Mental Exhaustion: How to Slow Down and Start Living

There are methods to exit the system without becoming a monk (that’s not the message behind the article).

You run from morning till evening without a specific direction, feeling guilty at the same time for not doing “something else,” or perhaps you constantly feel anxious and negative. When you think about your own and humanity’s future, you can’t see it in any other way than in dark colors. Well, this is not okay, and it’s time to put your foot down.

Perhaps you want to continue discussing the lack of long-term focus, the impression that “others” have a better life than you, the perfect job, and a fulfilled personal life. Not to mention the inability to concentrate for more than 30 minutes without the toxic need to check your phone, social media, or email.

You need to stop! I’ve been there, and I didn’t even realize where I was living. When I say it’s time to stop, I mean exactly this scene:

When we are reactive, we rarely do things because we want to, but because that’s how it “comes to us.” Here are a few “interventions” that helped me get back on my feet.

1 — Content Fatigue

Here’s a simple explanation. You read too much, listen to too much information, want to stay up to date with too many things, want to study too much — and I’m not sure if it’s even related to the fields that help you. The lack of mental vigor and confusion comes because you experience what’s called “content fatigue.”

What you can quickly do to recover:

• Turn off notifications on your smartphone — those sent by apps, not by people: in other words, except for messaging and phone calls or other apps that notify you when someone is clearly contacting you.

The others only fragment your attention and add extra fatigue.

• Stop reading things that don’t bring direct value to your life.
• Remove the Facebook/YouTube app from your phone (the phone is responsible for about 90% of the feeling of mental fatigue).

It’s a brutal content diet, and I assure you that in 3 weeks, you’ll regain your mental energy.

2 — Negative Input

If you happen to feel nervous, anxious, or impulsive, most likely you receive a massive negative input (negative emotional flow) from the outside. You probably ended up in this state, without realizing it, as a result of habits that used to calm you. Please check what radio you listen to, what television you watch, and what websites and news reach you.

You are the average of the 5 people you spend time with. They can be real people, acquaintances, or characters from books or movies. What’s their narrative?

Once you realize where this input that determines your negative feelings is coming from — ELIMINATE IT.

News is constructed to capture your attention, and the human mind can’t help but connect when negative emotions are involved (political scandals, acts of terrorism, accidents, etc.).

If you don’t believe that it affects you and think you’re immune, remember when you drove by a car accident. Police, ambulance, extrication, sirens, lots of people. Even though the traffic officer is whistling and signaling the cars to go faster, other participants in traffic tend to slow down to look at what happened.

Even if you know it’s not okay to look at people lying on the ground, some still moving, others already covered with a blanket, you won’t be able to help it. You’ll slow down your car, your pupils will dilate, your pulse will accelerate. That’s how we are built.

The example above is obviously exaggerated to make a point. Mass media, in the fight for survival, plays this card with you.

In winter, children play on the hill with their sled, enjoying the deep snow.

And parents, although they see their children outside, building snowmen, can’t take their eyes off the television, where everything is presented as if it were a real natural disaster.

Wake up! It’s just winter. The kids sledding have a more realistic view of reality than you do. But you can’t help but look at the journalist trembling while talking in front of the camera.

It’s not as if not watching the news means you won’t know what’s happening in the world. If something truly important happens, you’ll find out anyway.

Try this experiment! Identify the negative emotional flows that come to you and take a break from them for 3 weeks. You’ll be surprised to see that there’s another emotional reality, a positive one. You’ll become optimistic and calm.

3 — Speeding ticket

We do too many things at once and too fast, which affects us from three points of view:

• Concentration capacity (you can’t stay connected to a task for a long time).
• Productivity in general (you do tasks reactively, but also superficially).
• Level of fatigue (you’re tense all the time because there’s always something else to do).

SLOW DOWN!

There’s a whole philosophy of deliberate slowness.

Do an experiment, for an entire day, intentionally do things slowly.

• Eat slowly, trying to be aware of every movement you make. You might get bored, but try to observe the texture of the food and how it changes as you chew it.
• Don’t get up from the table until you’ve finished chewing.
• When you walk, don’t rush, enjoy the steps you take, and try to stay connected to the present. Follow the sensations in your feet. Feel the sensations in your feet.
• Walking is a dynamic balance of the body. Watch the balance sensation.
• When you stand still and wait, try to feel the weight in both feet at the same intensity.

MAKE AN EFFORT AND DO IT SLOWLY!

Festina Lente! The ancient Romans used to say.

By taking each activity one by one, without involving anything else and acting “SLOWLY,” you will:

• Have enviable productivity (you’ll do much more than usual).
• Enjoy what you do (you’ll enter a state of flow because you won’t be interrupted by other activities).
• Feel that your energy level increases as the day goes on.

4 — Decision Blocking

If you feel that you’re constantly in doubt, don’t know what decisions to make, and hesitate a lot, it’s because your brain is trying to rest, and it doesn’t know how to do it other than by stalling for time.

Perhaps you’ve tried the previous methods and still feel like you can’t make a decision easily. That’s okay.

You need to know that:

• Any wrong path is 1000 times better than 1000 potentially brilliant paths.

Why? Because when you’re on the wrong path, you can remedy what’s not working. But it’s impossible to get anywhere by going down 1,000 different paths.

These were 4 methods of conserving mental energy that worked for me. The idea is that we have enough mental energy if we stop the losses and poisons because the mind has to make an effort to clean up the toxins.

Do not let the past or the future control you, focus on the present. It is the only moment in which you truly live. — Marcus Aurelius