4 Shifts to Stop Sleepwalking Through Life (No Empty Mind Required)

Life is too precious to miss. And yet — most of us are missing it.

Picture by the author. This playground sign in Stockholm made me laugh… and then made me think — the seed for this article.

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Has this happened to you?

You get a message from a friend. You’re busy, of course — who doesn’t have a million things to do and another million waiting in the backlog?

So you don’t reply right away. Big mistake.

Now your mind has a new job: pulling you back to that message over and over, no matter what you’re doing.

Suddenly, you’re half-living your day while carrying on a full-blown imaginary phone call in your head.

And then you notice: you haven’t really been here for a while.

The message is still unwritten. Meanwhile, you’ve missed your actual life in exchange for a fake conversation in your mind.

Let’s be real — it’s never just once. We replay the same thought loops over and over until we finally sit down and just write the damn thing.

That’s how most of us live — sleepwalking. It happens all the time, with all sorts of things.

Our bodies move, our mouths speak — but we are somewhere else.