Exploring Life

[Exploring Life] We are all immersed in a cultural environment that promotes the manipulation and confinement of our awareness and attention. Culture is a collective distraction. That is to say, the rules, traditions, norms, and underlying assumptions at the core of our lifestyle prevent us from thinking and perceiving with clarity. Instead our thoughts, feelings, and vital energy are distracted by imposed expectations. These expectations now come at us with such speed, mass, and force that we are now all immersed in a lifestyle that invites, promotes, and sustains chronic mental fatigue. Our ways of life are making us sick in mind, body and spirit. Unless we find ways to heal our minds of distraction, we will remain on a steady descent into the abyss of mental degradation.

Distraction as a Source of Illness

It perhaps seems somewhat unusual to identify the experience of distraction as a source of mental degradation. Being distracted once in a while does not, after all, really have much of an impact on the quality of our experience. However, constant distraction, or the constant, rapid, and superficial shifting of our attention across a range of stimulus changes the brain. Instead of being able to focus our attention on single task, we find ourselves in a constant search for different stimulus. Often, to make matters worse, we are unaware that our attention has shifted.

Nicholas Carr writes:

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. – Is Google making Us Stupid?

Carr provides a model description of how the mind, under the affects of chronic mental fatigue, loses its resiliency and strength. A distracted mind is a weak ineffectual mind that can cause feelings of anxiety and insecurity in the individual. From a spiritual perspective, a distracted mind is inhibits spiritual growth by preventing the individual from reaching higher levels of understanding. Moreover, the body-mind-spirit continuum lives in a constant state of exhaustion and weakness.

Of course, what makes us stupid has nothing to do with Google. What makes us stupid is our own stupidity. In other words, the responsibility for our own delusions is always internal and never external. Equally as simple is the solution: stop doing the things that make us stupid. The problem however, as Carr alludes to, is that our brains have physically changed and the habit of distraction has become imprinted in our neurological circuitry. In this way, chronic mental fatigue is literally hard-wired into the brain itself. It is our default orientation. Our brains are physically sick.

Believing Our Own Delusions

Multitasking never happens; it is a delusion. The way many people talk about it creates the impression that it is something that actually exists. The human brain is a master of manufacturing beliefs that are utterly delusional. Professor Earl Miller notes that multitasking is really rapid switching from task to task, while the brain creates the delusion that we are doing more than one thing at a time (see NPR: Think You’re Multitasking? Think Again). The reality of multitasking is simply a weak form of attention placed on a variety of things across short time intervals. Multitasking is nothing more than an attempt to legitimize self-induced hyperactivity as well as attention deficit forms of behaviour. What the mind does do is to constantly and quickly shift attention from one point of attraction to another. When this rapid shifting of attention becomes persistent it results in a chronic fatigue syndrome of the mind.

For example, the educational curriculum originates in the delusion of multitasking. What evidence exists to support the notion of breaking up the students’ experience of education into discrete subject-time chunks and forcing them through this nonsense for twelve or more years of their lives. Is this the ideal form of education? Is this really the best we can come up with? Ultimately, there is no evidence to support the current structure of education – none – yet we continue to impose its attention-deficit origins on untold numbers of people. Education is a form of attention-deficit-hyperactive-disorder on an institutional level.

Some of us pride ourselves in multitasking, or getting as many things done as possible in the least amount of time. However, we constantly overestimate our own abilities to manage and cope with the increasing levels of complexity we manufacture for ourselves. We also significantly underestimate the virulent effects this has on our brain and mind. What begins as an inability to concentrate slowly morphs into subtle yet virulent feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Perhaps sleep becomes difficult. The end result is an increase in mental health disorders, disease, and illness. In reality, our minds can only focus on one thing at a time; multitasking, or the ability to hold more than one thought in precisely the same moment, is an impossibility.

From Mental to Physical Fatigue

Constantly shifting our attention across an increasingly greater range of things in shorter time intervals leads to chronic mental fatigue. The brain is simply not designed to constantly shift attention over long periods of time. When the mental fatigue becomes chronic, our ability to think and concentrate are weakened, and the stress placed on our nervous system begins to reveal itself. Our thought patterns lose their resiliency under the pressure of constant stress, and this translates into physical illness and disease in the body.

Another stress on the sympathetic nervous system is concept shifting, or multitasking. Concept shifting occurs when we have to change our focus or shift our attention too frequently. Forcing the brain to constantly shift from one subject to another not only causes stress but also results in a negative impact on your hormone and immune systems. BioHealth: Stress Management

One prominent way that chronic mental fatigue manifests itself in the body is by way of constant stress placed on the adrenal glands. This persistent mental stress begins to generate a constant state of fight or flight syndrome; our ability to relax degenerates, which eventually leads to the presence of physical disease and illness. Our scattered superficial thought patterns have now taken their toll on the condition of our body.

Healing Chronic Mental Fatigue

In Yoga, all suffering is caused by a mental modification, or disruption in the normal functioning of the brain/mind. The entire practice of Yoga originates in the elimination of mental modifications so that the mind, and therefore the body and spirit, is free from suffering (see Yoga: Mental Modifications). The elimination of mental disruptions originates in the training of awareness.

Across various contemplative practices there are common training methods or exercises that serve to restore our attention and awareness and heal the mind and brain from distraction. These exercises typically involve:

1. developing the ability to observe, without interference, one’s own thought patterns, feelings, habits, addictions, and emotions as they occur in real time;
2. interrupting a particular thought or feeling and observing how it translates into specific thoughts, feelings, sensations in the body, tensions, postures;
3. developing intimate comprehension of the effects of various thoughts, thought patterns, feelings, habits, addictions and how it limits our life and confines the possibility of experience;
4. the elimination of mental disruptions so that they no longer flow through the mind, or are at least no longer a source of suffering; and
5. the cultivation of essential qualities of body, mind, and spirit such as compassion and gratitude.

The mind can make the body sick. Chronic Mental Fatigue is not complex – the more we fragment and therefore degenerate our attention and awareness, the more we fragment and degenerate our thoughts, feelings, emotions, focus, ability to concentrate, and sense of clarity. These chronic mental frustrations reveal themselves physically in the body through discomfort, and eventually illness and disease. Our spiritual reality suffers because we become energetically inert. Left unchecked, chronic mental fatigue degenerate our very experience of life itself.