When you take time every day to be alone with yourself, away from phones, the Internet and noise, you'll be giving yourself a loving gift.  Get selfish about making time. Insist on it, and don’t allow anyone, especially yourself, to talk you out of it.

Here are what I consider six benefits of quiet time.

1. Lighten Up

When we get stressed out, it’s so easy to lose touch with that sweet calm that's always there for us to tap into. In a relaxed state, your mind quiets down and then you can connect with a deeper sense of purpose and good. Meditation and medication are derived from the Latin word medicus, to care or to cure. So a time of quiet calmness is the most effective remedy for a busy and overworked person.

Anytime you feel stress rising, heart closing, mind going into overwhelm, just bring your focus to your breathing and quietly repeat with each in-and-out breath: Breathing in, I am here; breathing out, All is well. If you have a set of words that help you relax and can be in time with your inhalations and exhalations by all means use those words. These are the words I use right now. They may change down the road.

Here in the pacific northwest we have a chain of stores called Fred Meyer. (We call it Freddies around this leg of the forest.) Freddie's advertising slogan is: What's on your list today?

Northwesterners catch the phrase every time they see a huge Freddie's truck on the freeway. With most people it probably causes a thought of 'what do I need at the store today.' However for me, it serves as a wake-up call to ask me what "list" of thoughts am I focusing on right now. 

In other words it wakes me up to become consciously aware of the quality of my thought at that moment. If you think about it, you can ascribe a value to a list of thoughts running in your mind at any given moment. So imagine you and a co-worker you carpool with are in traffic on your way home from work and you're driving in the HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lane when a guy driving alone slips in front of you, illegally enjoying a faster ride home, and you start a list of thoughts that goes something like this:

Back in 1929 when the stock market crashed, we didn’t have CNN or FOX or news or the Internet. Our grandparents (or great grandparents in some cases) didn’t get over-fed the news 24-7. They got a newspaper once a day (maybe) and they listened to the radio (maybe).

Because of this age of information we can (if we choose) be bombarded with bad news because the access is as close as our finger on the clicker or the mouse on our computer. It’s one thing to be aware of what is going on in the world, our country and our community, but it’s quite another to watch the reruns and regurgitated opinions of “the experts” as they re-hash the re-runs while we click to another channel to watch the news covered from a different camera angle.

The GOOD NEWS is that to the media, the only newsworthy material is what is negative AND sensational. Dog Bites Man, is not “news.” Man Bites Dog (and don’t forget to put music behind the story) is. (I learned that from my journalist husband.) It is the extraordinary that makes “the news.” So most everything you see on the news is unusual and extraordinary. IT IS NOT THE NORM. But we in our naivety (or stupidity) allow our sweet minds to watch what happened not once but on the hour until the next day when the next batch of bad news is ready. How many times do you have to watch the bank robber caught on tape? Isn’t once enough?

We cause ourselves needless suffering

I know we’re human and most of us are naturally curious about bad news.

There are about ten well-known marital fights that disturb our peace and if you’ve been married very long, you’ve probably had most of them.

But with the advent of GPS, there’s one less marital fight to have; “the map fight.” Most husbands expect their wives to be natural navigators. Most wives are not. The map fight most commonly occurs when the husband is driving on an unfamiliar freeway at 70 mph and he tosses the map to the wife and says, “Where are we?” If she’s like most women, she can only read the map when the car and the map are going in the same direction and that’d be north. South is out of the question, because it’s just too hard to read a map upside-down.      

When I got married, I wasn’t prepared for the real world of marriage. My parents had three four fights in their entire marriage of 60+ years. It was always over the same issue. Dad would lose track of time, fishing and as it started getting dark, mom would get worried. The fight looked something like this. He’d come in the door wearing his waders and holding his fly rod in one hand and a couple trout on a string in the other. He’d hang his head with a beseeching, I’m-sorry look and mom would shake her head, tighten her lips and sigh with a mix of disgust and relief that he hadn’t drown. My sister and I would run to our room, sure this would end our happy home because they were going to divorce and we’d be put in foster care.

Do you love the thought of a romantic get-away up in the mountains in a rustic cabin?

What is it that draws us to want to go to one, or, better yet, have a cabin of our own?

Is it the thought that cabin life is simple, restful and peaceful? Does that thought of life is better at the cabin make you think of a crackling fire, the aroma of hot chili on the wood stove, the sound of the wind in the tall firs and no telephones? Peace and rest, away from the chaos of modern life definitely calls us to retreat and enjoy a simpler time.

There are romantic mountain cabin get-aways all over the Internet and just perusing the ads can slow your heart rate and let you breathe deeply. But life is better at the cabin is just a thought. Did you know you can mess with your mind and make it think you’re at a cabin when you’re not? Well you can! Our subconscious minds don’t know the difference between reality and fantasy and that truth is so much fun to play with.