We live in a society of abundance unlike any in history: thousands of options for entertainment, food, and lifestyle choices every day.
A typical Swede has the same standard of living as the royal families here 500 years ago, with better housing.
We rarely suffer from deficiency diseases. Instead, we are affected by welfare diseases—abundance diseases.
Our body has not evolved as quickly as our environment. I have previously written about achieving the infamous balance through diet and exercise—the following is about finding and maintaining psychological balance by regulating attention.
Day in and day out, we constantly process information and make decisions—small to large.
In one moment, we spread our attention to navigate through the grocery store—in the next moment, we focus on a text message on our mobile phone. A thought flits by and in the next moment a feeling of joy, or anxiety, spreads throughout the body. You can read more about becoming free from anxiety problems in some of the articles on well-being.
Our attention is constantly directed at different things, it’s like a lottery—seemingly completely random—what our next thought will be. Read more about a healthy distance from thoughts in one of the other articles here.
Attention, consciousness, focus—no matter what we call it—it’s like the water we swim in, the background to everything we experience and do.
We can learn to be more aware of the background to everything we experience and as a result become more inclined to direct our attention in a way that supports what we really want and think is important in life.
Living in accordance with our values in a society full of distractions and easily accessible bad choices requires a certain distance from it all.
If you identify with everything you think, feel, and want you quickly become overwhelmed today.
If everything you think, feel, and want is something that happens to you, something you can observe in your head and body, then you have some distance from what you experience and options open up.
When you can observe a strong feeling of motivation in your body to have another cookie, you can also describe it and give it a name. When you do this, your desire to have the cookie is no longer you: it is something that happens to you.
I find it works best to make a habit of observing oneself in this way as a bounded exercise a few minutes a day. You can try it through one of the guided meditations here on the site.
When we meditate, we practice focusing on how our consciousness works, how focus—spontaneous and automatic—is always directed towards something. And that we can actually control it much more than we usually experience and believe.
When we start working on ourselves in this way, thoughts often arise like: “What do I want and who am I, really?” These are big and very interesting questions that I spent most of a decade sorting out for myself.
The search ended in a profound anti climax which evolved into increasingly helping others explore their own answers to their own questions. I have some more tidbits of information on finding yourself in the section on Success.
When you invest time in intelligent introspection you end up acquiring superpowers. One of them is the ability to eat the exact amount of cookies corresponding to your true desire. It might be 0, it might be 10—only the best version of yourself can tell.
