Know the importance of mental diet in your life

What goes into our mind determines what comes out of our mouth. A very famous saying goes like this, ‘GARBAGE IN – GARBAGE OUT’. Thus, there is a great need to take care of our mental inputs. If we want to BRING-OUT our best, we need to BRING-IN the best.

Martin Luther King Jr said “We have guided missiles and misguided men”. This also means that if we have guided men then we may not have any need of missiles. If we really want to make our life better, the area that has to be worked on is our own self. 

No one wants pains, sufferings, miseries, or any negative emotions in their lives: that is why we work hard to create a happy life. But the irony is that even after so much hard work, what we experience is momentary happiness and long-term sorrows. Our mind is always agitated by unfulfilled desires and the unexpected reversals of our lives. It adds to our miseries by making us believe what we already have as unworthy, and we get trapped in the vicious cycle of yearning for what we don’t have.  

When the software of a computer system gets corrupted, it negatively impacts the performance of the system. The software of our body is our mind. We all have some good things and some bad things; we all have some moments of success and some of failure in our lives. But if the programming of our mind gets calibrated to show us only bad things and remind us only about our failures, then we lose the enthusiasm and hope that help us move ahead in life.

What most of us are lacking in is the seriousness to work on ourselves. Most of us are busy in our work so much so that self-development seems like an extra-curricular activity. How wise it is to say “I am so busy in driving my car (life) that I don’t have time to clean the dirty windshield (mind)”.  Our apathy towards cleansing and regulating our mind can lead to many mental and emotional disasters that affect our work as well as our personal life. 

Today, the resources are innumerable but we lack the vision to see them. Unless we work on clearing the mental and emotional garbage in our system, we will not be able to see and decide what opportunities to accept and what to reject, in order to lead a happy and successful life. 

• 

Many of us lose battles in the mind even before we face challenges in the real world. A lot of things happen inside us that we don’t have control over. That’s the reason we regret our own decisions, we blame others and self, we keep grudges and hold on to miserable memories more than the positive and enlivening ones.

Working on self-development was important a few centuries back; it was urgent a few decades back; but now it’s like an emergency. The fast-growing world has many technological advancements but yet it has not been able to make any positive difference on our mental health. 

In the 21^st century, the most dangerous diseases which will affect people are not cancers or AIDS, or any viruses but psychological disorders like stress, depression, and anxiety – resulting in suicidal tendencies in the affected people. You will be surprised to know that as per a WHO study, suicide tendencies occur throughout our lifespan and, globally, it is the second leading cause of death among people in the age group 15-29 years. Close to 8,00,000 people die due to suicide every year, which is one person every 40 seconds. Furthermore, for every suicide, there are more than 20 suicide attempts. Suicides and suicide attempts have a ripple effect that impacts families, friends, colleagues, communities, and societies”.

These are the worst results of improper management of our thoughts and emotions. We all have some gifts through which we can make our life better and build a better world but most of us are not able to harness our own gifts to convert them into significant contributions. The unregulated flow of inputs coming from the outside world can ruin our potential and make us see ourselves as  losers or unlovable or someone inferior.

A mental diet is about knowing various factors and their impact on our mental and emotional status and taking the necessary steps to implement suitable and feasible solutions so that our mind can work for us and not against us.

In general, we don’t see things AS THEY ARE; rather, we see them AS WE ARE. If we work on improving our abilities to see things as they are then we can live a more peaceful life.

We have a lot of time (to spend) for earning what people can see and appreciate such as a high paying job, a car, a big house, and many gadgets. But what makes us really happy is beyond all these material possessions. It is not bad to have wealth and assets but if that is coming at the cost of ignoring to invest a considerable amount of time in the self-cleansing process then, eventually, we will end up regretting all that we achieved.  

There is a great need to understand that life is less about gross material things which we can see and more about the subtler things which we cannot see. 

If you make a serious commitment to work consistently on your mental diet then you will soon realize that “the more peaceful and stronger you become from inside, the less you will be affected from the calamities of life”

We’d love to hear from you about your experience of our site, as indeed any suggestions or comments that you may have. Share you thoughts with us via the comments section (given below).