The quality of your mind determines the quality of your life. If your thinking is foggy, unfocused, circular, or random, your results will reflect that. If your mind is sharp, focused, and clear, your results will reflect that too.
If you care about having a good life, then care about cultivating a strong mind since a strong mind will provide you with a good life.
If you fail to exercise regularly, realize that not exercising is at least as health damaging as smoking regularly. Exercise has such a wide variety of physical benefits, including significant neurological benefits.
Generally speaking, pay attention to what degrades your mental performance, and make an effort to drop those bad habits from your life. Cutting the bad habits is often much more important than adding good habits. What difference will it make to add some good habits if you’re re-poisoning your brain with a fresh supply of toxins every month?
Consume Quality Input
Your mind is trained by sensory input. If you give your mind low-quality input, such as a high volume of television, web surfing, or social media, your mind will suffer for it.
Instead of random and chaotic input, feed your mind focused, high quality input. Read several highly rated books on a subject that interests you. Take notes on what you read, and seek to apply what you learn, so you can test the ideas for yourself. Get book recommendations from the smartest people you know.
If you’re taking in a lot of input but the input isn’t helping you grow and improve, then change the input that you expose yourself to. This is a key difference between people who practice conscious mental management and those who don’t. The mental drifters accept whatever input flows their way. The mental managers pause to consciously choose input sources that will provide their minds with quality mental fuel.
Do Deep Dives
The Internet can provide us with a high volume of shallow learning experiences. It’s easy to bounce around from one topic to another and feel you’ve learned some worthwhile ideas. But if your exposure is shallow, random, or irrelevant, your mind can’t intelligently digest the info and apply it to your life.
Our brains aren’t well suited to random direction changes day after day. We’re better off doing deep, immersive dives into focused subjects. This can produce strong transformational effects that benefit us.
When it comes to new experiences, the exterior view looking in is markedly different than the interior view looking out. A temporary trial gives you the opportunity to experience the interior perspective, which is especially valuable when considering lifestyle changes.
Conduct Mind Management Reviews
As a final recommendation, I suggest using your journal to do monthly or quarterly reviews of your current mind management practices. Ask and answer the following questions:
How have I been weakening (or poisoning) my mind lately? What do I need to stop doing?
What’s the best input I’ve been feeding my mind? How can I increase and improve this input?
What’s the worst input I’ve been feeding my mind? How can I reduce or eliminate these sources?
What deep dives have I done, and what have I learned from them? What deep dives shall I do next?
Who are the most intelligent and inspiring people in my life? How can I spend more time with them?
Which people in my life are dragging me down or negatively affecting my standards? How can I reduce their influence?
Treat your mind as a precious resource. Protect it from negative influences. Feed it quality input. Invite it to be influenced by quality people.
The better you consciously manage your mind, the better the quality of your life will be.