The Power of a Picnic: Time to Relax, Reflect, and Rejuvenate

Imagine yourself at a picnic. You're at your favorite spot with your favorite people, eating your favorite food. You are relaxed, thinking things through and reflecting on the things important to you. While few of us have time to head out on a picnic every day, there are ways to experience those same benefits without packing the cooler and laying out the blanket. That place where interests and talents collide in our heart, head, and hands align to do good and feel good. The intent of today's episode is to identify and tame the thoughts and habits creating stress in your life and to make time to picnic. I don't mean a literal picnic, although I do feel those are beneficial too. The picnic metaphor is about time to connect with nature, others around you, and yourself. Time to check in with how you're feeling, how others are doing, and where you are on your path in relation to where you want to be. About having a sense of balance and confidence while having more energy and a sharper mind so you can do and feel better. We are part of a society that is still coming out of a pandemic. And if you're thinking to yourself, well, this doesn't pertain to me, the pandemic didn't really impact or change me much, or I am so over that COVID thing, then consider this. Homelessness, social relationships, safety, both physical and psychological. The economy and our education system have all taken a hit from this pandemic. Employment is another big one, not just unemployment, but those who are employed and making their way in the current workforce with perhaps little experience or training and having to adjust to new post-COVID procedures and mindsets. So whether or not you feel you've been impacted, there are a lot of people around who have.

So few of me and so much to do. If only there were two of me. Just then there was a knock on the door.

