Manage your mind.

Today your most important job is managing the thoughts in your head.  

From your thoughts come your emotions.  

From your emotions come your actions.

From your actions come your results.

If your head is full of fearful thoughts you will, without question, create your reality from fear, which serves no one, especially you.  To quote one of my favorite lines in Point Break (and I have a LOT of them) "Fear causes hesitation and hesitation causes your greatest fear to come true".

Here are a few ideas to help manage your mind, today when things are crazy nuts and tomorrow when things are just the regular kind of nuts.

1. Write down every thought in your head, really sweep every stinky one out from the dark corners of your mind. You can’t manage your mind if you don’t recognize what is feeding it.

2. Go through each thought ask yourself “is this a fact?” If it is not an absolute irrefutable FACT then draw a line through it. That thought has now been nullified. Write a new TRUE thought to replace it and practice that thought throughout the day.

Example:  The world has gone crazy.   This is a temporary problem that we are all working through together.

3. Turn off the news and refrain from indulging in fear-based chatter. Your brain is very sensitive to potential danger and by watching/reading/hearing about all the opinions and worst case scenarios you are giving your brain a nonstop stream of DANGER signals. When your brain thinks you are in danger it sets off a very effective and explosive chain of internal reactions to protect you.  Right now you are pickling your internal organs in all the stress hormones and chemicals that are released when your brain believes you are in danger.  You HAVE to turn off the firehose of fear.

4. Be of service to others.

• Offer to help a neighbor with their kids.  Especially if you are a single without the concern of exposing young children. Give a tired momma a break for even 30 minutes.  It makes a difference.
• Plan neighborhood activities to help keep the kids occupied while out of school.
  • Neighborhood bike rides
  • Sidewalk chalk competitions
  • Scavenger hunts around your neighborhood
  • Create a lending library
  • Plan group fun runs
• Offer your time to older people that need assistance.  They may not have the technology know-how in order to live-stream their church services or they may have a pet that needs walking or prescriptions or groceries that need to be picked up.  
• Offer to help at local food kitchens.  They are in deep need as a lot of their normal volunteers are not able to help right now.  If you do not have a concern of exposing vulnerable family members then maybe you could jump in and fill in where others can not.
• Be a connector.  If your situation does not allow for you to physically help out then connect community needs with people wanting to help.  Many people are just waiting to be activated.  Make it easy for them by finding a need for them to fill.  Let's use social media for something useful for a change.
• Focus on all you have that allows you to weather this storm and show plenty of gratitude.  Do not complain about a missed concert or a cancelled flight when there are people that are struggling to survive.