HLife | Healthy Living Redefined

Everyone is in detox mode in January – new year, new goals, new body.  Great – let’s add to that: Let’s do a detox for the mind.

Detoxing the mind at the same time that we detox the body is extremely important because these two areas of you go hand-in-hand. Sometimes your body tells your mind what to do. But, mostly, it is your mind that is telling your body what to do. So, detoxing your mind is a natural step to detoxing your body.

What do we mean by detoxing the mind? Detoxing the mind means getting rid of triggers, thoughts, ideas, images and sounds that do not serve a positive purpose for your nourishment. As HLife is all about a healthy lifestyle and not a one-time temporary solution, it is also about maintaining awareness of what comes into and what goes out of your mind – being in control of your thoughts and focusing on healthy “mental food”.

The mind processes information that you take in through the senses, what you touch, taste, smell, see or hear (there are more than these – balance, somatic – but that’s for another post). Touch is the most sensitive sense while taste and smell are chemical senses, mostly affected by things like food and aromas. But especially important here are the sense of sight and hearing, with sight taking the lead.

Unlike taste and touch (and sometimes smell and hearing), your sense of sight doesn’t require you to be in close proximity to the object you are trying to analyze. You can see the tip of your nose as well as a faraway star from another solar system. While you walk around with your eyes open, your brain is processing information from that tree in your peripheral vision as well as the sun, an object that is 93 million miles away. Sight is such an important and complex tool for gathering information that our human brains allocate about half of the cerebral cortex to analyzing what you take in with your eyes.

Because of this, visual mediums are crucial in detoxing the mind. Simply put: What are you watching? This question, if asked of ourselves and really analyzed for fact, will provide us with a lot of answers to our lives.

Going to the movies, a beloved pastime that doesn’t seem to be affected by economic downturns, is viewed as an entertaining experience. You go and you expect your eyes and your ears to be engaged, focused and interested in what you are seeing and hearing. But what are you really seeing and hearing? In other words, what information are you feeding your mind? What kind of movies do I watch? Are they ones with violence and aggression?  Are they ones where difficulty is overcome or is there a distorted view of the world?  What kind of lessons am I learning here?

Television is something we mostly do in the comfort of our own home. Like movies, TV is an audio-visual medium. The thing with TV is that, because it is in your house, you can watch it right before you go to bed and first thing when you wake up. These times are critical for us, because right before we go to sleep and right when we wake up, our brain is in a state of theta wave activity, a drowsy, slower state that hypnotherapists say has access to our subconscious mind, where we “program” our brain with instructions on how to behave. So, for 5-20 or so minutes right before you sleep and right when you wake up, you are recording in your subconscious – the part of your mind that supposedly dictates 90% of your behavior without you being aware of it – how to behave. And what do most of us do with that time? We watch the news. In fact, what we’re really doing is recording in our subconscious a good half hour of violence, death, drama and tears from that mother whose daughter is missing, and more, because, as we all know: story is conflict. Really good story – with really good ratings – is a lot of conflict, all different kinds of conflict, and intense conflict.

Other than news, which are mostly bad news, what TV shows do we watch? As yourself: Why do I watch them and what do I get from them?  What kinds of images am I recording in my brain? Are they beautiful? Are they distorted? Is this what I want my brain to record, my mind to process and, consequently, my life to be like? Because, make no mistake about it: Just like you literally (chemically) are what you eat, YOUR LIFE IS WHAT YOU WATCH.  Now, the choice is yours: Do you want to live a tragedy or a comedy?

Detoxing means cleansing your mind of aggressive, distorted, drama-without-a-lesson type of visual content. It means being conscious and aware of what you’re feeding your mind on a daily basis. Do yourself a favor and analyze your “entertainment”. Remember that what goes INTO your mind, will somehow have to COME OUT of it, in some form or another. Violence will beget violence. Tragedy, more tragedy. Love, more love.

Here’s to a year of much more love, fun, truth, productivity and heroic journeys with happy endings in your life.