A Simple But Important Factor In Determining Your Experience Of Life
If you’re feeling good, in other words, if you’re general well-being is good, then everything else around you feels good too, even though the external circumstances you find yourself in might objectively be not that great. Similarly, if you’re feeling crappy inside, then you could be sitting in the most wonderful, comfortable, luxurious space, but still feel like a pile of shit.
So why are we inclined to make our external circumstances better all the time when that energy could be devoted to inner well-being? I can think of a few reasons: One, that we are socially conditioned to think that and second, the external is inherently more tangible and obvious, while the internal is intangible and not readily apparent, it cannot be sensed with our physical senses immediately. Hence, just by frequency of exposure, we are biased to think about improving external circumstances. Third, we are not really trained to pay attention to the intuitive and our gut, because we live in a world that over-emphasizes rationality and evidence-based thinking, and applies them in areas where these tools are not particularly well suited. Now I want to make it clear that I am not saying the rational and evidence-based decision making is wrong, not-needed or flawed. It is essential in areas where this kind of thinking is required. There’s a reason why buildings and aircraft aren’t built just on gut, but on measurement. Anyone who is part of an organization with a social and political hierarchy must have experienced how grey decisions are made on a powerful person’s whims, desires and not evidence. In fact, its not difficult to find highly impactful decisions made that are completely in contradiction with factual evidence.
But I digress. The point is, it is very important that we devote some focus into thinking systematically about our own well-being, which ripples into every other area of our life including work and relationships. Well-being can be cultivated first on a physical level.
Are you getting enough sleep?
Are you getting enough exercise?
Are you getting enough nutritious food in your body?
There’s so many days that I don’t get a sufficient amount of sleep. And my experience of the following day is almost always really bad. This trickles down to producing low quality work, generating unnecessary and avoidable friction with other people, all while having a low quality moment-t0-moment experience.
Once you’ve got your physical well-being in check, the next thing is mental well-being. Essentially this is the thoughts and emotions generated in your head. These in turn are based on how you’ve trained your neural circuitry and what kind of environment or situation you are in.
The kind of data or information you are consuming from the external world gives rise to thoughts and emotions. Your environment is always emitting cues and triggers that make it into you mind, are processed by your neural circuitry in a specific way (based on how you previously processed similar information) and gives rise to thoughts and emotions. Bear in mind, this is the conceptual model I am working with right now, this may or may not be the exact case, but its good enough that we can work with it to achieve our desired goals.
Are you reading, listening and watching things that cultivate a healthy mind? Or is it training you to be distracted and triggering your unhealthy habits?
Are you mindlessly moving from one dopamine hit after another by the highly optimized content on social media designed to hijack your attention into a subject that has no meaningful contribution towards what you really want in life?
No matter what activity you pursue, seemingly as harmless as browsing social media or watching a YouTube video in the cyber world, or taking a walk in nature in the real world. You are building, strengthening or weakening neural connections. You are always training the learning algorithm within you. Be mindful of that.
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