Calm down. Slow down. Phone down.

Linda McNeill uses hypnobirthing tools to promote rest and relaxation in birth and family life

Are you addicted to overwhelm? How about overstimulation? And why not chuck one more in there – override? What am I talking about? Let me introduce you to the three big addictive O’s. 

We live in a fast-paced, rapidly changing world. It’s an amazing time to exist in so many ways. We literally have the ability to find out about something that intrigues us at the touch of a button, be entertained on repeat by attention-grabbing videos, be contacted virtually anytime, anywhere by almost anyone. But all this is very much a double-edged sword. We allow ourselves to be easily distracted (I have had to put my phone in another room in order to focus on writing this article). Our brain is not allowed to concentrate on one thing at a time because we bombard it with different stimuli, and we often override our body to enable this mental barrage to continue. We can easily tip into overstimulated and overwhelmed and we then miss the cues that we need more rest, that we need calm, that we need to go outside more and move our bodies. Rather than rest, we choose caffeine or sugar. Rather than calming ourselves to sleep, we take our phones to bed with us.