[00:00:00] Vesna: Today I'm going to talk about how to reduce the mental load that we carry so we can reduce our stress levels.
[00:00:42] Now when we talk about mental load, you may have heard this phrase, so we are carrying a lot of responsibilities on our shoulders. a lot of demands on us managing other people's emotions, whether it be at work or at home, and it just feels like our head is full and it's exhausting and we can't switch off at nighttime.
[00:01:01] And you might find yourself. Staying up late, like 11pm, midnight, watching Netflix with a glass of wine or whatever it is in order to switch off the mind. Now what many people don't realise is that There is a task load and there is a mental load. And I'm going to talk about both because what we don't realize is the impact of chronic overthinking and how that impacts the mental load that we carry all day long.
[00:01:29] Okay? So this nonstop mental chatter that we have going in our heads, which I hear from a lot of women and a lot of people say to me, if I could just get my head to shut up for five minutes, I would feel a lot better. I'd feel a lot clearer. Now this all adds up. So in my work, I'm looking at the side effect of chronic stress.
[00:01:45] So when we look at the mental load, the mental load is this kind of invisible load of stress that we don't realise is the biggest source of stress, right? So we look at it that we just have too much stress. And that is why we're stressed, right? There's too much to manage. But so there's task load and there's mental load.
[00:02:04] So task load is you are over scheduled, okay? You are over loaded. If you looked at your calendar, there is actually no way that you could get those things done in a day, right? And of course it's going to create some overwhelm because it's not possible to get them done, right? Even though you're trying to squeeze them in.
[00:02:22] So if you look at your to do list and it's a mile long, Then you have that going on, okay? So, that's not possible, but That's not generally what we see, right? It's certainly not. What I see with my clients who are burnt out, exhausted is what I see is the mental load or this invisible load is this chronic overthinking.
[00:02:40] It's thinking about the responsibilities and the tasks and the day ahead and what could possibly happen, and the worry and the fear, and the overwhelm and the concern. This over analytical, this overthinking mind is. The biggest source of stress, right? So that is the mental load. So that's overwhelm. So we've got overloaded and we've got overwhelm.
[00:03:03] So in order to reduce our stress levels, we need to reduce this overwhelm, right? Because it's the overwhelm which creates a physical, load on the body. and it builds up over time, right? It builds up over years. So you feel like you suddenly get to this place where you've got aches and pains.
[00:03:19] You've got, sore neck and shoulders. You've got weight that's kind of crept up out of nowhere. You're exhausted all the time. You find that you're unable to handle stress. So any little thing sets you off, you get anxious, you can't sleep at night, you get brain fog. These are all of the side effects of chronic stress.
[00:03:36] And as I said, we may not realise that it's been building up for years and it seems like, bang, those symptoms just arrive out of nowhere. But they have been building up due to this chronic mental load or this chronic mental stress. so you may be thinking, okay, no, that's not true.
[00:03:50] I just, I have a lot on and it can get done in a day. And that's why I'm overwhelmed. It's just too much responsibility on my shoulders. So I want you to think about the days that you get so much done. Like you have your to do list, you get everything done from your to do list. And then, if you're anything like me, which I know people do this, I'm not the only one, you go back to your to do list and go, I actually did this and this as well.
[00:04:11] So you write it down and you cross it off. You write it down and you cross it off and you're like, energized, right? energized from your day. You feel like, you feel really good because you got so much done. You do not feel overwhelmed. You do not feel overstretched. You do not feel tired, right? You feel energized by everything that you had done.
[00:04:28] Yet, there are days when you don't get much done at all. But you feel very overwhelmed, very overwhelmed with what you have on your plate, right? And I want you to see the difference, and whether you see that right now, but you would have experienced those moments where you can get a lot done and not feel overwhelmed or get very little done and become overwhelmed.
[00:04:48] And that is the mental load. That is because of everything that we're carrying in our life. mind with our thinking that is slowing us down, making us less productive, and making us overwhelmed and anxious and overstressed and burnt out.
[00:05:01] we have been taught that if we're feeling overwhelmed and overstretched or and our mind works in this way, that we look what's happening around us, right? We've got to find where it's coming from, right? It's coming from our relationship, it's coming from my boss, or it's coming from my schedule. And our mind is looking for where it's coming from. And then it's trying to understand why we feel like that, what that person's done wrong to us, or why this situation is triggering us. And then our mind has to solve it. Right? It must solve it, transform it, change it, reframe it, something, okay?
[00:05:35] So there's a lot of busyness in the mind through this process. And that's what we've been taught, and that's what we're accustomed to. But as you can imagine as I'm just talking through all of that, That creates even more overthinking, right? That creates even more thoughts, stress, anxiety, and it's not gonna relieve our overwhelm.
[00:05:55] Our stress is not caused by our to do list. Our stress is caused by our thinking, by our thoughts about them, by our beliefs, by the negative thinking that we carry around in our head all day long, or simply. The overthinking, the busy mind. Now I know that that's a tough pill to swallow because it sounds like we're doing this deliberately, we're causing our own suffering. But we don't realize we're doing this, okay? It's very unconscious, it's very innocent, we don't realize that the more we focus on the negative thinking, the more we're The more it's going to create a lot more stress, the more it's going to lower our mood.
[00:06:30] And when our mood is low, we don't do very well, okay? We don't do very well in any area of our life, whether it be through our work, or even in our relationships, in your mothering, okay? So when our mood is low, we tend to not want to be in that place. We want to get out of it, right? And so again, we're looking for ways in our environment.
[00:06:46] What is triggering my low mood? What is making me feel so bad? So, um, And then we go about trying to fix that, but that's not the source of it, right? So it's our thinking. So as soon as we have too much thinking or overthinking or negative thinking, it is gonna change the way that we feel. And because it feels really uncomfortable, we want to change that.