What Leo finds on the other side of the door is another him. And of course, he now believes he will be able to get through his list. But faster than the two Leos can check the items off the list, the list keeps growing. Work life balance for quite some time was all the rage and a common New Year's resolution. But nowadays it's simply life balance. We tell ourselves, this year I'm going to give more to my family, spend more time with friends, exercise more, save more money, read more, have more time for myself, or put more into my work. I will do more so I can do better and feel better. If your resolutions tend to be about doing more without doing less, my guess is you are actually feeling worse instead of better. I recently learned of the Zeigernick effect. As you may have guessed, it is a condition named after the psychologist and professor who studied it. In his observations of waiters in a busy restaurant back in the 1920s, Dr. Zegernick saw consistently across all the waiters that they could remember long and complex orders that they had not yet delivered. But yet after the orders were complete, they could no longer remember all the details. He went on to study the effect in different conditions and found the same result. People tended to recall uncompleted tasks or activities that had been interrupted and they forget the ones they had completed. In other words, your brain is constantly working to remember the things you have not finished. This sounds like a good thing, right? Well, here's where it gets problematic. All those unfinished tasks wear and tear on your brain. That nagging guilt impacts your mental ability and makes it difficult to focus. And so when we are working on a task and then we get distracted by another one and start going down those rabbit holes, we create more stress because we're adding to the list of unfinished business. Here's another one. Most of us have heard of ADD and ADHD. They're both acronyms for attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactive disorder. ADD and ADHD are neurological disorders, which can be aggravated by the environment. Similar but different is attention deficit trait, or ADT, which is actually caused by the environment. And more often than not, our ADT is within our control. ADT comes from information and decision overload. Today's work and learning environments bring a whole new meaning to multitasking. Whether school or work, the idea of more, more, more just keeps creeping up on us. And the distractions, my goodness, emails, texts, social media, maintaining account profiles, recalling passwords, all this on top of the usual things that go along with daily life. According to Dr. Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span, our attention spans are declining. In fact, the average attention span has gone from two and a half minutes in 2004 down to just 47 seconds. Do the math, and that doesn't look too good for the next decade. ADT is the difference between peace and panic. Think back to the Saber-toothed Tiger days. That to-do list you have, or maybe you have several. That's all the information you're receiving about your parenting, your work, your health, your social connections. They are the modern day saber-toothed tiger staring you in the eye. You feel pressure to get a handle on it before it takes you down. Well, there is no place for this tiger at our picnic. Time to hit the pause button and stop that tiger in its tracks. We do it all the time with our devices to give ourselves a break or make sure we don't miss anything. Let's do it today for our health. In the children's book So Few of Me, that we heard of a bit earlier, Leo is running around with his mini and long lists of things to do. The more the Leos multiply, the longer the list gets. Spoiler alert, in the end, Leo learns to have just one list that just one Leo can manage. While obviously as a children's book, it doesn't describe Leo's entire thought processes and strategies, but I believe it went something like this. He came to realize when his list is longer than his ability, he is trying to win the wrong game. He took the time to understand himself and the purpose behind what he was doing or what he wanted to do. And he reflected on the return value of what he was doing. He started to realize it's not about getting more done, but about getting the right things done. So what are you getting back for the things you spend your time on? Do they have short-term effects or long-term value? Is there something else you could do with that time that would be of more value? Take a moment to contemplate your top priorities. Now count how many things are on your list. If you have more than three, it's time to rethink how you view priorities. A priority is a priority, something of greatest importance. So if there is a long list, they can't all possibly be priorities. Something's got to give. And a priority is not a task. Taking out the garbage is a task. Maintaining a clean and orderly environment is a priority. Completing a course is a task. Improving performance at work or earning a diploma or degree is a priority. Our priorities are a reflection of who we are and who we want to be. As you determine your priorities, ask yourself, why is this a priority to me? What is my ability to get where I want to go with it? Be honest and be realistic. Once you have your top three priorities, take some time to consider roadblocks that may get in your way of doing what matters to you. Things like FOMO, the fear of missing out. Modern society offers us so much more, more friends, more events, more information, so much to do, so little time. When you look at your schedule, how much time are you devoting to activities that bring value to your life, that you truly enjoy, versus doing them because you fear you will miss out on something? Another roadblock, screen time. I recently read a study that showed that more than 90% of adult Americans spend 15 to 18 hours per month on Facebook alone. That's just one of the many platforms. The amount of time the average American watches TV per week is 28 hours. Another study, over the course of a 17-week league, fantasy football costs employers over $14 billion in lost productivity. How much time do you spend each day on screen entertainment? What value does it bring for you? How does it align with what is important to you? A friend recently turned me on to a website called A Thousand Hours Outside, which promotes matching screen time with green time. You can click on the website from our show notes or search yourself, but I highly recommend it. Here's another roadblock, multitasking. We tend to think we've got it all under control when we're multitasking, but research out of Stanford University reflects that the brain does not really do multiple tasks at a time, but rather it switches rapidly from one task to another, which is very demanding on the brain. To be pulled in so many directions at once shows that not only do you get less done than you think, the divergence of mental focus can often lead to poorer performance, whether that be on the job, as a parent, as a friend. I learned a new word recently, flubbing, spelled with a pH. It's a term for being on your phone, like texting, internet search, whatever. But you're on your phone in the presence of someone. You are essentially snubbing that person while being on your phone. While you're thinking to yourself, yeah, I'm listening as I look this thing up or respond to a text. You really aren't. How often do you flub people? Here's another roadblock that gets in the way of doing what matters most is the lack of exercise. The American Psychological Association reports that we are 15% more productive on days that we exercise before work. In addition, the study found that physically active employees were less likely to develop job burnout and depression. In his book, SPARC, the revolutionary new science of exercise in the brain, John Rady MD explains how exercise improves mood, it improves feelings of wellness, it jumpstarts your attention span, and improves cognition. How often are you spending time engaged in physical activity? How about your children? Another roadblock, breathing. Sometimes we underestimate the importance of breathing. As part of our autonomic nervous system, our body just does it without us having to think much about it. But if you do pay attention to your breathing, you will likely find that when you're stressed, your breathing is shallow and in your chest. In episode four of season two, titled If I Only Had a Brain, we talk about the science behind the importance of balanced breathing, where you take the time to control your breathing with equal inhale and exhale using your diaphragm. Think of breathing like exercise. It's like a concentration workout to tone up your attention and decision-making abilities. How often do you take the time to check your breathing and engage in balanced breathing to level yourself out? And the last thing I'll mention as far as a roadblock is workload. While work, in the sense of performing a task that requires sustained effort, is good for the soul. It builds character and competence, it gives us a sense of belonging and significance, and it feeds our natural inclination to explore and learn and create and build. But like anything, too much of even a good thing can be harmful. How much time are you spending on work compared to how much time you allow yourself for rest and recreation? In what ways can you streamline, simplify, or delegate your work to achieve the same or better results with less time and energy? Make sure you're scheduling your version of a picnic to give yourself time to rejuvenate. The guiding questions I've shared here are available on our website in case that works better for you than listening. If you think you don't have time to sit down and do all this pondering, that is a clue that you really do need it. Make your priorities your list and spend time on them every day. There will still be time for all the other things, but if you make sure you're engaging with your priorities each day, you'll find you have more energy and a better frame of mind to tackle or even eliminate the other stuff. And putting those priorities first, you just might find you're operating in your element.