During the lockdown, my daughter and I developed this habit of cleaning up before we went to bed. She would tidy up the living room, and dust and wipe the furniture. And I would put away the dishes after dinner and clean the table and tidy the kitchen. It would take us about half an hour to do it.
During this time she would play her favourite songs on our Amazon Echo (a.k.a Alexa). These were songs I had never heard before but got used to hearing them every night now. I enjoyed these moments and it was a nice way to wind down, swaying to this peppy music.
Then one day when I was chilling with some coffee I heard one of these songs play. I recognised a strange urge in me to get off the sofa and clean up! The song gave me a signal that it was clean-up time!
My mind, without my knowledge, had developed an association between the song, my feelings and the cleaning up action. Sahar Yousef, productivity expert at UC Berkley’s Haas School of Business, says that music can be an automatic tool to trigger your brain to focus on any given task, in this case, the cleaning up.
You can also make an intentional effort to associate music with work. Just make sure it is a new song so that you don’t have any previous association with it. It could also be the smell of coffee or the taste of tea which could energise you to do a particular task. But research has shown that music works in triggering your brain to focus on a particular task.
Click on the audio link below to practise a short guided meditation.
Bell The Mind 
You must be logged in to post a comment.