Awareness

Know What BBS Is And Keep It At Bay When you notice you’ve been snapping at everybody in the office for every little thing … when you can’t keep track of the details of an important project , or when you’re having problems getting a good night’s sleep. No, that’s not because of your recent lovers’ quarrel with your partner. Place that in the back burner for another day. She/he loves you so much she/he won’t dump you. For now, pull back a bit. Spend some time to take stock of how you’ve been doing at the workplace the last three or four months. You could be suffering from BBS. What Is BBS? You know the colloquial meaning of BS. No, it’s not a big BS. BBS stands for BUSY BRAIN SYNDROME. It’s an emerging, modern scourge in the business world. It’s a serious condition where your brains, having been constantly working gets tired, over-worked and over-loaded with pressure. And it leads to a tremendous plunge in productivity and performance. It can be a tricky condition because you hardly notice its development. It grows gradually over a period of weeks or months and most often, it’s become fully developed before realizing it has hit you. Here are several BBS symptoms: A heightened level of irritability and easy distraction. Shortened attention span Deterioration of accuracy and missing out on the details of an undertaking Insomnia Increased risk-taking to almost bring situations to a “win or lose” game. Poor decision making Inability to keep up with pressures of everyday work. What makes this whole condition even worse is that it tends to make you feel terrible though you can’t quite put your finger on what’s wrong or “why this feeling?” What Causes BBS? In simple terms, it’s the kind of lifestyle we choose to live that causes BBS. We, somehow have this crazy idea that success comes only from tons of hard work and effort. Of course, it’s true… kind of. I will talk about this in another blog. But when you take these into extremes, when you push these to the max, something’s got to give. We are after all, humans, not robots. When we push ourselves too hard over long periods of time, we place ourselves on the verge of mental distress, exhaustion and tremendous burnout. So, How Do You Take Control Again? BBS happens because of a poor unhealthy lifestyle, bad work practices and behavior that are not sustainable for the long haul. The essential step to getting back control is to recognize these poor choices and then decide to change them. And change them, you must. Create a frame work (write it down, if you must) that allows you to put in several small changes to how you go about your job and how you’re living your life. Follow these changes and improve on them gradually, bringing in the big changes. Most often a personal program like this will make a big difference. And so, starting today, set in motion new ways of thinking and doing things, building on your increased level of brain awareness. Pretty soon, you’ll discover your old self to the great relief and delight of your partner and colleagues at work.

Nobody needs to tell you this. Life is one big, endless cycle of activity. From the moment we wake up (but not wanting to rise) until we get some shut-eye at night (wishing we’d gone to bed earlier) it’s simply about being busy, busy, busy. How we handle this “busyness” determines how we get to be truly effective in our personal and professional life and how we get to feel in physical and emotional terms. Are we going ballistic because we’re stressed out? Have we lost our drive because we’re tired? Of course some pressure is good for the body. The batch of stress hormones that come along with it jacks up our performance, energizes us and pushes us to head back for the salt mines. The cortisol number in our bodies goes up as high as ten times more creating that sense of enthusiasm we all need to keep us going. That’s the good news. The bad news is that when too much stress starts hitting our brain, we run the risk of being a mad hatter. So, What Do We Do? Enter: Mindful Moments Mindful moments can serve as a helpful tool to assist us in managing our busyness, tone done mental fatigue and regain focus and normal level stress. What’s A Mindful Moment? Mindful moment is that stand-still pause where you consciously connect with a keen awareness of the present moment. It’s the here-and-now time fraction, where instead of letting your mind roam forward to future thoughts or allowing worries to bring you back to what happened during the yesteryears, you simply touch base with Now…this moment. Because breathing is the human function readily available to just about anybody who is pretty familiar and well adapted to the art of regular breathing, a mindful moment is about focusing on it. No matter what position you’re in, sitting or standing, a mindful moment allows you to concentrate on the inhaling and exhaling of your breath. As you do so, you’ll notice your tension starting to go down. You start to feel less antsy and become calmer. And you get this sense of control of handling any emotions being generated. So, When Should You Try These Mindful Moments? When you think seriously that your potential reaction to a given scenario may go haywire and you envision results as not serving you best, go try a mindful moment. Some of the most typical situations you might encounter include the following: When you start getting edgy and irritated waiting in line at the coffee shop, in a government bureau or a bank. When you get this pins-and-needles feeling and dread for that important job interview. When you feel sick as you see a surge of 500 emails into your inbox. When you oversleep, the traffic is a nightmare and the you’re-running-out-of-gas orange light is flashing in your face. To be sure you’ll run into other situations similar to these as you go through the routine of everyday life. When you begin to get that walking-on- eggs tense feeling, go for that mindful moment. It helps.