One of the helpful things the psychologist told me before was that I couldn't seem to ground myself to just one task. My mind would be thinking about too many things at once and I'd be inefficient and stressed, and the stress builds and I go down a downward spiral. While there can be creative benefits when you detaching yourself from a single idea, you don't want to go so far detached from the real world.
Enter Mindfulness. The idea is to observe your surroundings, thoughts, feelings without judging, and without clinging onto any one of them. It is to train your ability to pay attention to things and let go as required. Then you can put your all into whatever you need to do, focus on what works for the situation, think ahead, and plan for the future.
It isn't the first time I've been told this though, I had read scattered bits of such advice online before, and asked Eddie about how to be efficient. He's mentioned about creating specific, quantifiable goals and thinking of the next step that accomplishes said goals. Not wishy-washy, unquantifiable "I'm gonna do this" goals, but measurable "I'll do X by meeting this target, Y by meeting that target" goals.
There's days when I can do that, days when I don't do that for some reason, and there's days when I do that and everything all crashes. Still, the key point is to practice my focus and attention on one thing at a time, and it's my hope that practicing every aspect of mindfulness helps the higher level aspects of thinking ahead and future planning that I desire to achieve. But man, mindfulness can be hard! (At least for me.)
The psychologist does acknowledge that I know a bit more information about psychology than others, mainly through reading up and learning from others as mentioned previously. However, she does point out observations about myself I've not made before, and possible connections between the theory, and who I have become. She said it isn't a bad thing that I know a bit about psychology though, since it helps one learn about oneself better. Previously I thought there wouldn't be any point to seeing a psychologist if the main problem was epilepsy, but…perhaps this is a separate problem that is worth solving, regardless of epilepsy.
