Here's the evidence that your mind is so cluttered

Try this experiment just for a single day.

After you had your dinner, do not look at your mobile. Go to bed and just close your eyes. If your mind is calm, you should fall asleep in a few seconds. But that’s not the case for most of us, unless we’re extremely tired. If you are extremely tired, you should not try this experiment but take some rest :)

Keep your eyes closed, and just observe your thoughts.

For the first few mins you will think about why you are doing this experiment, who asked you to try this, etc. Let’s call it thought A. But slowly your thoughts will change, you will recall an important incident that happened that day - thought B. B will remind you of another incident that happened in the past - C. C will cause you to recollect a different event D. And then from D you go to E. This will go on and on.

If you didn’t experience this, i.e. you just fell asleep as you navigate your thoughts, that’s fantastic. But again, that’s not the case for most of us.

At this point some people get frustrated accepting the fact that they experienced this. To calm themselves down, they will take their mobile and start scrolling through social media. For those who did this, this is the evidence.

If you still didn’t touch your mobile and want to keep going, you will go back to thought A, gradually start thinking about something else - B, B → C, C → D → … → A

But somehow you try to manage to go to sleep, after using social media for a while or until you get lost in the Thoughts Loop.

Whatever the case is, when you wake up the next morning, think about how many thoughts you had and how long it took for you to fall asleep after closing your eyes. You don’t need to closely track that; you would have some rough idea about what that might be.

And, that’s why your mind is so cluttered, and you must fix it.

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Written by

Maran Sowthri Kalailingam
Maran Sowthri Kalailingam

Senior Software Engineer at athenahealth