CHANGE THE SCENERY

The act of moving away from your computer, phone or whatever activity it is that’s taking up space in your mind can’t be underestimated. And it doesn’t have to be a big change of scenery. “Let’s take your lunch break, for example. Instead of eating at your desk, go and have lunch in another area, even if it’s just by a window. This allows your brain and body to have a different sensory experience. From a neuroscientific perspective, that’s going to make a change to how you process emotions and will hopefully have benefits such as relaxation,” says Dr Birah.

USE A BRAIN TRIGGER

Unfortunately, we can’t just stop looking at something as all-encompassing as our inbox and expect our brain to forget about it. One way that we can signal to our brain it’s time to move on is to have a small activity in place that signals that work, reading the news, or whatever it is that you need to switch off from, is over.

“It might be something as simple as shutting the laptop, putting the phone away and literally doing five jumping jacks. It’s just something to change your energy and send a signal to your brain that it’s going to be doing something different now. Something that lets you shut down and work away from that inbox,” says Dr Birah.

BE PRESENT

It’s all well and good saying that we just need to be in the moment, but how do you do that? “Try naming 10 things that you see in your immediate environment. Often when our minds are still in our work or phones, we’re not actually in the present moment, we’re thinking about the past or jumping forward to the future. So just by noticing things that you’ve seen in your environment, it brings you back to the here and now,” Dr Birah explains.

6 ways to relax if you have trouble switching off