The amount of information reaching us every day is overwhelming. It isn’t simply the information that we take in through reading, listening, or watching. It goes beyond this and is an endless list of stimulation.

Humans have trained their body and mind to filter and thus reduce the number of stimulations reaching us and having a chance to be perceived.

The body, for example, automated much of the processing, it transformed some of the available information related to danger and connection into bodily reactions we become aware of. They can be goosebumps, aching muscles, emotions, and so on.

The mind created different types of filters. We’ll call them experience, stereotypes, the story we tell ourselves, but also denial, projections, transference, repression of emotions, and so on.

However, today, one can say, that the last hundred years dramatically changed the number of stimulations reaching us leading to an exponential growth of them. But instead of adapting the filters to keep the number of stimulations reaching us at the same level, the desire to reach a higher performance transformed itself into the assumption that this would be possible by processing more stimuli.

It rarely is the case. Even less when performance is linked to being creative.

One important aspect of performance is our minds or our ability to stay focused on the task at hand. That is, to reduce the thoughts we are engaging in and always come back to giving our attention to the task at hand.

It is not possible to reduce emotions or thoughts, they are the ways our bodies and our minds make us attentive to danger and the needs of our connection. The only thing we can do is to let thoughts and emotions pass by and come back to whatever it is we want to set our attention on.

It’s an ability that one can train, that one needs to practice, and that is based on learning that thoughts are only thoughts and emotions are only emotions.

If we don’t practice it, our minds take over and chose what to set our attention on.