Use your unconscious mind

We need more stillness in our lives. There's too much noise. Just think about how your mind is bombarded with constant stimulus every day and moment.

Most people make the terrible choice to wake up to the news, then check the phone; then there's radio playing, e-mails, and messages to be checked, the traffic, people on the street, ads everywhere, construction noises, and so on and so on.

Because of all this, our conscious mind is in constant overdrive, which doesn't let our unconscious mind to work. We greatly undervalue the power of the unconscious.

People tend even to think that if they're consciously not working on something, they're not working and wasting time.

However, it's actually the unconscious mind that does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to solving problems. This is why great thoughts come to people when they're taking a shower or walking in the woods. While the conscious mind is at ease, the unconscious can work in the background.

As Holiday explains in his new book, the stillness can also help to cool things down. Or even save the world!

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy chose to sit in the garden, go swimming and withdraw to reflect deeply on the issue. As we all know, he came up with a brilliant solution of placing a blockade around Cuba. He could've also immediately reacted with a vengeance - but things would've been probably very different in this world, had he done that.

If we get away from all the noise, we can indeed come up with greatly better solutions than our conscious mind would at the heat of the moment. All great thinkers understand this.

KRISTJAN