Emotional filing - De-fragment your brain

The decision I made about a year ago to pay some serious attention to my emotional state and get it sorted out properly is the best decision I’ve made in my life to date.

Have you ever felt the need to shout out “Stop the world and let me get off for a while”?

That feeling of despair and confusion is the most distressing of life experiences. There seems to be no time to think straight. The mind is working overtime and causing mental and physical exhaustion. Like trying to swim against the current, it feels like no progress is being made and you can sense you are going backwards. That current is actually trying to drag you to the place you need to be. It’s probably time to let go of the fighting and “go with the flow”.

So how does this work?

The first stage is to actually go and seek help. There is a need to trust in the process of your inner self or soul calling you to let go of the fighting.  It’s a bit like maintaining the computer you are currently using to increase it performance and prevent it from crashing. We’ve all experienced the speed of a brand new computer and then notice that gradually, over time it begins to slow down and malfunction as more and more programs are added. The hard disk becomes cluttered. Other unhelpful processes get in the way, such as checking details of previously accessed programs, some of which may be of no further use. The computer processes can be cleared up by clearing the history of web pages visited that don’t need to be held in the forefront of the memory and also by defragging the hard disk.

The good news is that we can do this with our brain.

Taking some therapy is equivalent to booting your computer in “safe mode” and choosing one of the tools to make the repairs. The “defrag” option looks at all the processes and puts them into order, grouping them appropriately, discarding what is no longer needed freeing up some space. This allows everything to run much more smoothly. The human brain equivalent of a “defrag” is what I call emotional filing.

Of  course, we can’t operate in “safe mode” for long periods of time, so the brain defrag needs to be done in stages.

There are of course many other tools that can improve the computers performance, some of which “claim” to fix all problems and often simply make things worse!

What tools can we use to perform maintenance on our minds?

Taking therapy is one, particularly when things are pretty messed up. Other techniques come under what is described as self help. These can be learning some meditation techniques, taking some physical exercise, taking appropriate rest, taking a restful holiday, sharing with trusted friends, keeping a diary or journal, and many more that don’t come to mind right at this minute. Of course, once maintenance is performed, everything works much better for a while, until the next time perhaps. I’m coming to the conclusion that people who don’t suffer too much with emotional problems perform regular maintenance on their minds. This may occur naturally (unconsciously) or they make a conscious effort to keep their minds running efficiently and effectively.

Sometimes, we are not aware of needing maintenance. Again, it’s a bit like your computer that run frustratingly slowly with many faults, but you just accept its slowness and don’t do anything about it until it finally breaks completely.

Do you perform emotional filing? If so, how do you do it? What techniques do you use? Do those techniques help?

Feel free to comment.

Merry Christmas,

Marty