Who Do You Spend Most Of Your Time With? - Grasshopper

Who do you spend most of your time with?

It’s a question that can produce a lot of different answers, but only one of them is correct.

You might say you spend most of your time with your coworkers, your friends, your partner, your family – or somebody else I haven’t mentioned.

And I’m not going to quibble with your calculations.

But you’re leaving the biggest consumer of your time off the list.

You spend most of your time with your thoughts.

They win the gold medal for occupying your time.

That realization may not be particularly uplifting, especially when you consider how many of our thoughts aren’t very uplifting either.

Some can be depressing. Some can be frustrating. And some can take us down a rabbit hole that seems to get darker the further we go.

Who hasn’t gotten lost in their thoughts from time to time – sometimes to the point of despair?

But there’s good news.

You don’t have to stay down that rabbit hole.

There’s a way to spend less time with your thoughts, and it starts with something very simple:

Notice them.

The moment you recognize that you’re lost in thought, you’ve already taken the first step toward freeing yourself from them.

And you might even ask yourself, “Who is it that’s doing the noticing?”

It isn’t your mind.

It’s the part of you that can observe your mind.

We all have that ability. We can step back and simply watch our thoughts as they come and go.

And that’s important because the moment you become the observer instead of the participant, something changes.

You interrupt the train of thought.

And sometimes, you derail it completely.

Think about it. A thought can have a tremendous amount of momentum when you’re caught up in it. One thought leads to another, and another, and before you know it, you’re somewhere you never intended to go.

But observing the process gives you a chance to step off the train.

The more often you practice observing your mind, the less time you have to spend being carried away by it.

Those nagging thoughts aren’t going to disappear. They’ll always be part of the human experience.

But how much time you spend with them?

That’s much more within your control.

So begin developing the habit of observing your mind.

Because the more you can watch your thoughts without automatically following them, the more freedom you have over how you spend your time.

And that’s time well spent.

All the best,