In the past month, I was extremely lucky to have been able to attend a conference of Sissel Gran, a Norwegian psychologist and couple-therapist. One of the talks she gave focused on psychological differences between men and women, particularly how we process things in our brains.

It was a fascinating talk, and I ate up every last bit of what she had to say!

As we all know, men can’t understand why women are so concerned about everything all the time. The reason for that is hidden in the structure of our brains.

Sissel compared the brain to a big dresser standing in the bedroom. In a man’s brain, there are many drawers in this dresser – thousands, actually. Men have the ability to open and close each one of them when they see fit.

But the only rule is, they can only open one drawer at a time. When they leave for gym in the morning, they open the gym drawer. After that, they close the drawer and open the job drawer. During the day, they might open several other ones before promptly returning to the job drawer, always careful to open just one drawer at a time.

When they come home at night, they close the job drawer and open the family drawer, wife drawer, or TV drawer. When they go to bed, they close and lock all the drawers and shut down for the day, says Sissel Gran.

Not so with women!

Women also have a big dresser to represent their brains, but they only have one huge drawer – huge enough for everything!

And this single drawer stands open all day. Women constantly throw stuff in and takes stuff out. Sometimes, when searching for a particular object in there, they come across some other object and quickly divert some attention to it before continuing the search.

Everything is in that one drawer – conflicts at work, Christmas, children, those extra kilos, dinner, new clothes, new shoes (!), the best places to pick up specials, etc. Also contained in there are the things they have to accomplish during the day, the things that was not completed yesterday, and everything that needs to be done tomorrow.

No wonder why many of us women get so exhausted!

It’s an information overload, and we sometimes find it difficult to cope with everything.

So maybe we should learn to take life one step at a time, however difficult and challenging this might be.

You cannot do everything equally well. If you try, you will end up stressed out and have no time for yourself. It is important to note that not EVERYTHING is important.

Sissel suggests a way to try and break things up. It leads like this:

Start by drawing the big, lumbering dresser on a sheet of paper. And then write inside it everything that comes to mind. Fill it with all the things you think about during the day.

And then, begin to sort those things into smaller drawers, keeping similar items together. Decide which items are going in a large drawer (typically small, unimportant things), and which ones should rather be in their own smaller drawers. Also identify the items that take up unused space and can be thrown out.

And then try to stick to that plan. During most of the day, you can linger in the big drawer and sort out the small things. But when you tackle one of the items in the smaller drawers, try to keep your attention to that drawer alone.

In this way, you will soon notice an increase in productivity in your daily routine. And before long, you will find space for that special time alone we all crave so dearly!

Start organizing and de-clustering your drawer today and put together a plan of the items you will give attention to tomorrow!

I sure will… J