Mental Hygiene | Mind
Your mind is like your body: You have to feed it healthy things
Our world is full of distractions: Advertisement, entertainment, rage-bait, lots of content to push the quick dopamine high, designed to keep you consuming until your brain is mush.
It’s almost the same as our food, that slowly morphed to ultra processed foods designed to never quite satiate for long and always keep us longing for more. Pretty analogous to food, the same rules of thumb apply to feeding your brain:
Top three things to try
Mental fasting
When you eat you have breaks in between, some people do fasts, but we rarely take breaks in our mental stimulation. But similar to digesting food, we need to process what comes in. If we just keep stimulating ourselves, we suppress the need to process, and get stressed, anxious, depressed.
0-inbox brain: I try to make time every day where I don’t do any mental work to allow thoughts to bubble up. Most of the time that’s when I’m commuting on my bike, sometimes I go for a walk. If I don’t do this, especially when working long, my brain will do the processing work when I lie in bed and then I can’t sleep. When something important comes up, I simply write it in my notes app so my brain doesn’t have to try to remember it.
Quiet weekends: Processing works on different time-scales. Give yourself some rest at least one of the weekend days to recoup energy for the next week. I’ve had some friends, and for a while been there myself, who went from work hard to play hard on the weekends, and it was never long-term sustainable.
Retreats: If you want to take the idea of a 0-inbox brain to the next level, go on a silent retreat. You can watch in real-time how your brain first processes the last days, then weeks, and then goes back to older memories that still need some of your attentions.
I used to work as part of a Kenyan company and whenever I would ask my colleagues what they did that weekend, they would say “chilling”, “resting”, or something similar. I was always baffled by this. I felt this need to do something exciting, even more stimulating, so I could report back on Monday about something exciting I did. They just couldn’t be bothered haha.
Christoph
Outsmart addictions
Almost everybody I know spends more time on addictive content than they want to - news, social media, short- and long-form videos, shows, porn. All of these were designed to be addictive, so don’t blame yourself if you somehow can’t build up the willpower to resist them. Instead
Block apps: Easier said than done but what I’ve seen work is: Using parental control modes on your phone and making your partner your parent. For cross-platform blocking, Freedom is supposed to be a good choice, I haven’t tried it.
Make it boring: This will depend on your content but some ways I found helpful: I use economist espresso - a news app that only updates once a day. I read wikipedia summaries of shows I don’t want to keep watching.
Disable notifications: On all apps that aren’t time-critical. Which is probably just all. If your friends or colleagues really need to reach you, they can always pick up the phone and call.
I have personally set up my digital environment to minimise algorithmic social media as much as is possible, realistically it's hard to rely on sheer willpower, as the designers of these apps are paid millions so you spend as much time on them as possible, the following apps may help you this endeavor and I'd also recommend using Firefox on mobile and the same add on's there! These add ons will block social media feeds, YT Shorts, Homepage, recommended, IG Reels and one sec you can configure to set a reminder based on opening certain apps!
News feed eradicator extension, Unhook, for Youtube, IGPlus, For Instagram, One sec app, rethink opening apps
Cameron
Practice discomfort
As the Germans say: Life is no pony farm. And most things we covered aren’t exactly fun. But you can train your mind to be less dependent on dopamine hits and more able to do the work in a similar way we can rebalance our cravings for fast food. These counter-hedonic practices have roots in wisdom traditions and has evidence in modern psychology:
Urge surfing: Recognize your urges but just as with everything else observe how it comes and goes. This needs some willpower, so maybe don’t rely on this all the time, but if you manage to do this you slowly build agency over your urges.
Impulse delay: When you want something - be it short-term consumption or larger purchases, add a delay. Tell yourself you can get the thing in 5min, two days, … Often the need will vanish by that time.
Voluntary hardship: Take cold showers, fasting, monotask on boring work, meditate, have difficult conversations, walk the stairs, finish what you start, to practice your tolerance for discomfort.
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Try something now
Go for a walk later today, don’t listen to anything.
Disable all your notifications now. It takes 5min.
Delay your next impulse, see what happens.
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