How Stillness Helps You Stop Putting Things Off

"Ugh… faced with a mountain of work, I never know where to begin."

"I usually find it really hard to get into the right mood first. I mean to deal with something in a few days' time, then I keep putting it off and off until it's right on my doorstep… argh!"

Do the lines above describe your own life? If so, then the stillness handbook Mind Training is just the book to help you break, once and for all, the habit of putting everything off again and again — a must-read of 2020 for cultivating habits and building a free, self-directed life.

Mind Training is a book written by TreeholeHK founder Peter Chan. Beyond setting out, in words, the methods for practising stillness, it draws on different metaphors of "grounding", on historical background, and on recent cross-disciplinary research and applications, to explain what "stillness" really means — so that readers not only come to understand "stillness" in the round, from the surface to the depths, but also get a taste of psychology's most popular, practical knowledge. What sets Mind Training apart from mainstream stillness titles (also written in Chinese) is the way it brings "stillness" into the secular mainstream — its secularization and normalization — fundamentally overturning entrenched myths such as "stillness is a form of psychotherapy" and "you only need stillness if you have an emotional problem". If psychotherapy is the "medicine" for dealing with mental distress, then "stillness" is the "nourishment" that keeps our bodies and minds healthy — and it suits young and old alike, at little cost.

The thread running through Mind Training is that "stillness" can help us change our entrenched patterns of thinking and behaving in a scientific, evidence-based way. This stillness handbook makes a tightly reasoned case; its content is substantial, and it is certainly no idle talk. The two lines at the start of this piece reflect the psychological phenomenon of "procrastination", a problem that today's Hong Kong people (whether students or "office grunts") face to some degree. It doesn't just waste your time and leave you stuck in place — it can even derail your whole life. The author, too, has long been plagued by procrastination: plans to learn a foreign language or to write code, for instance, dragged on and never went ahead as scheduled. The pity is that we all know full well the harm procrastination does, yet we don't know how to face it, and sometimes don't even want to. Psychology calls this phenomenon "experiential avoidance", a concept closely bound up with procrastination. Take an example: say you intend to take up long-distance running. Because you have no habit of doing aerobic exercise, after running for a while you can hardly avoid feeling out of breath, struggling for air, or experiencing muscle discomfort, and you readily develop negative feelings and emotions such as "this is so painful" and "I want to give up". People with a higher tendency towards "experiential avoidance" find these negative feelings and emotions unbearable, and in the end opt for "not in the mood today, I'll make time tomorrow!", or even give up halfway — which is a great shame.

What most appeals to the author about Mind Training is the way it explains, from a neuropsychological perspective and through a richly illustrated format, how stillness genuinely changes us. Put simply, sustained, persistent practice of stillness improves the function of the brain's pre-frontal cortex (the main region for thinking, focus and self-control) and strengthens its connection to the limbic system (the main region for emotion and motivation), so that we can more effectively "drive" ourselves to keep working at something and rise to challenges, pushing past our own limits. Seen from another angle, "stillness" is not about no longer feeling negative emotions; rather, it lets us keep facing things and go on to complete our goals and plans even in the face of unavoidable negative feelings or emotions. To put it another way, the function of "stillness" is to lower our "experiential avoidance" — to reduce the threat that the negative feelings stirred up by trying new things pose to our progress towards our goals, helping us reshape the life we want. Of course, the rewards of practising stillness are by no means limited to overcoming "procrastination" or "lack of drive" and similar motivational problems. Because practising stillness can deepen our awareness of the people and things around us, reducing some habitual but maladaptive ways of speaking and behaving (such as the way we make requests of a boss or colleague), stillness can, in the long run, help us improve our relationships with the people around us, as well as our own warmth towards others.

Finally, the author would like to recommend Mind Training to everyone, so that, on top of enjoying good physical and mental health, you can take hold of your own gifts and talents and build the ideal life that truly belongs to you. Because in 2020, Hong Kong people deserve something better!