I feel like I am wasting my time

Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 126

Listen here

When I'm coaching people about what they want to do with their lives and how they're spending their time, a thought that comes up quite often is, "I feel like I'm wasting my time". And it's something that I have been prone to thinking as well, over the years, and especially in some of my relationships and often my relationship with grief, actually, I worry that I'm wasting my time that I have left with people, it's something that comes up for me quite a lot. I worry that I'm not doing the right thing and that if I'm not doing the right thing now, what will I do and how will I speak to myself further down the line?

What I want to spend this week just tiptoeing towards you is the idea that actually you can't waste your time. The idea of wasting time is just a thought. It's not a fact. It's not a tangible thing. And we know that because everybody has a different understanding and a different concept of what the idea of "wasting time" looks like.

Digging down into some of these things that we've been telling ourselves for the longest time can be really useful in terms of trying to dissect them a little bit and see if they're serving us.

What does wasting time look like for you?

How can you waste time?

Where does wasted time go?

Time, I would like to remind you, is a human construct that we invented mostly so that trains could run to particular stations and people would be at stations to be able to pick people up at the right time. The concept of time is completely arbitrary. And your time is yours. How you use it is yours, but most importantly, how you speak to yourself about it is yours. I don't think there's any possibility that you can waste time because time just is. It's a neutral fact. It's like you can't think that a sofa isn't a sofa just because you think that you've wasted a sofa. A door isn't a door just because you think that you're wasting a door. These might be slightly rubbish analogies. I'm trying to think of ways to explain the idea that time only exists in as much as we think about it.

The way that we think about it is less to do with the actual construct of minutes and hours and years, and a lot more to do with how we think we will talk to ourselves if something, you know, "goes wrong". What we're really worried about is that at some point in the future when something occurs that we are not going to be able to speak to ourselves with kindness or grace, or more likely, we're really worried that we're going to be absolutely brutal to ourselves because we're going to tell ourselves that we didn't do the right thing and that we made the wrong decisions.

So rather than this trying to navigate our way through thinking that there's some magical way that we can spend our minutes, hours, weeks and months so we can avoid feeling a particular feeling, (which frankly, is regret or shame or embarrassment or sadness or grief - all things, you'll note, are part of the human experience). What we could do instead, rather than trying to change our actions so that we don't have to feel a human emotion, what we could do to sidestep that a little bit is to practice along the way that no matter what happened and no matter how life unfolds, I'm going to speak to myself with kindness. I'm going to speak to myself like the kind of human who made the best decisions that they could according to what they knew at the time, and frankly, just did their best.

If you trust yourself to speak to yourself with the kind of voice that allows you to be human, to make mistakes, decisions, opinions, all the way along the way, without knowing all the information and just trusting that with the information you have, you're probably going to be doing your best. If you can speak to yourself like you trust yourself, then actually the idea of "wasting time" sort of disintegrates in on itself. The idea and the construct of the fact that we can waste our time sort of rests on this false premise that if we spend our time in precisely the right way, then we will feel this precise set of emotions and that life will be rosy at the end of it all.

The truth is that no matter what you do, no matter what actions you take, no matter what decisions are made or what activities you do, the other side of that decision, that action, the choices that you make to spend your time, life's still pretty lifey. The other side of it life will involve some joy, some sadness, some boredom, some elation, some despondency, some frustration, and all of the other flavors of emotions in between. Life's gonna life the other side of any which way that you spend your time. We can't navigate our way out of the way that our brains process things and life keeps on happening to us.

We can't actually "waste our time". And in truth, what we mean when we say we're "wasting our time" is I don't trust myself to speak to myself with any kind of kindness if I feel an uncomfortable emotion, the other side of whatever is going on here or whatever I'm doing. And the reality is that you are going to feel some of those emotions as long as you're breathing, there's going to be some emotions that are a little bit uncomfortable and that you don't enjoy.

We can't take a particular action or do a particular thing or schedule our way out of feelings that are uncomfortable. So knowing that life is going to have a whole load of emotions and aren't we lucky that it does, because it is the full granular set of life lifing out there and not some weird automaton AI version of trademark happiness, knowing that life's gonna just carry on rolling and we're just gonna carry on humaning, we can kind of relax a little bit into the idea that, yeah, time is just gonna pass. I'm gonna make the decisions that I'm gonna make and no matter what happens, if I can trust that I've got my own back, that I'm not gonna bully myself or berate myself, no matter what happens, we can lean into the idea.

So we spend the time the way that we want to spend the time. And sometimes that's going to look like super, super productive. Sometimes it's going to look really creative, sometimes it's going to look silly, sometimes it's going to look joyful, sometimes it's going to look like an awful lot of relaxation. Sometimes it's going to look like doing things we absolutely wouldn't want other people to watch us doing. And all of those things are welcome.

We can't "waste our own time" because it's ours. You can't waste your time because it is your life and you get to live it however you choose.

What we can decide is how we speak to ourselves while we're doing the thing before we take the action. But most importantly, deciding ahead of time that no matter how our lives unfold, that we're going to speak to ourselves with grace and glory. That is the way to stop feeling like you're wasting your time.

This has been Spam Filter for Your Brain, a podcast which. Do you know what? I would love, love, love if you wanted to share, share on social media, share with your friends. If you get things out of this podcast, it would be so useful for me if you could spread the word about it. And that means that these little tidbits and life hacks get into other people's ears and hopefully allow more people to be more kind to themselves as they roam around their lives.

And I'm sure that if you're listening to this you know this already but just in case you don't I have a weekly email list that I send a little sort of love letter to rest and to all things emotional, brain, body connection and sometimes with some of the photo shoots that I do and some of the confidence building tricks and quite often with free resources and things in it. And that email list is all linked in the show notes. So if you've never visited the show notes before perhaps you'd like to do that today.

I have really quite enjoyed speaking to you today about not wasting your time. I invite you to go and spend the rest of your week and dabble in wasting a bit of time and seeing how you feel about it and see how you speak to yourself about it and I will speak to you next week.