The Mental Equivalent of Washing Your Hands…
Good hygiene helps maintain our physical well-being. The human body is an amazing thing. We cut ourselves and we heal, by maintaining hygiene we support the body to do what it does naturally - heal. Depending on the severity and the nature of the wound we might need to simply wash it, or clean thoroughly or even disinfect and take antibiotics. If we then don’t pick at it and keep it clean it will heal, there may be scarring but that’s part of having a physical body.
The human mind is an even more amazing thing. It also will heal if we understand how it works, maintain its hygiene and let it do what it is designed to do. The good news is the nature of the hygiene it needs is even simpler. Stop, allow your mind to clear, don’t pick at it and it will rebalance.
Knowing how our minds work can aid us to make a similar leap in our mental well-being – we just have to realise how our minds function and how they stay fresh, healthy and in full-operating order.
Some time ago when working with Robin Charbit and Ken Manning of Insight Principles, Robin said something like: “We like to keep the same level of hygiene the whole time – and this applies to our mental hygiene as well”. This thought has stuck with me and I can see how truly understanding how anything works surpasses all of our trial and error learning and allows us to build on it to make great leaps forward.
I live in central Edinburgh and from my desk can see the old medical school and hospital buildings where many advances in in our understanding of germ transmission were made.
Before we knew how transmission actually worked, we had many theories about the nature of disease spread, surgeons wore their blood-stained aprons as a sign of experience and didn’t wash scalpels between operations or dissections! It made no sense to them to do so; with the thinking they had their actions made sense. The consequences for their patients were grim.
When we actually realised how germs spread, well before the advent of antibiotics, human beings began to live longer and healthier lives, grounded in the understanding of how good physical hygiene supports our well-being.
The tremendous news is that we don’t need an injection of bleach or a zap of uv light!
Our minds are designed to be self-cleaning. So if you leave the mind alone it will clear, just like a muddy pool will clear if you stop stirring /agitating it. That clear mind gives us bandwidth to access all of our relevant experience, skills, training etc. alongside fresh thoughts and insights, which allow us to respond to whatever life has presented us with, be it challenge or opportunity.
So what does mental hygiene look like to me? Quite simply it looks like, as best as I can, making opportunities throughout the day to let my mind settle. Which might be making space between meetings, or in the middle of a tricky conversation, or before I plough into my emails… These micro-pauses are the equivalent of a 20 second hand wash. And just as valuable.