Take a break from your tiring Monkey Mind and distract yourself with these Delightful Distraction videos.

Change the momentum of your thoughts, you change your day and, ultimately, your life.

The primary reason I create these videos or add other videos to the Delightful Distractions playlist is to find relief from the monkey mind. 

What is the monkey mind? 

Monkey mind is alive and well, Maria Nemeth, author of  Mastering Life’s Energies: Simple Steps to a Luminous Life   explains:

“Monkey Mind is a term coined by Buddhists. It expresses that aspect of the mind that is always chattering at us as it swings from doubt to worry and back to doubt again. Our Monkey Mind is fearful for our survival. It has no sense of proportion Everything is big. Everything is a threat.”  

In his delightfully scientifically funny book, Brain Rules:  12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School  John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist and an affiliate Professor of Bio-Engineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine, noted this about our brains:  “Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth….To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously.”

This is where blessed delightful distraction videos come in. Since the mind cannot pay attention to more than one thing at a time, diverting our attention might be our best defense when the chatter of the monkey mind is so overpowering that we cannot control our head.

Additional benefits of distraction

To paraphrase Phaedrus, once diverted from whatever situation is plaguing us, when we return to it after being distracted we may return to better thinking. This has almost always been the case for me when I choose a healthy distraction.  Like short videos.

Step to the Right

In her phenomenal book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, Brain Scientist Jill Bolte Taylor, shares her journey as she recovered from a rare type of stroke that damaged the left side of her brain. What she shares about the distinct characteristics and functions of the left and right brain are remarkable and inspiring. Essentially, the right mind, “is all about the richness of this present moment…It is content, compassionate, nurturing and eternally optimistic.” The left mind, on the other hand, “takes pride in its ability to categorize, organize, describe, judge, and critically analyze absolutely everything. The left mind allows us to focus the creative, joyful energy inherent in the right brain into the personality that is us that functions in this time and place.”

The mind chatter of the left brain (the “storyteller,” as Dr. Bolte labels it) can cause us to get caught up in its incessant need to understand and control everything. Stepping to the Right is quieting the mind chatter of the left brain and entering into the joyful calm of the right brain. These short videos help me step to the right.

In short (no pun intended) anything – music, photos, videos – that you enjoy and can calm the busy monkey mind of the left brain, will not only help you to feel better but to access solutions not readily available when stressed. This is because stress affects emotional intelligence, says Dr. Steven Stein, the researcher, and author of many books on the topic.

So, let these videos help you be calm, focused and brilliant.

Enjoy the Playlist!