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Organize your spaces
Human beings, you and I, we like to know that the world is predictable, that there is order in the world. It’s nice to know that when you open the door, you’re not gonna get assaulted. It’s nice to know that when you lift your foot to take a step, you’re not gonna fall down, but you can keep on going. Knowing that we live in predictable environments is very important to our species.
When we’re experiencing chatter, we often don’t feel like there is order in the world because our thoughts are pinballing all over the place and feel outside of our control. One of the things we’ve learned is that we can turn to our physical environments for giving us a sense of order and control when we find it lacking in our internal world. And one way to do this is really simple. It involves organizing your spaces. Lots of people, when they find themselves consumed with chatter, reflexively start cleaning and organizing. What we’ve learned is this is another way of compensating for not feeling order in our heads, by organizing our spaces, carefully putting things away, making sure things are tidy and neat. This gives us a sense of order and control. It makes us feel more in control of ourselves, which we often don’t feel when we’re experiencing chatter.
Spend time in nature
One of the things that happens when we experience chatter is it consumes our attention. We’re zoomed in on the problem. That’s all we can think about. And that can be exhausting, because we only have so much attention that we can devote to things at any given moment in time. When you interact with a green space, when you go for a walk in a park or on a tree-lined street, or even watch a video of an serene natural setting on your TV or computer, what happens is the interesting plants and shrubs and trees, it captures our attention in a very gentle, soft way. People find their attention drifting away from the chatter and onto the landscape in a way that essentially provides us with a break from ruminating and worrying over and over about our problems. And when our attention is drifting onto the green spaces, what that allows to happen in the mind is it allows our attention to be restored. You can bring green spaces into your office or work environment as well in the form of plants and flowers and orchids. Bring nature into your home. Adjust your desks so that it’s facing trees instead of maybe a cityscape.
There’s actually a second way that nature can help us, though, when it comes to chatter, which is interacting with a green space, walking in a beautiful park, or looking at a great natural sunset, or staring at a tree that’s been there for hundreds of years, those interactions provide us with opportunities to experience the emotion of awe. Awe is an emotion we experience when we’re in the presence of something vast that we have trouble understanding. My God, this tree has been here for 300 years. Think about how many pandemics it has weathered. Think about how many storms. What happens when we experience the emotion of awe is it leads to something called the shrinking of the self. We feel smaller when we’re contemplating things that are awe-inspiring. And it’s not just ourselves that feel smaller, but our chatter as well. Our problems feel smaller when we’re contemplating something vast and indescribable.