t be the parent, worker, partner-just be empty and mindful of thoughts with nothing attached.

He asks that you “Focus on being proactive and creative with life – where most people are distracted and reactive to their environment and chemical addictions.”

“This is how you connect your conscious mind with your subconscious mind. And you should be doing it every single day.”

“Research has shown that by age 12, most children lose the connection between the conscious and subconscious. The world becomes so busy and fast-paced and stressful that we keep ourselves stuck at the conscious level, and then our lives become a repeating pattern.”

However, Benjamin Hardy states that you can bridge the conscious and subconscious by doing this 10-minute routine every evening and morning.

“While writing in your journal in the morning, immediately following sleep, you have amazing access to your subconscious. As you write things down, whatever comes to your mind, you’ll begin to become more self-aware. You’ll also be able to become more creative and powerful.”

“When you write your goals down on paper first thing in the morning, you are speaking directly to your subconscious mind. You can get to the point where you have strong neural connections throughout your brain that reflect your future dreams and desires.”

“In other words, while “giving requests” to your subconscious before bed, and while meditating on them and writing them down in the morning, you are literally rewiring your brain.”

“You’re creating a new brain with new connections and memories of FUTURE EXPERIENCES that you plan to create.”

“Yes, you can create a brain and subconscious of your ideal future. And once the subconscious is onboard, your external reality will immediately begin shaping itself to match your subconscious.”
As we are coming out of lockdown, it is a great opportunity to look back at your stages of fear, anxiety, frustration and stress and realise that we’ve come a long way- in order to move past this- and to return to the “new normal” you need to feed your subconscious new pieces of information and limit your exposure to these negative feelings and subconscious bombardment from the media and decide how you want to be and what you want to create rather than be just reactive.

I would ask you to review the diagram below. It is a great way to possibly understand the stages you have possibly gone through, how this has affected our subconscious. It may also help you map the way forwards to who you want to be and how you want to be when this situation starts to change for all of us. It’s a great way to make decisions about how you want to speak with your subconscious!