Do More of What You Care About:
Sample Lesson Material
Module 1: Mindful Action Planning—Finding Your Why and Finding Your Way
Lesson 5: Getting Curious—Noticing how you spend your time
Early in this module, you were challenged to track your time, simply noting what you were doing throughout the day and week. Although this task was specifically related to some planning strategies for time management that we're going to talk about more, self-observation in general is also an important skill for building psychological flexibility. As noted in the last lesson, healthy and flexible "self-ing" is an important repertoire to build, and being able to identify one's own behavior and the context within which it occurs is a part of that.
Simply tracking your time likely made you not only more aware of how you spent your time, but also probably changed your behavior. Self-monitoring or “awareness training” is a key component of many highly effective behavior therapies, and even just the act of recording one’s own behavior has long been shown to have significant effects on increasing or decreasing behaviors targeted for change.
Tracking your time also provides you with the opportunity to not only notice how you are spending your time, but also noticing that you are spending time. Whether or not you track it, time is going by anyway. Your time on this earth is finite—when you track it, you become more aware of how precious it is, creating an opportunity for choosing how you spend it.
Tracking your time may have brought up a lot of feelings and thoughts related what you felt like you should or shouldn't be doing in a given moment. Join me in these next videos to explore the rules you might have about how you spend your time. I'll also explain a bit more about rules and values-as-rules from a relational framing perspective.
As you move forward into the next module, keep tracking and noticing your own activities, and the thoughts and feelings that arise as you do (or don't do) them, taking a stance of curiosity and self-compassion as you do so. Observe what shifts your choices.
But before you go on, take some time to simply rest, connect with the important people around you, and enjoy simply being in this time and in this place, doing something that has no particular value beyond the doing of it. Go for a walk, a swim, enjoy the meditation of chopping vegetables for soup, or doing anything at all that feels nourishing. Get silly. Play with bubbles. Do something that is not goal-directed/instrumentalized, or justified because it will help you be more productive later. You deserve rest, and care, and pleasure, simply for you. Following this advice might be hard for you—if so, be gentle with yourself, and curious about the experience. You too are a beautiful sunset.