Why You Should Read: How to Calm Your Mind
Finding peace and calm in anxious times
For the last few months, I have become more anxious and unnecessarily busy. Even outside of work, sometimes I feel like I should be doing more things. Even in resting time, my mind spins nonstop, almost like having thousands of open browsers running at the same time.
Besides, I consider myself a Type A perfectionist person… meaning things that happen outside my control tend to make me worry a lot. Envisioning things that “might happen” turns my worrywart nature a lot worst. Without realizing it, my brain thinks of multiple risks assessment and builds decision trees on its own. It is really tiring because I can’t help it.
I am completely aware that my jittery, anxious self has worsened over time so when I saw How To Calm Your Mind by Chris Bailey at my local bookstore, it immediately caught my attention.
According to this book, there are 3 factors that can make us anxious:
🥇Striving for Accomplishment
The accomplishment mindset is a conditioned set of attitudes and beliefs that drives us to constantly strive to achieve more. It is a mindset that makes us feel guilty for enjoying a coffee with a friend, or telling us that we should go home to start making dinner before the kids come back from school 😕
Striving for accomplishment is a good thing because it drives our modern world but too much of a good thing can be bad. This kind of mindset leads us away from calm because we keep thinking about how to optimize our time, and how to be more productive.
🤥🤥 I truly struggle with this personally. Instead of savoring delicious meals, I ate them distractedly while watching YouTube videos. That is my way of trying to fit more into that time. I find myself trying to fill in my time by doing small unimportant tasks, such as bouncing between apps on my phone for something to watch or read. In between work meetings, I fire up my phone to read the news on my phone and scroll mindlessly.
IMPORTANT: The author makes me realize that the mirage of busyness and productivity can make me more anxious. Everything does not have to be work and be done productively. An accomplishment mindset is nice to have at work, but not when we are spending time enjoying the fruits of our accomplishments – the free time, the vacations, and the quality time with family.
🎢 Mindset of More
In this modern world, having the mindset of more is sometimes inescapable. We want to have more money, more followers, more free time, more quality possessions, more success at work, and be healthier and fitter. Modern humans never feel enough and we always feel that something is missing.
For the author, the pursuit of more has a significant impact on anxiety 🧠Overworking makes us burn out, overeating makes us feel sluggish, and buying a bigger house can lead to more debt and more chores.
The mindset of more actually stems from social comparison. It leads us to value things that are external to us over what’s inside of us. While we can look successful when we build up external values such as possessions and achievements, we can only feel successful when we truly feel calm and enjoy our life.
🤥🤥 I must admit that I have fallen into this mindset so many times. Not so much in the social aspect of things like owning big houses and having a wildly successful career though. It is more like I worry about making enough money for my daughter’s education, I worry about having enough in the bank for future emergencies.
IMPORTANT: It is tough when there are so many external factors to think of when it comes to money and wealth. Recession, inflation, government rulings, wars, and pandemics, are all outside my control. I know in the depths of my heart that I shouldn’t worry about these things and try my best to live life within my means. As a Muslim, I do believe in the concept of Tawakkal (making peace with the end results) after trying my best in the things I do.
🤳 Advancement of Superstimuli
An obvious factor that makes us more anxious is the advancement of superstimuli. Superstimuli is a highly processed, exaggerated version of things we are naturally wired to enjoy. One of the biggest superstimuli is social media, which is addictive as its algorithm tailors to our personal preferences. Our brain craves novelty (surprising and unexpected things) by default and it awards us with dopamine when we experience novelty 😍
Social media gives us plenty of novelty and thus very high dopamine hits. When we log in often and become so used to being rewarded with dopamine hits after hits, we want to stay at the dopamine high.
Side note: There is an interesting observation that the author did: the more he sought dopamine hits in the digital world, the more he desired it in the analog world – he buy more things, drink more booze, and eat more takeout.
More than enough think pieces have been written about the dangers of social media but linking it to the 🧠 and the neurotransmitters is interesting to me. It is eye-opening to see our body reacts to social media, craving it, again and again, to get the dopamine high, losing ourselves in the online world.
How many times have you found yourself spending 30 minutes on Instagram when you originally log on to the app to check on something 😱 I had that experience way too many times and it sucks. I often feel empty after spending so much time on social media yet I can’t stop myself because my brain craves for the high.
The author also offers useful tips for us to obtain more calm in our daily lives. There is a lot of great info in the book but these are a few of my favorites:
🛠 Tackle Chronic Sources of Stress
To live a calmer life, we can start by tackling our chronic sources of stress. It is important to note that this will vary because we are not built the same, we live different lives and have different jobs.
Chronic stress is a constant source of stress without signs of going down. Unlike acute stress which peaks and passes when the source of stress is tackled, chronic stress occurs repeatedly and feels like it’s never going to end 🤮
The author suggests listing chronic sources of stress as preventable and unpreventable sources. Then, focus on working through the preventable sources of stress. The list might be smaller than the unpreventable ones but don’t worry. Tackling even a portion of your stress sources can still make a huge difference 💪
Here’s how to do it:
Take a sheet of paper and list down everything that is stressing you out.
Sort everything into two columns: preventable and unpreventable.
Take action to immediately deal with preventable sources of stress. Easy examples of these are unnecessary email refreshes, news websites, toxic relationships, social media, etc.
📶 Stimulation Fasting
Like all other digital detox-related books, How to Calm Your Mind also persuades us to live less in the digital world. Not everything has to be done with analog though, because going digital can often save us time and be more efficient.
The trick to this advice is: when we want to do an activity efficiently, we should do it digitally, and when we want our actions to be meaningful, we should do things the analog way. Doing things the analog way forces us to be more focused and give our mind room to think.
Look at the Venn diagram above. For things we can do both analog and digital, which are things in the overlapped diagram, choose to go for digital when you want to do it meaningfully. For example, you can talk to friends online but cultivating friendship is much more meaningful when we do it face to face.
Besides that, making the effort to move at least 10 minutes a day also brings more calm to our minds. More points if we can do our exercises in nature, as 🌳🌳🌳 can lend its undisputable calming vibe to our minds. In addition, try to practice meditation by focusing solely on breathing. It’s hard on the first few tries, but the author claims that meditation brings so much calmness into his daily life that it might be one of the best takeaways of this book.
We can also literally “fast” by giving up coffee as it is liquid adrenaline. Coffee makes us highly alert and forces the body to release cortisol and adrenaline. Coffee has long been linked to anxiety and panic attacks, which is far from calm. For us who have grown dependent on coffee, having a coffee detox can often help with bringing calm to our minds.
I drink coffee ☕ on a daily basis not because I need the adrenalin jolt, but because I enjoy its taste. As my mind keeps going like 250 km/h and I feel anxious a lot recently, I think I should give this a try. It will be hard to completely give up on coffee but it might do wonders for my anxious self 💪
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While the book can be edited better, I have gained a lot of useful nuggets of information from How To Calm Your Mind. Obviously for some, just reading books on anxiety is not enough to replace therapy, but I feel like this book can be a good start for those who want to tame their anxious feelings and become calmer.
Thank you for reading as always and do share this post with friends and family if you enjoyed it :)
Ristina xx
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