How to calm a busy mind without changing your whole life…
A busy mind isn’t a personal failure, it’s a product of the hustle culture and the fast paced world we live in. This culture trains our nervous system to stay alert, productive, and prepared at all times. For many professionals, constant thinking feels normal, even necessary. But over time, it becomes exhausting and often it becomes unsustainable and we burnout.
Good news is you don’t need to quit your job, wake up at 5am, or meditate for an hour to feel calmer. You need small, safe ways to tell your mind and body: you’re allowed to slow down.
Why Your Mind Feels So Busy
A busy mind usually comes from:
High responsibility
Constant stimulation
Pressure to perform
Lack of emotional rest
Your brain is trying to protect you by staying “on.” The goal isn’t to silence your mind—it’s to teach it that rest is safe.
1. Recognise you are in busyness
Part of calming is recognising when you are stuck in a busy brain. Often times we are so used to living like this we don’t realise we are caught in a loop of thinking and doing until we try to get to sleep at night. Good news is that over time we can start to recognise the early signs and intervene before burnout happens or even better we can put in place techniques to help us daily.
A simple technique is to ask yourself “How am I feeling right now?” throughout the day this will help you to identify if you are in busyness.
2. Create Mental “Off Switch” Moments
Adding to the previous step if you identified you are in busyness it will benefit you to switch off when you have a moment to do so. I know that for a busy mind switching off can be a struggle. This is not a skill that is always learned overnight and can be a practice that is built over time. However we can harness the benefits in simple ways to begin with.
Choose one daily moment where thinking is not required.
Examples:
Drinking tea without your phone, making sure to bring your mind back to the taste, to the heat, to the feeling of the cup in your hand.
Walking without headphones, looking for things that are naturally beautiful focusing only on that.
Showering without planning your day and feeling the water, smelling your soap and taking care to mindfully wash.
This trains your mind to experience things in the present in calm short, safe doses.
3. Externalize Your Thoughts
Your mind feels busy when it has to hold everything. We often have a to do list for work, home, relationships, family, health and fitness and dreams and goals. This is a lot of information to hold on to and action. One of the things I like to do is get it down on paper.
Try:
A daily brain dump without holding back write everything without care of handwriting or neatness or order.
Writing worries down can help to make them feel less prominent.
Making “later” lists this can give a sense of clarity.
Writing it down tells your brain it doesn’t need to remember everything and should lighten the busyness slightly.
4. Stop Treating Calm Like a Reward
Calm isn’t something you earn after productivity. It’s what makes productivity sustainable. You can choose calm at any point in the day. Even when things are stressful or busy. It’s natural at times to feel stressed or busy but we can choose to calm ourselves in order to not only feel better but to function at our best.
You are allowed to feel calm even when:
Your to-do list isn’t done, if you need to schedule out when you will do things or at least when you will complete tasks by.
You’re still figuring life out, you don’t have to have all of your goals checked off now how boring would that be anyway!
You don’t have clarity yet, if anything calm brings clarity with it.
5. Build Calm as a Habit
Calm comes from repetition, not perfection. As we previously talked about being mindful and choosing calm can become easier over time through building it as a habit.
Tiny calm habits:
Checking in with yourself
Choosing to be mindful
Letting out worries
Small signals of safety, repeated daily, create a calmer mind over time.
Final Thoughts
Your mind isn’t broken—it’s tired. Calm doesn’t require a new life. It starts with small moments of safety, built gently into the life you already have. If you are interested in having a simple daily practice to guide you check out my free workbook.