The Restless Mind: More Activity, Less Grounding

Are you worried about impending work almost all the time and then, when you finally get time to yourself, you can't stop binge-watching or can't stop thinking about keeping yourself busy again? 

You can ask yourself whether you do your work solely to achieve an outcome. Or whether you do it to keep yourself occupied In some sense, both can be draining. When you do an activity just for the achievement of a goal, without enjoying the process itself, you tie your worth to external outcomes and overlook the intrinsically rewarding part of the process. And when an activity itself serves as an escape from your daily life or your own thoughts, you are perhaps exhibiting avoidance, a reluctance toward what you may need to face.

Most of us imagine peace and contentment, yet we spend time in activities that offer neither. Sitting with our thoughts is either too overwhelming or too difficult so we stick to momentum and continuous activity. 

But why is it so difficult to sit idle for a moment, without work or a mobile phone? 

Perhaps because our minds give more importance to the negatives than the positives. This is called negativity bias in psychology. When we haven't had the space to process our difficult experiences, they surface the moment we pause. When the mind is filled to the brim with a lot of negatives from around us and we haven't yet learned how to make sense of them or make peace with them, they break us when they get the chance to. But can we really make peace with all of our thoughts? Probably not. While some can be sorted by us, and some through therapy, most of them arrive out of nowhere, shaped by our mental schemas (they are like the built-in guide for us that helps us interpret the world around us). They don’t always need to be resolved. They only need to be noticed and allowed to simply pass. 

Most importantly, we haven't trained our mind for idleness yet. Continuous activity without grounding may have only taught our mind to move from one thought to the next, so it expects that and offers us that as well. 

So how'd we actually teach our mind to ground itself?

By meditating and living in the present as much as possible. It is very common advice, and almost everyone knows it, but hardly anyone practices it. Meditation is not just about the posture that we see from the outside. Whenever we feel like our thoughts are too much to bear when we're by ourselves, whether we are lying down or travelling, we can pause and ground ourselves, simply by choosing to do so in that moment. It's how we let the thoughts flow through our brain without engaging with them directly, observing them from afar and just letting them come and go, seeing them as just thoughts rather than facts. Psychologists call this cognitive diffusion. 

Nature is another of the most important aids that help us ground ourselves, as time spent in it is when our nervous system finally gets a reset. Sadly, one doesn't get to experience much of it today. 

With the rise of industrialization, there was a significant rise in what we call 'melancholia', a feeling of sadness or gloominess (Beard, 1881). Many writers, poets and thinkers recognised how separating humans from nature and from slower rhythms of life could leave them alienated and affect them poorly. Much of modern work culture and lifestyle also does the same by reducing an entire conscious being to a machine-like entity. We mostly work out of a necessity and as an escape, which leaves little time for us to sit with others and most importantly, with our own selves. A shrinking sense of community and an inability to sit with solitude can both wear down our well-being, quietly. But we can still better ourselves with the resources we have. 

We may not be able to change the pace of the world around us, but we can change how we make use of the pauses within it by starting small.

Try sitting for five minutes without a phone, all by yourself or going for a slow walk under an open sky. Appreciate the time you get to sit with yourself and your thoughts and use that time to learn to manage them well. Stillness, at first, may feel uncomfortable, like a muscle that has not been used for a long time and aches badly when it is finally put to use. However, that discomfort is simply a mind learning something new and knowing how to actually rest.

So, the next time the work stops and the thoughts start arriving out of nowhere, try not to reach for the next distraction right away but stay a little longer.