Transcripts

Mike Carruthers:
See if you fit into this group.

Katherine Gibson:
People are so fragmented and so busy, their focus isn't there, our satisfaction levels are lower, our expectations are higher and we're really running out of control.

Katherine Gibson, author of the book Pause: Putting on the Brakes of a Runaway Life, says being able to carve out some time for yourself and step back can do amazing things.

It's very interesting to note a study that was done in England with some workers in the financial district who were incredibly stressed people. These people were asked to spend an hour every day in an art gallery and their biological rhythms were measured, their hormone outputs, and their blood pressure and their heart rate and they found a significant decrease in all of those measurements after the hour. And we found that just going into quiet spaces does make a difference.

And you can start on this right now, says Katherine, by taking small steps.

Where they say okay, "Let's look at the day. What here is trivial? What can I let go? What are the activities that are meaningless to me? Maybe I'm going to take a walk and turn the cell phone off." We start in small ways.

One reason people are so busy with so many things is they have no real plan for their life. So Katherine's advice...

Decide what my goal is, what my purpose is, what I really want to do with this life, and to write it down. But until we write it down, it's not going to happen.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net. I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.