Reclaim Your Brain
Let me start by asking you this: when was the last time you spent 2 hours sitting and thinking about your life? Not looking at your phone, simply being by yourself and intentionally figuring out the situation you are currently in? When I ask my students before taking them on silent retreats if they remember spending an extended time without their phones, the answer is always the same…”not anytime in the last decade.”
The results of giving away the quality time spent with our brain are high rates of career dissatisfaction, mid-life crisis, divorce, reactivity, short temper, depression, anxiety, chronic pain, weakened memory, addiction to drugs. Sound familiar?
Not knowing how to come up with our own solutions after years of disengaging with the self, most of us will delegate ‘thinking’ to our therapists, coaches, and friends. After studying psychology, I can tell you that even the best-trained therapists won’t give you the solutions to your life, but rather guide you to figure it out on your own.
I remember the time spent in waiting rooms was my time to come up with solutions for the problem ‘du-jour’. Walking to school was the time to look into my goals, challenges, and ways to improve. When I would ride a train I would think of my family, whose birthday is coming up, and what could I do to show my love. I even had quality thinking time sitting on the toilet! I gained good old cognitive skills, thankfully, before my phone monopolized my brain.
We all have given away the time we used to have for ourselves. We have decreased the attention span for logical processing and problem resolution. We are losing the skill of independent thinking and concentration for making weighted decisions, thoughtful plans, and creative strategies. With more and more scrolling, less and less thinking, we are wasting the opportunities to engage with our own selves, look into our needs, regulate our emotions, and simply know what we want out of life. When we are disconnected from the self, we are codependent, unconscious, and our emotions become dependant on others’ actions.
How Did We Get Here?
Do not beat yourself up — this is not your fault. We are only adapting to our environment. In order to save our minds from floating away in a flash flood of never-ending data, we do need to know the three main causes that brought us here:
1. Our brain likes to preserve energy by creating automatic, subconscious patterns. The pattern we have helped it make is a one-way communication — from outside in. We basically created a hungry data monster inside of our heads… If our brain was Sir-Mix-A-Lot, it would sing ‘I LIKE BIG DATA and I cannot lie’. One-way communication is easy, energy-preserving and always readily available from every screen and speaker — it’s hard to escape. The bad news here is that the data we feed our minds is not dissolved into the nothingness. It stays and congests our psyche, like a container of waste water filled with someone else’s ideas, headlines, thinking patterns, beliefs, emotions, trauma, 100% of other people’s lives that do not belong in our minds. The result is an overstimulated and addicted brain — fast to react, unable to concentrate, or calm down for quality rest, deep thoughts, self-regulation, and self-control. The more we watch TV and reach for our phones, the more we strengthen this addiction.
2. We are selling 100% of our thinking brains for money. We are paid for 8–12 hours of our brain-day, spending all of our quality thinking time to figure out solutions for our businesses and employers. We grant our companies access to our minds 24/7 to come up with the best ideas and products, we grow profitability, and we get compensated! What a great win-win. Our brain not only learns to think for cash but also at the end of the day, it is literally spent, overworked and tired. Worst of all, unknowingly, as we get home — we choose to stare at our phone and television screens, mistakenly taking that as ‘time to unwind’, keep feeding into the addiction, the black hole of data.
3. We do not make an effort to develop a range of skills. Because of the two reasons above, most of us see no value in becoming an expert in anything but our profession. The truth is that our brains are incredible multi-talented devices that are capable and require much more attention. In a highly competitive environment we learned to invest in our skills just based on ROI: learning photography, mastering chess, playing guitar or making pottery is not going to pay the rent, so why bother? Unfortunately, this one-dimensional use directly affects our brain’s health, limits our memory potential, and reduces the range of brain functioning. And it gets only worse as we age. It is just like getting a smart athletic animal and keeping it caged up.
With these three very real and challenging obstacles in front of all of us, it is only a thoughtful strategy that can help us overcome the addiction, pull our brain out of the fast-moving flood, give it mouth-to-mouth and let it awaken on solid ground.
The good news is that we have the ability and we can reclaim our brain with the 7 simple steps I outline in my next article. A well-behaved healthy brain is our advocate, healer, advisor, source of joy, wonder, creativity, wisdom, and wellbeing.
Ready to reclaim your brain? Continue reading Part 2.
