Can You Create More Time?

(By Sara Childre, President, Institute of HeartMath)
http://www.heartmath.org/templates/ihm/e-mail/broadcast/online/can_you_create_more_time_online.html

What if you could somehow shift time in your favour, gather up a few moments here, an hour there, and use it any way you like? Would you be willing? We all would like that and there is a way it can be done. There is a new tool called Ease Frame that I would like to share with you in this article.

Time-shifting is not just some concept born of science fiction or tales of the future. It is a simple process in which time is saved and gained as you change your perceptions of it.

Recall any situation that elicited a negative response from you and consider how much time you spent entwined in that response: a minute, five minutes, an hour, or was there one in which you threw up your hands and said, "That’s it – I’m outta here!" Then the rest of that day was spent wallowing in your response. What if you had stepped back immediately and told yourself, "OK, it happened, but nothing to gain by dwelling on it all day"? How much time would you have saved then, or would have saved in the past year in similar situations?

Why does it seem like we never have enough time?

In this fast-paced age we hear that every minute counts. Day after day, week after week, all this pressure to achieve, meet goals, finish daily tasks begins to build up inside of us until one day we are locked in the throes of time pressure.

A chief contributor to time pressure is "emotional identity." This happens when you invest a great deal of mental and emotional energy in a situation. All that energy can create tunnel vision, leaving you unable to see or appreciate other important things in your life. When someone or something interferes with that focus, the result frequently is irritation, anxiousness and frustration, especially when deadlines must be met. You push people away, neglect other areas of your life, but still proceed until eventually you lapse into emotional chaos. In the end, time pressure can seriously damage not only your relationships and quality of life, but even the situation in which you buried yourself – to the exclusion of all else.

Time pressure takes a toll on our nervous, immune and hormonal systems, and left unattended will likely produce cycles of anxiety, fatigue and temporary despair. As this process continues it makes us more susceptible to health problems.

Do you recognize any of these time pressure symptoms in your life?

1. Always rushed, too much to do, not enough time
2. Mentally scattered, not feeling in control
3. Tunnel vision, irritation at anyone or anything that breaks your focus
4. Internal pressure, a gnawing feeling in your solar plexus
5. Impatience, lack of compassion for self and others
6. Feeling a constant slow burn inside
7. Low-grade stress and strain
8. Feeling disconnected from life
9. Decreased enjoyment of projects, relationships or life in general

The Ease Frame Tool ™

Here is the tool I mentioned earlier, it’s called Ease Frame.

Many people are using it and getting helpful results especially in the areas of anxiety, overload and time crunch. Ease Frame is slowing down on the inside even though you have so much to do and the world around you is going faster than ever. As you go about your day, and especially when you feel time pressure, begin telling yourself to Ease Frame.

Here is how it works.

When you start to experience overload and anxiety, your objective is to breathe easily for a few moments while imagining yourself slowing down your mind and emotions on the inside. By slowing down on the inside, you reorganize scattered energy that creates anxiety, self-doubt and compression. This eases up your system within that time frame. This can help you reconnect with your capacity to discern, make decisions and release self doubt. If you do this process genuinely from the heart, it helps to regain balance and flow.

By slowing down on the inside, you are actually creating more time because you operate with more flow and less ‘energetic traffic jams.’ With practice, Ease Frame can help you move through daily modulations while making it easier to replace stress with resilience. One of the most important benefits of using Ease Frame is that it helps you to connect with that place of resilience inside that we all have – until self doubt clouds the connection. Often, when we quietly connect with our heart, we free up the resilience to suit the need of the moment.

Here are some additional benefits as you continue to practice Ease Frame:

1. New sense that you have the time you need
2. Hopeful feelings that replace hopeless feelings
3. More time for things that really matter to you
4. Improved outlook on life
5. More patience with people, less irritable
6. More relaxed, greater enjoyment at work and play

Remember to anchor your efforts in the heart and don’t get discouraged if you have a setback at times. We all know that certain situations are more challenging than others. We also know that we have surprised ourselves at what we can do when genuine commitment is applied while putting our hearts into our intentions.

N.B. The Institute of HeartMath is an internationally recognized nonprofit research and education organization dedicated to heart-based living – people relying on the intelligence of their hearts in concert with their minds to conduct their lives at home, school, work and play. HeartMath has been researching heart intelligence, stress and emotional management for more than 18 years and applied its findings to practical, easy-to-use tools that have been scientifically developed and tested.