Stretching is usually thought of as a very physical thing. Its main goal for most people is to aid in flexibility and decrease the risk of injury, but there's more to stretching for me than just being able to bend over and touch the ground with my palms.

It's a real mental thing. It's amazing how we don't really find out about how much some things really are helping and improving our lives until we stop doing them and things fuck up. Well for me things really fucked up when I stopped.

Stretching really kept me on track and I never understood why until today. Before I go into why and how, let's take a look at the past few months of my life:

Low Productivity

I really didn't get much done at all in the past few months. Sure I pumped out a few gallery pieces here and there.. a website or two.. but really with all the time I had free it's amazing how much work I didn't do. Yes of course most of that time I spent reading and researching, but I also spent a lot of it just doing seemingly nothing. I'd get to the end of the day and people would ask me "what did you do today?" and I wouldn't know what to tell them.

Newsreadingwhore

I developed an obsession with the news. Ok maybe that's not a bad thing in some cases, but in my case it was. I became obsessed with reading the news. I'd have a few news sources like google news, digg, osnn, oled-info, cato, lp news, ccf, cap mag, biospace and I would just sit here all day and constantly click on the links I have in my toolbar to get to them and read everything I could. Not only would I go once, but as many of you know, most online newsources don't have publish dates. They publish news when they get it, so of course I'd come back for another visit.
Now this may seem like it wouldn't take too much time, especially if you're a speed reader, but it did! I'd go through these sites over and over again and there's oh-so-much information that I just couldn't stop reading. I'd read something, then research the topic more, go onto another news story, read the news on that site. It just never ended. I'd end up spending entire days just reading about technology and news. Sure I came out with a lot of information, but man.. that was crazy.

Craziness

The news thing really explains my behavioral problems. I couldn't concentrate on just one thing. Speed reading might've actually helped lead to that since it allowed me to read so much in so little time that I didn't think I was really spending that much time reading. Normally I believe that speed reading helps people concentrate more, but in my case when I'm surrounded by links to other things and such and not just opening a real physical book then things start to fuck up and I wander.

From all of this of course I developed some issues. Not only could I not concentrate all day, but even if I started trying to concentrate and read just one thing or work on just one thing I really couldn't. At one point I remember feeling for about a week or a month like my heart was going to explode. I felt like blood should just come gushing out of my fingers, eyes and mouth any second because of the extreme rate at which my mind was processing information about anything and everything. Sure I soaked up a lot of knowledge, but it really did keep me from learning the things I really wanted to learn and doing the things I should have been doing.

Anyway

So back to the subject.. How does all of this relate to stretching? Well I was stretching out today and realized that one of the reasons I stopped stretching was that I just forgot to do it.. the second reason was that when I came back I couldn't concentrate on doing it and it just seemed to hard.

Stretching lately has helped me to concentrate. I sit on the floor in my room and do very prolonged stretches. I'll sit there and hold a pose for 30 counts, which is whatever my mind interprets it to be - usually comes out to about 2-3 seconds per count. At first sometimes it's hard to do and my body gets really fidgety and I feel like I can't do it. Eventually after a few deep breaths though my heart and head calm down and I can hold it with no problem. It is at that exact moment that I realized that stretching used to help me a lot during my day because it would calm me down and allow me to focus and not get so nervous about..everything.