Careful What You Feed Your Mind

For the past few years I’ve been trying to eat healthy. For me that means cutting out processed foods, seed oils, added sugar, and most of the stuff that comes in packages. It’s harder than it should be because that’s what’s everywhere. Cooking at home and buying better ingredients takes more time and money. But it’s worth it. I feel better. My mind is clearer. And I have steady energy throughout the day, instead of crashing in the afternoon.

I think the same principle applies to what I feed my mind. Most of the content online – in the news, TV, movies, and especially social media – grabs your attention and can steer your thoughts and desires. A lot of it is a waste of time; but even worse, it quietly shapes what feels normal, what feels possible, and even what I find myself wanting.

This presents a challenge for someone trying to forge their own path. The algorithms in social media try to burrow into your psyche. The seek out your deepest thoughts and feelings. If I scroll past a shirtless guy, and accidentally linger for half a second, suddenly my feed is full of more of the same – male bodies and gay themes. There’s a part of me that wants to keep looking. But I don’t want that. I didn’t ask for it.

So I have to be intentional about what I let into my mind.

Over time, repeated exposure to material that conflicts with who I want to be starts to feel normal. It shapes how I see myself and how I interact with the world. The content I consume doesn’t stay neutral. It either feeds the part of me that wants to live as according to my own values or it feeds something else. One of those sides gets stronger depending on what I keep giving attention to. Your mind gets better at whatever you practice. But it takes steady effort over time, not just an occasional good decision.

Sometimes I feel like a recovering alcoholic who keeps ending up in bars. The smarter move isn’t to test my willpower every time I walk past one. It’s to stop putting myself in those situations in the first place.

Small choices compound. Eating ice cream before bed once in a while won’t ruin my health. Doing it every night probably will. The same is true with content. If I regularly consume material that pulls against the man I want to become, I can’t expect it to have no effect on me.

Put differently, if I eat what everyone else eats and watch what everyone else watches, I should expect average results – both in mind and body. That is what average means. But if I want something better than average, if I want to build a life where I become the best version of myself, I have to make choices that perhaps most people aren’t making. That might mean stepping back from the feeds and platforms that keep everyone else hooked. At the very least, it means I won’t stay average by default.

I'm finding the real work isn’t just trying harder to resist what shows up. It’s changing what shows up in the first place. That can mean being more deliberate about which apps I open, which shows I watch, or how much time I spend in the environments that keep feeding me the same patterns. These aren’t big, dramatic moves. They're just small decisions that give me more optionality. The pull may not disappear, but it stops feeling like the default.