[00:07:06] But that's not the place where we are gonna get the biggest transformation.
[00:07:08] So, if you're wondering whether you're carrying this mental load, whether this is actually the thing that's affecting you, then you can really determine that by the way that you feel. if you feel, anxious stressed burnt out frazzled everything's urgent, very busy, very busy, right?
[00:07:26] All of that indicates that there is too much overthinking going on and too much mental load.
[00:07:30] At about this point when I speak to clients about this, I get the question, well how do I think differently, right? How do I Change my thinking. How do I think positive is one of the questions. How do I think less? Now, it's not possible to change your thinking, right? I think there's a bit of a myth out there that if we just put more positive thinking in there, that we will feel better.
[00:07:52] But if we're looking at how many thoughts are going on in our head, we've got a lot of negative thinking, and then we're trying to add more positive thinking in there. It just creates more load. Okay, even though it's positive, it just creates more load. And what we want to do is reduce that load. And so the way that this happens, which is a less of an active process, is that our mind is designed to dismiss noise, right?
[00:08:18] So if you think about it, this overthinking, this, this busy mind, very noisy in there, okay? And that noise, our mind is designed to block out noise. And I'd like to give you an example. If you don't believe me, I'd like to give you an example.
[00:08:29] So, you would have had times where you've gone into the city and it's been noisy and you couldn't sleep or you've had a barking dog in the area that eventually you became accustomed to the noise, okay? You just didn't notice it anymore. I remember years ago when I moved into a city apartment Me and my friend, we were like, wow, this apartment is amazing.
[00:08:48] You know, we didn't really look outside properly. we kind of knew, but we didn't focus on it. Right. And the situation was that the bedrooms were out the back, the windows you had to open when it, in summertime, because it was very hot, there was a train line right out the back and out the front. Front, where the balconies were, there was like a main, road which had about 6 lanes and it was used as a thoroughfare for the freeway, right?
[00:09:11] So at summer time, it was extremely noisy when we opened up the windows, which we had to. And I remember the first night, my head was like, oh my goodness, I'm never going to be able to sleep here, this is crazy, the train sounds like it's in my room. And by the third night, I was sleeping like a baby. Okay, and every night after that my mind blocked out the noise.
[00:09:30] I didn't notice it anymore, right? And if anyone was to come over they would be like, wow, how do you sleep with that? But my mind had dismissed it right all of us have the ability to dismiss Certain thinking to block out all that noise. Okay, the brain does it automatically you do it already if you are feeling road rage on the road Okay i'm sure you've had this scenario where someone cuts you off and we had it the other day with someone like almost hit into us and like we're on the horn and saying whatever we were saying, right?
[00:10:00] But we didn't act on that thinking right? We really just dismissed it very quickly It's not as if we were going to do something to the driver, right? So you would have had those scenarios as well and there is an ability of your mind to dismiss your thinking When you are aware of that, okay, so if I'm, you know, bringing your attention to that.
[00:10:19] So right, my brain does this, or my mind does this all the time, I'm focusing too much on the negative. The only thing that we need to do here, and it's not really a task, is to be aware that if we take our mind off the negative, if we don't entertain the negative thinking, if we don't go into overthinking mode, we will come back to a clear mind.
[00:10:39] I'm going to simplify it to two mental states, but there's many different mental states. There's a noisy mind. there's a clear mind. A noisy mind is going to create the mental load, the overwhelm, the anxiety, the low moods, and all the downstream effect on your physical body.
[00:10:53] Right? Fatigue, anxiety, weight gain, bloating, hormonal issues, okay? But the clear mind allows you to navigate your life. so here we have busy thinking, here we have thought that provides insights and guidance for our life. Okay, so there will be times in your life where, thoughts come in and they help to guide your life and help you to solve your problems, help you to create the things that you want in your life.
[00:11:21] It gives you the desires that you want and it helps you to create those desires. Okay. But it's very hard in a busy mind. So we really need to, just to simplify it even further, we need to value the quiet mind. The busy mind doesn't do anything for us except create a lot of stress, And then we need to switch off from that at night time.
[00:11:41] And then we need to rebalance our nervous system because it's in overdrive due to so much of this noise going on. So if we can realize that in a calm state of mind, in a clear state of mind, I'm going to operate at my best. We really do so well in a clear state of mind, right? Cause that mood is up. We're very clear.
[00:11:58] We're very focused. We're very productive. Our hormones are very balanced. Our body is just humming along, right? But in a noisy state of mind, we don't have any of that. Okay. And the way that we switch, it's not an active process because we're not making that happen. The mind is designed to slow down. Right?
[00:12:19] It's almost like we have an immune system, like a psychological immune system, right? Our immune system helps us to fight infections and virus and bacteria, or the psychological immune system helps us to go back to well being, back to this calm, clear mind, so we can navigate our life, And if we, just dismiss or not hang on or not dwell or just allow the mind to do that by kind of backing off the overthinking, right?
[00:12:46] Not living in our heads so much. We will come from that place. So it's really about valuing this state of mind, a calm state of mind in order to not keep going back into that busy state of mind.
[00:12:56] So you already have this ability to dismiss that thinking. You just have to take it up a notch, okay? And the way we take it up a notch is just being a little bit more aware if you're going into a situation, if you're entertaining a lot of that negative thinking. We're never going to get rid of negative thinking, right?
[00:13:14] But, um, The biggest impact that we can make to our health and to our life is to not entertain it, right? Not spend a lot of time there, right? Allow new fresh thinking to come through, allow a clear state of mind for new ideas and opportunities to come through for us.
