Jun 19, 2022
Why is our mind the one that needs CPR?
“Your mind is for having ideas, not (for) holding them.”
Are we letting ghosts live rent-free in our minds?
How are we helping our brain breathe?
Are we looking into the right mirror?
There I was, sitting in the middle of the room. He was sobbing on the ground.
I look around. We are alone. I can see the life fleeing from his body.
“What is the tempo again?” I asked myself. Then it was silent.
My hands started shaking. I have to get back in control. Every second matters. I grab my two hands and join them together.
I put them on his chest. I have doubts again. “What is the compression-to-ventilation ratio again?”, “Should I start with compression or ventilation?”, “the tempo?”
As I am asking myself all those questions, I hear a voice screaming: “EVERY SECOND MATTER. HURRY UP!”
Then I snapped-d back to reality: 30:2, and a song started playing the tempo for me.
30:2 is the compression to ventilation ratio. And compression is first.
The song playing in my head is: Bee Gees — Stayin’ Alive (Official Music Video)
“FINALLY!” said the voice.
It was the voice of our trainer. I was in the middle of training for first responders at work.
It was my turn to perform CPR:
“Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is an emergency procedure consisting of chest compressions often combined with artificial ventilation in an effort to manually preserve intact brain function until further measures are taken to restore spontaneous blood circulation and breathing in a person who is in cardiac arrest.”
Source: Wikipedia
I remember the tempo from the article Three Things You May Not Know About CPR:
“The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends timing your pushes to the beat of the song “Stayin’ Alive.”
I remember how funny I found it that a song that could save someone’s life is literally called “Stayin’ Alive.”
I listen to it now and then to hardcode the tempo into my muscle memory.
When we perform CPR, we pump air into someone’s brain so they can stay alive.
Yet most of us suffer slowly and surely from another form of cardiac arrest. That suffocation is not brutal and does not target the heart.
Contrary to a regular cardiac arrest, this form is not targeting our brain directly. It is targeting our minds.
We all have been there. We are hit with information overflow, and our mind suffocates slowly but surely.
The sneaky part is that it is a long process, and we can live like a zombie for the rest of our life without noticing it.
It is similar to the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) for our minds:
“A blue screen of death (BSoD), officially known as a stop error or blue screen error, is an error screen that the Windows operating system displays in the event of a fatal system error.”
Source: Wikipedia
Contrary to the physical BSOD displayed for you to see, the internal BSOD in our mind can be invisible to the rest of the universe.
It can be buried so deep within us that even we cannot see it.
What if there was a system that could prevent our mind cardi from reaching BSOD — Blue Screen Of Death?
The answer is that there is CPR for our mind:
- Capturing,
- Processing,
- Reviewing.
1. CAPTURING — We often have so many ideas in our minds that we cannot keep up with them. The crazy of us let those ghost ideas live rent-free in our minds.
Like monkeys, our minds jump from one idea to another in an endless stream of ghost ideas for our whole life.
Some of us acknowledge the situation and feel the need to capture those ideas. That is a significant first step.
We can use notebooks, physical or digital, journaling, or any other source to download the information from our brain to an external container in the real world.
I have been using Google Keep to capture my ideas for articles. I use it also for my video editing steps.
Indeed I perform many different things when I film, edit, and publish a video. I put all the steps in a Google Keep checklist.
It frees my brain to follow the second most critical step.
Because capturing ideas is excellent. Yet the ideas captured that are not processed are worse.
Because now they have a physical vessel to haunt us.
2. PROCESSING — Most people who succeed in the first step fail in this second step. We have endless “to-do” lists, notes, or ideas on a vision board.
If we do not act on them, they will continue haunting us.
We need to give them the KiSS of death regularly:
- K as Keep doing if we find value in the idea’s outcome,
- S as Stop if we have not laid out the outcome clearly,
- S as Start if we can clearly define the next steps to the desired outcome.
Bonus tip: if you can act on the idea in less than 2 minutes, just do it.
I review my ideas for articles weekly using only the Google Keep app. I discard ideas that I don’t find relevant.
I choose one idea each week and write it down as an article. Then I archive it.
Journaling is a way for me also to capture and process information, one stone, two birds.
Each morning, I write down my objective for the day. Each evening I reflect on my day in my journal and write down how I feel, what has worked for me, what did not and why.
“Action kills fear!” is my motto every single day.
An efficient method of processing information is all about frequency. We need to make time in our day to be able to process the data we capture.
That does not mean that we all have to do it daily. A rule of thumb can be at least three times a week, in the beginning, middle, and end.
3. REVIEWING — We need to take time to rest and reset our brains at least once a week.
It is great to have set up systems. Yet it is better to perform audits on those systems.
For an audit to be efficient, it has to be tied to a vision.
We must have a clear vision of what we want to achieve and when we want to achieve it.
Then from the rooftop, we have to level down to the basement and check if the systems we have set up are in service to our goal of the day, the week, the month, the year, the decade.
We often build systems, and we are so entangled in them that we forget why we made them in the first place.
We often forget to ask if those systems still serve the initial purpose we had in mind.
Yes, we should fall in love with the process more than the product; but only if the process and the product are here to serve our vision.
We have to review the ideas we have captured; we need to assess whether or not we are acting upon the right ones.
That is the most challenging part for me. I love routines and habits. I often feel more in love with the process than the product.
Yet I am not sure about which product the process is serving. I am so entrenched in my systems that I now and then fail to review the outcome.
Like all of us, I am a human in progress.
In summary, we need to provide CPR to our minds like we would try to save a person victim of cardiac arrest.
As we would not want to be surrounded by bystanders if we were the victim, we should not be a bystander to our BSOD.
Each step is critical: capturing is like the compression, the processing is like the ventilation, and reviewing gives the tempo.
“Stayin’ Alive.”
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You can read my previous article on What is the best way to provide feedback? Just ACE it! (Friendly link)
Photo by Ryan Christodoulou on Unsplash
