You are sitting in a conference room with a room full of people and everyone’s talking about the launch plan the team has been working on for the last one week. Your most senior member of the product marketing team has just finished his 5 min overview of the entire sequence. Everyone is looking at you with an expectant face, you are aware of the faces staring blankly at you, you know you are supposed to give your thoughts. You take a deep breath and reposition your body from the slump you’ve sinked into for the last one 20 minutes.

You are getting ready to say something but suddenly it hits you that you’ve not really been paying attention and words refuse to come out of your mouth. You feel a lump in your throat and you slide into the guilt trip of letting your mind wander even though you really want to be here and pay attention. So you do what you have always done, go back to the your memory lane and grab whatever “marketing-y” and “pep-talky” sentences you can recall and conjure up a 2 min long monologue packed with a whole lot of words and leave everyone enchanted but inside you resent yourself for the upteenth time.

Does this sound familiar to you? How many times have you been in a classroom, in a conversation with a loved one, in a meeting room, sitting with a book in your hand or in the shower and found yourself lost in thoughts.

Just when you think you have your mind, you realize your mind has you?

Being able to master your mind is a skill that unfortunately we’re not born with and looking back makes sense? You can never remember how you ended up learning your first language or learning how to walk, how you fell in love for the first time or created that first piece of art, program or whatever artistic pursuit you are skilled at.

The unconscious mind plays a major role in helping you level up in life, start a creative pursuit, discover a new idea or even start a company. But, as you hit your mid-20s you wake up to the glaring truth that you aren’t really the master of your mind. For some people, it might be a few failures in their career trajectory or a getting sucked into months of failed relationships or poor life decisions such as drugs that they suddenly realize they’ve become a prisoner of their mind. And if you’re someone who likes to figure things out with a little bit of desire to control, you’ll get sucked into the lifelong quest for resources to control your mind.

If you’re a gen-z or a millennial, you’ll probably land up on a Ted-talk on YouTube or some neo-spiritual influencer on Instagram giving you a 30 second way to hack your brain, so you like, follow and subscribe and trick the algorithm to suggest you more content to stimulate you intellectually. You thrive on the new found wisdom, you feel like you’ve finally figured this out.

You try this breathing technique you learned from the Huberman podcast, it makes you feel good for a day or three and then slump back into you default mode, you hate yourself for forgetting to practise the breathing techniques, so you download a hot new meditation app that promises you to get back your mind in control, you try it not once, not twice but thrice on the first day and then set a reminder for 3 reminders for the next day, you wake up, see the reminder for your morning session, but you’re too tired, so you let that notification stay telling yourself you’ll come back to this, but you’re at work now and it’s 2 pm and you’ve another notification but your colleagues are all asking you to join them for lunch, so you miss your 2nd meditation session, you promise yourself you’re going to meditate just before going to bed. It’s 8:30pm when you reach home and you realize you’ve two choices, cook or order. By the time you’re done with dinner, and it’s 11pm, and you have a netflix video on and you have two choices - sleep or do your meditation session, so you decide to do it finally and fall back to sleep. You repeat the same cycle for the next 3-4 days until your lockscreen is full of notification reminders and you don’t want to do this anymore. It’s Day 7 and you see charge notification from Apple and you realize, you signed up for the free trial but never cancelled the subscription and now it’s $69.99 that you paid for something you probably would never use.

A few weeks goes by and you realize you have lost it again, so this time you start looking for books and you come across a myriad of books that promise to help you gain control of your mind. You read three pages of a book and then decide to buy it on Audible, you sweep past through the book at 2x over the course of 2 days and you feel splendid. Finally, you’ve figured it out and all you’ve to do is Take a DEP FUCKING BREATH and get back to the present moment. THAT’S IT. So you tell everyone about the newfound secret you’ve discovered and all your friends are listening to you with the kind of attention that a dictator or the President gets. You try the techniques for a few days and you feel the positive effects but then something goes awry at work, or a conflict with your significant other and then your techniques tosses out the window and you’re probably coping with whatever coping mechanism works for you – nightclub, cigarettes or alcohol and you’re sleep deprived throughout the weekend and you come to work on Monday being groggy and it takes you three iced americanos just to get through the day. You’ve forgotten all your techniques and slumped back into the vortex – the default state of entropy. ENTROPY HAS CAUGHT UP ON YOU ALL OVER AGAIN.

A few weeks goes, maybe a month or two, work is alright, but occasionally you slump back into the same state of anxious, monkey mind and you think probably there’s some chemical imbalances in your brain, so you read a few blogs on Psychology Today, read up the DSM-V manual and unless you’ve been lucky enough as an adolescent to have been diagnosed with ADHD, you develop the conviction that probably you’ve ADHD, you research on some therapy and schedule a few sessions with a therapist. DAMN, it feels great to unload on someone without having to listen to their problems.

Therapy helps you or so it seems.

Well, you don’t know if it helps but all you know is that it make sense, if your therapist is any good, they will get you talking and talk, you will. From the unbelievably grotesque to the unbelievably banal things that you think about, and week over week, you’ll feel like you are making progress. You’ll probably go through a few questionnaires, a few rounds of Behavioral Attacks, one of the subset of practices under CBT. You read up on a lot of stuff on psychology and traumas and fears and the whole lot of Situation-Emotions-Thought-Action loop. You feel better, you feel like you’re finally the master of your emotions, a couple of months goes by and you feel like you’re equipped enough to let go of these sessions, so you drop out.

A couple of months goes by and some other major life event happen to you and you find yourself sliding back into the depth of your anxieties and the abyss.

On a random Wednesday evening, you get crippled by a sense of overwhelming anxiety and your heart starts fluttering. You are incapacitated with fear, panic and whatever gobblesmacking collection of words they use to describe a state of incapacitation.

You try breathing techniques, you try visualization, you fight back with your fears, you stare back at it and you start panicking, your knees go weak, you can sense a pulsating vein around your forehead and you start sweating. You head back home and take a warm shower and you feel every drop of water falling on your skin. You feel the heat and the temperature soothing your skin and then you feel it rolling down the back of your spine. You slowly feel the exhaustion leaving your body one ooze at a time and you know you are suddenly calm and relaxed.

So that is the state you want to find yourself in, a state of calm and relaxation where your mind is at ease and whatever anxiety you have is in the future — at this moment you are calm.

HOW IT FEELS TO BE IN THE STATE OF FLOW

So, what does it even mean to be able to control your attention and flow?

It feels as if you are breathing in the air and you can feel every molecule of air passing through your nostrils, it feels like you are in the sun, you can feel every ray of sun and every photon as if you’re experiencing sun for the first time ever.

It’s as if you are standing in front of the ocean and you can hear every wave crashing into the shore. It’s as if you are staring into your lover’s eyes and the entire world just vanishes from your field of view. Maybe, I’m just exaggerating but you get the drift?

The goal is to be always in the present moment and to be able to tune yourself out on demand, being the master of your mind rather than be enslaved by it.

So the question is how do you do it?

Before you are able to control your flow and attention, you need to know what is occupying your prefrontal cortex when you’re not actively trying to control it.

Are you even aware of what occupies your mind when you are not actively trying to control it?

We should start from there.