Mental Dieting: A Low-Information Diet
“What we attend to is reality.” – William James
Attention is a valuable, scarce resource. It determines your personal experience of the world, like a camera in your own personal TV show.
Whatever you pay attention to, no matter how briefly, affects your mind on a conscious or subconscious level.
For example, celebrity images can influence your perception of beauty. Seeing an ad could alter your desires or even your worldview.
The problem is that there’s a lot of junk information vying for your attention, making it difficult to focus on what matters most to you.
The Distraction Crisis
Companies have realized that they can tap into your psychological software for profit. As a result, attention has become a form of currency.
Every time you surf the web, go on social media, or use certain apps, companies bid for your eyeballs. This business model has led to the common refrain: “If you’re not paying, then you are the product.”
Many seemingly free services like Google, Facebook, and Reddit, are paid for with attention. Sadly, most people are unsuspecting prey to the advertisers, rather than active combatants protecting their valuable resource.
To be fair, it’s an uphill battle when pitting million-year-old evolved instincts against artificial algorithms that have rooms full of predictive data.
The attention economy has gotten so good at gaming this system that they’ve created a distraction crisis for many people. Addicted to dopamine-driven activities like antisocial media, juicy clickbait, and animal memes, it’s easy to give up attention to whatever seems fun at the moment.
While distraction may seem like the opposite of boredom, it’s actually a mindless state characterized by craving impulses and discontent. Without the capacity for focused attention on a single task, fulfilling work and activities become more difficult.
Here’s one solution to the distraction crisis: a mental diet.
A Mental Diet
Imagine an athlete who trains hard only to eat fast food and stay up all night partying. Their muscles won’t grow strong.
Low-nutrient, calorie-rich food is like low-quality, dopamine-rich mental inputs.
When someone tries to lose weight, they might decrease calories and increase physical exercise. Likewise, the attention solution is to reduce mental inputs (like television) while increasing mental exercise (with mind training).
This Mental Diet, as we’ll call it, involves carefully vetting objects of attention to make sure they're worthwhile. First, write down what’s important to you.
What are three things you want to focus on in life: projects, people, skills, etc.? Maybe it's your job, learning Italian, and building a better relationship with your family.
Now for one week, eliminate every unessential item that sucks up attention without contributing to your core missions.
The Mental Diet involves cutting out anything that doesn’t add value to your life, consuming very little info to make room for what matters most.
Distractions might include social media feeds, email clutter, TV shows, recommended videos on YouTube, and even certain gossip-prone colleagues (you know the ones).
Anything that drains your attention. Unless your job doesn’t allow for it, you can silence all notifications and check email (and even text) at a couple of pre-determined times. Spend attention frugally like a thrift shopper.
Now observe how this affects your mind. Do you notice sharper focus, energy, and clarity?
After the week is up, you might return to some of those unnecessary yet enjoyable items. But even finding a couple of mental inputs you can live without will have a large payout in attentional “muscular gains."
P.S. — If you’re serious about starting or deepening your meditation practice, check out the FitMind meditation app.