The concept of “mental food” is simple: just as the food we eat shapes our body, the information and stimuli we consume with our senses shapes our psyche, our emotions, and our overall well-being. There is an ancient proverb: “The body becomes what the foods are; as the spirit becomes what the thoughts are.” The Buddha taught that feeding the mind with greed, hatred, and delusion strengthens those things, and that practicing mindfulness allows us to guard the “gates of the senses” and curate a more pure experience. Epictetus taught that the mind should be guarded like a fortress against external events to maintain inner peace and freedom. According to Rosicrucian philosophy, pure thoughts build finer vehicles. In James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh, the mind is compared to a garden that must be cultivated. By treating thoughts as seeds, individuals choose to plant positive, constructive ideas or allow weeds of negative thought to grow. This shapes the individual’s character and determines their outcomes in life.
GIGO—”Garbage In, Garbage Out”—is a computing principle that simply expresses how the quality of the output is directly determined by the quality of the input. You don’t want to input garbage code into your computer, and you certainly don’t want to input garbage into your mind. And Social media, for the most part—along with much of mass media—is garbage.
Studies show that habitual scrolling on social media causes desensitization, reduced focus, dopamine addiction, compulsion, anxiety, and depression. Exposure to political media, regardless of political affiliation, increases feelings of despair, hopelessness, and paranoia. And this psychology is very well known: when people are kept in this voluntary state of hysteria, they are easily herded in any direction the shepherd desires.
Techniques called microtargeting and hyper-nudging are used against social media consumers to foster conflicts and reactive behaviors, and to create echo chambers that temper worldviews. This manipulates the emotions of all social media consumers on a subconscious level, keeping them from asking deeper questions. State-sponsored social media manipulation is officially being used in over sixty countries to condition the minds of the masses. Propaganda is very popular with governments because everyone is easily influenced by it.
G.I. Gurdjieff calls these sensory and psychological inputs from the external world “impressions” and taught that impressions are the highest and most important food, requiring conscious awareness to be properly assimilated. And warned that without a well-practiced sense of self-awareness, the acquired personality—what some call the ego—will mismanage the impressions, causing people to be hypnotized and poisoned by them.
To override this, one must interpose consciousness the moment the impression is received. As an impression arrives, pause and observe it objectively, and observe how your thoughts, emotions, and body react to it. Use reflection to properly address the impression, and if needed, redirect it to the intellectual center for analysis. To get really good at this, you could sit comfortably every evening before bed and reconstruct your entire day, working backwards scene by scene.
For many, this requires consistent effort, but restricting yourself from violent media and feeding yourself more positive stimuli has the benefits of reduced ego-driven reactions, less stress, more peace, and spiritual evolution. Studies on media deprivation and mental health show that even taking a break for one or two weeks significantly reduces anxiety, depression, loneliness, and insomnia. Studies have shown that listening to non-lyrical classical music reduces stress and depression while enhancing cognition and emotional processing. It improves sleep quality, memory, and mobility in older adults.
Be careful what you “eat.” As Nietzsche famously said, “If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
