Your Mind Is Your Castle—Defend It Accordingly
Our mental time-energy is a vital resource for our ability to flourish in life that we should never squander.
To borrow a phrase from author Michael Crichton, we live in a state of fear. Everywhere we turn, news and social media are trying to give us reasons to be pessimistic and fearful.
It’s hard not to be infected by the deadly disease of pessimism. A quick scroll down my news feed is often enough to get me worrying about war advancing throughout Europe, the Western world sliding into dictatorship, economic meltdowns, natural disasters, and so on. I also see stories spreading fear about climate change, diseases, AI, social disorder, and much more.
Some of these are genuine risks to be aware of. But the reason that they’re potentially important is that, if they came to pass, they would impair our ability to live and enjoy our lives. The purpose of worry is to focus our minds on something we need to take steps to prevent so that we can live our lives and be happy. Worrying about things that are effectively out of our control does not help us protect our future happiness. It also destroys our ability to live in the present by occupying our minds with negative thoughts that make it harder to enjoy life and think productively. Unfortunately, many of us have minds that seem naturally configured for worrying, and are not good at discerning between what warrants it and what doesn’t. As such, these worries often enter our minds and occupy our thoughts against our will, living there rent-free, meaning without providing value to justify the energy and time they cost.
We have extremely limited time in our lives—an average lifetime in a developed country contains about 400,000 waking hours. Every minute we spend thinking about global war or climate change is a minute we can’t spend living life fully. We also have limited mental energy. Our brains use about 20% of the energy that our bodies require, and the more we think, the more tired we get. Worrying consumes vital energy (not only through thought but through the physical reactions such as muscle tensing that accompany fear) that we then don’t have for more productive thinking. Productive thinking requires a lot of mental energy and a positive frame of mind. In short, our mental time-energy is a vital resource for our ability to flourish in life that we should never squander.
Every time I catch myself worrying about these things, I think of the life-potential that such worrying costs me. But worries are not the only negative thoughts that live rent-free in my mind. So do thoughts of anger and resentment toward people who’ve behaved poorly toward me—people I should know better than to care about.
Sometimes, such thoughts can seem to be outside our control, but in the long run, they aren’t. Our emotions and thoughts may feel uncontrollable when they come from our subconscious—the part of our mind that operates without our conscious awareness. But our subconscious can be trained by sustained effort over time. Anyone who’s ever gotten over an infatuation will have direct experience of this. Someone who once occupied your every waking thought can seem unimportant when you habituate yourself into understanding—both consciously and subconsciously—that the person is not a rational value to you and that thinking about him or her will not help you achieve happiness.
Cultivating a positive, optimistic mindset similarly requires a sustained effort of habituation. An important component of that is curating our sources of information to keep us informed about world events to the degree we deem necessary for our future ability to live and flourish without unduly affecting our state of mind. For example, I try to selectively click on articles on positive or interesting topics so that my news feed app will show me more of those and less depressing or fear-inducing content. Then, I use a separate app for occasional checks on mainstream news stories.
But there’s a vital internal component to it too. We need to stop ourselves when we feel those pessimistic, worrisome thoughts coming on. Sometimes, our minds are like a car with broken tracking—we need to constantly wrestle the steering wheel to keep us on the road. It can be tiring and it can feel hopeless, but after a while we can begin to habituate better thinking habits, especially if we give ourselves go-to positive and productive thoughts for those moments. For example, I will push myself to think about my favorite stories or consider topics for new articles and videos when I start to fixate on a negative chain of thoughts.
We’re all protective of our property. We understand that such things as our homes, our cars, our money, our food, and so on are vital for our ability to flourish and be happy. It’s even more important, however, to be protective of our mental time and energy. It’s an ever-diminishing resource that we need for our future success and that nobody else has any right to—not fear-driven news sites nor the people in our lives that we feel resentment toward. Our minds are our castles—our private sanctuaries where we plan our futures and build the ideas that will shape our lives. It’s imperative that we defend them resolutely from thoughts that will otherwise overrun them and stifle our ability to flourish. Our minds are the one place where we are truly sovereign—but it’s up to us to use that sovereignty wisely.
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