Cultivating a Passive Mind

Well now that the Ketosis articles are over I am going to delve into some other topics that have been interesting me lately.  Some of these next few posts won't have as much science in them, and will be more personal musing on health than anything else.  As the blog continues to grow I am hoping I can develop a nice mix of some of the more technical science of health and nutrition, and some lighter things that are more subjective.  I think they both have their place as science is always changing and growing and some things might not have concrete answers yet.  Please feel free to leave some comments about what you would like to hear about! And now on to today's topic...

Matt Metzgar has talked several times about the importance of “darkness time” for health.  He has also noted how he feels much better on days when he gets more darkness time than others.

We also don’t have to look too far to find the benefits of meditative practices that also help to cultivate health and wellbeing (1, 2, 3).

There is a lot of evidence for the benefits of things like music and story telling can have a positive effect on health as well (4, 5).  These are the kind of recreational activities that our ancestors participated in (6). 

Sleep is also one of the unquestionable best things we can do for health, and the evidence for that can be seen from many sources as well (7, 8, 9).

Why do I bring all these up?  Well I think they all have one common thread that might be at the root of their benefit to health.  They all are ways of shutting down our minds and allowing it to rest for a bit.  Now, some of these things obviously have a mental component to them, we can’t play an instrument or tell a story without using our brains to facilitate the action, but they allow us to have a “passive mind”.

What do I mean by a passive mind?  Well I think it has to do with letting go of everything else and just focusing on our task at hand.  We can also think of this as a default, or baseline state of our brain. If we turn off all our TVs, iPods, smartphones, and computers and just let our brains rest for a bit we can tap into our passive minds and just let our brains relax for a bit.  I think all of these things act like a stressor to our brain, and the constant stimulus it easily deals with.

While I do think a component of the benefits of Matt’s darkness time theory could be that he ends up getting more sleep, he also notes that even on days when his darkness time doesn’t translate to more sleep, he still feels better the next day.  Now, if it is not the sleep that helps him feel better the next day, what could it be?  I think that the darkness time is a surrogate for having a passive mind, and that the activities you would be left are similar to the ones I described above, and all help to facilitate a passive mind.

In Richie Davidson’s newest book “The Emotional Life of Our Brains” he talks about getting lost in the “flow” of certain activities.  I think this is another form of a passive mind.  By losing ourselves in the activity, and not really having to think about it, we are giving our brains a chance to rest, even though we may be doing something pretty amazing!  You often hear of a similar experience between musicians and writers, or even craftsmen.

I think this is where one of the negatives of driving comes in.  When you drive you have to be constantly alert and hyper-focused on everything that happens.  It is simply a very stressful thing for us to do.  Not to mention that people have only been driving long distances for the past 70-80 years, quite the novel stimuli that we probably don’t have many coping mechanisms for. 

I think we would all benefit from trying to cultivate our passive mind, especially at night.  I have often noticed that when I work on something right before bed my mind is swimming with thoughts and ideas for a long time as I lay in bed.  However, when I perform some sort of meditation, foam roll or stretch, or even do some light reading (mainly short stories or something fun, not a text book or research paper!) my mind is much more at ease as I try to fall asleep and I feel more refreshed when I wake up the next moring.  I would think that listening to music, or playing an instrument for fun (not trying to learn a new song or something that would require a lot of thought) would also work this way.  Think in terms of leisure activities that don’t involve some sort of electronic!

Also, I would wonder about the effects of integrating this passive mind theory throughout the day.  If we try to lower how much we are stimulating our brains through unimportant stimuli can we get the benefits that appear to come from this type of relaxation later in the day?  I know everyone likes multitasking but an interesting experiment might be to see if you feel more flustered or have more anxiety on days when you multitask a lot, compared to days you focus on one thing, then the other and so on, using a passive mind to guide you from task to task.

I encourage everyone to try and find ways to rest your brain both throughout the day, and especially at night, and please leave your experiences in the comments! I would love to hear what kind of activities people are using to cultivate their own passive minds!