Welcome to the Monday Muse, a short round up of stuff that I found interesting in the last week. If you have comments or ideas you want to share, feel free to drop me a message. If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
1/ Are you thinking or feeling?
Many of us live in our heads and out of our bodies. This leads us to overemphasize a rational approach, disregard emotions (both yours and those of others), straining your relationships and even leading to burnout.
There’s a simple way to test whether you are thinking-through or feeling-through a problem: When someone asks how you’re feeling, do your eyeballs move down to the right (or stay centered)?
Feelings are stored in your body. If your eyes are moving up, that indicates you’re probably thinking, and not feeling. If they stay centered or move to the down and right, it indicates you are sensing the feeling in your body. Try it now!
I first learned about this years back in a book by Tony Robins called Unlimited Power. He wrote about Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and how our eye movements called "Eye Accessing Cues," can reveal different cognitive processes:
Kinesthetic and Self-Talk: Your eye movements downwards, to the middle and either side are associated with accessing emotions (kinesthetic).
Visual Construct: When you look up and to the left, it suggests that you are mentally creating visual images or engaging in imaginative thinking.
Visual Remember: When you look up and to the right, it indicates that you are accessing stored visual memories or recalling past visual experiences.
Auditory Construct and Remember: Looking left is linked to constructing auditory thoughts, while looking right is associated with remembering auditory experiences.
2/ Quick Way to Clear a Blocked Nose👃
Take a deep breath.
Pinch your nose and hold your breath.
As you do, tap your forehead with your finger.
Simultaneously move your head from left to right and up and down.
This gives your sinuses a bit of a message, loosens up mucus, and helps to unblock your nose with out any extra tools.
3/ Move slow to move fast
Mindfulness may seem counterproductive when you are trying to be productive. But I’ve found that very much the opposite is true. A few different ways to think about it:💡
1. 🧠 Your best, most creative, ground-breaking ideas come from a rested mind. Not a rat-brained, sugar-fueled, exhausted mind.
2. 🤔 It’s impossible to listen to your intuition and gut feelings (pretty important for a startup) if you’re completely ignoring your body’s cues.
3. 🚫 Ego is the ultimate trap. It avoids the hard truths so that it can keep itself inflated and protected at the expense of your startup’s success.
4. 🧘 Mindfulness actually increases your ability to be in a flow state — so you can move fast more efficiently without distractions.
5. 🚀 Speaking of which, mindfulness actually reduces analysis paralysis. You think less, worry less, and simply do more.
A few minutes of mindfulness meditation a day is enough to get all of the benefits above.
4/ What I’m reading
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
I picked up this fascinating Audiobook that goes into the ancient history of breathing, the science of breathing, how breathing is the key to better health, and why you are probably breathing incorrectly. Did you know that…
Most of our weight loss comes through breathing out CO2. The triglycerides release fat as carbon dioxide and water atoms during fat metabolism or oxidation. In other words, fat leaves the body as carbon dioxide when you exhale.
Inhaling through your left nostril activates the parasympathic nervous system (relaxes you), and breathing in your right nostril activates your sympathetic (pumping you up)
We have erectile tissue in our nostrils, which is why some people experience nasal congestion during sex called “Honeymoon Rhinitis”. And sexually induced sneezing also exists, where people sneeze uncontrollably when even thinking about sexual activity.
“Email Apnea” is when we unconsciously hold our breaths when looking at a screen, anxiously breathing through our chests
When you breathe through your belly (vs. chest breathing) you inhale more oxygen and you lymphatic fluids can move around, clearing out toxins quicker
5/ Powerful questions I am asking myself
“Will this choice propel me toward an inspiring future or will it keep me stuck in the past?”
📞 Feeling stressed, stuck or burned out? Book a Free Coaching Call
📚 For an in-depth exploration of burnout Get my eBook or my 14-Day Email Course
🤝 Check out more content and Connect with me on LinkedIn