Mental Degradation: Distraction — Healing Chronic Mental Fatigue

[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.

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.