Raising the Great Inner Realm Shield to Enrich your Life
As a species, we have developed a remarkable ability to protect ourselves from external threats. We slather on sunblock to protect our skin from the harmful rays of the sun, we wear blue light-blocking glasses to preserve our precious vision, and we inject ourselves with vaccines to safeguard our bodies from insidious viruses. We lock our doors and install security systems to keep potential intruders out of our homes. Despite all of these precautions, most of us neglect to guard the most crucial aspect of our well-being, our minds.
In this article, I shall convey the imperative nature of constructing a formidable defense for our innermost selves. I will elucidate how one can cultivate and maintain such a shield.
The Tug of War: Attention Economy's Imprint on our Mental Landscape
Social Media Marketing in the Battlefield of Influence
First, let's dive into the present scenario and comprehend its intricacies. Over the past few decades, our minds and brains have been relentlessly bombarded from all angles as the war for dominance of the new attention economy has raged on. Instead of seeking out the most effective methods to harness the potential of the internet for the betterment of society while maintaining a fair return on investment, avaricious corporations have expended considerable resources in their quest to discover how to perpetuate our gaze upon the screen for extended periods, generating a plethora of techniques and by-products to foster addiction, in order to maximize the number of clicks and advertisements per individual, earn exorbitant sums of money, and obliterate any competition that arises (or acquire it) in the process.
Of course, many people are aware of that phenomenon, actively engaging in discussion and even combatting it, based on personal data and privacy policies. But what's often left unaddressed, in my estimation, are both the depth and the increasing magnitude of the pollution that this modern malaise imposes upon our minds and the consequences.
Beyond the suicidal teens and compulsive consumers, these circumstances give rise to a vast array of afflictions, such as depression, a sense of existential aimlessness, and even neurological disorders such as ADHD and OCD, as well as other forms of addiction and mental distress. Frankly, given the nature of some of the content and the ways in which it's disseminated, it's not all that surprising. As the 21st century unfolds, it has become as crucial to elevate this inner shield to safeguard our minds as it is to protect our bodies and homes.
Sly methods to abuse our primitive brains
The Humankind Odyssey
In order to truly comprehend this matter, we must first understand more about the fundamental nature of our species, the homo sapiens. According to the Smithsonian magazine, our species was already walking on this earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, but our ancestors couldn't yet create abstract concepts like money, rules of law, or religions. Their cognitive capabilities were limited to tangible entities: food, rain from the sky, caves to take shelter, or rudimentary tools crafted from pieces of wood, for example.
Back in those days, our homo sapiens ancestors were limited to bands of roughly 150 individuals (Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, 2015), due to the difficulty of maintaining sufficient order without the aid of abstract concepts. To survive in such a setting, it was crucial for every individual to possess a thorough understanding of all other members within the group so that one could know or estimate who would help, protect and care and who would be mean and selfish, who was the chief, and how the hierarchy of the group was built, and so on.
And how did they acquire such knowledge? By engaging in the art of gossip, of course. Gossip is a fundamental ability that our species had to develop as a means of survival. Therefore, it is unsurprising that reality shows have achieved incredible success in recent decades; it is a typical example of primitive brain mechanisms being abused.
Those instincts and primitive capabilities are rooted in our brains from before what anthropologists call 'the cognitive revolution,' which occurred between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago. It has allowed Homo sapiens to communicate at a level never seen before in language. We can observe that only our species can talk about things we have never seen, touched, or smelled. We have things like traditions, myths, legends, and complex economic models, just to name a few.
However, these ancient mechanisms still play a role in our everyday lives, particularly when we engage with media that features violence, greed, or fear. These elements have the power to speak directly to our primitive brain, bypassing our common sense and reasoning. Those effects are particularly pronounced when we are not fully aware of the phenomenon, which is, I would argue, the case for the vast majority of people.
Impacts and Self-Elevation
On the other hand, the people creating those media are fully aware of all those dynamics. That's where the sneakiness kicks in. The most concerning thing is that those materials are not bringing us anything good whatsoever; they do not enrich us in anchoring our minds to the present or in making us envision the future. On the contrary, they encourage us to become absorbed in obsolete mental frameworks and unproductive thought systems.
We are creatures with a profound legacy, stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, with neural circuitry that's been honed over countless generations. Now, it truly disturbs me when I witness insidious corporations taking advantage of our shared humanity by exploiting those very same primal mechanisms that are wired into our brains. It's a corruption of our most fundamental instincts, and it's something from which we have to be shielded.
The way we allow and give permission for elements to enter our minds can profoundly impact our daily well-being and lives. We cannot ignore this if we seek to achieve wellness and self-elevation. My advice, and what I do myself, is to ruthlessly filter everything potentially entering the brain and only allow constructive information and media. All the media does not necessarily need to be “positive” or “optimistic,” but “constructive,” meaning things that our minds can use to build and construct models and cognitive patterns that are anchored into the present and pointed toward the future. This will enrich and improve not just ourselves, but those around us. It's a critical step, and I suspect it is also the reason why many people are struggling and even regressing to pre-historical types of behaviors.
After unacceptable abuses of your attention, heal from attention sickness.
After reading her inspirational book, How to do nothing, I agreed with author Jenny Odell, writer, and instructor of digital art at Stanford University (2013 - 2021), that complete withdrawal from the attention economy by partially or entirely leaving the social media platforms is not the appropriate solution or response. Social media carries both advantages and disadvantages in our daily lives. It holds the potential to benefit us by providing career opportunities, enhancing professional networks, and fostering interpersonal connections that span across geographical boundaries. Beyond that, it is rarely a good choice to bury our heads in the sand; instead, it is smarter to use diverse strategies to utilize social media for these benefits that can help us evolve in a healthy and constructive direction while avoiding its potential perils.
Targeted Protective Attention Behavior
To address this issue, I have developed my own conceptualization: “Targeted Protective Attention Behavior,” or TPAB. (While I confess my distaste for acronyms, I acknowledge their utility on occasion). It encompasses a set of reflexes and methods we can cultivate to navigate the treacherous terrain of social media without succumbing to the attention traps. So how to do this? I will give you several leads to help you develop that framework.
Don't scroll.
When it comes to platforms like Facebook or Instagram, I've found that it's best to steer clear of the feed and instead seek out specific people or content to engage. You see, the feed is riddled with attention traps and manipulative ads designed to keep us scrolling and clicking for hours on end.
There is another excellent and powerful tool: learning to unsee the ads.
When you go through a feed, teach your mind to identify the posts versus the ads and teach your vision not to pay attention to the ads. Researchers have proven and demonstrated that we don't necessarily see what is inside our field of vision; actually, we only see a small part of it, the part on which our eyes are focusing. By deliberately and repeatedly shifting your attention away from the ads, you can effectively start to "un-see" them entirely. Amazing, right?
I've been employing this technique myself for some time now, and it's worked wonders. I simply don't see the ads anymore; therefore, it's highly improbable that I click on them. In applying this framework, you will protect your attention while sabotaging the very tactics built to abuse your primitive brain, and you will retrieve a large amount of awareness instead of being lost in the context-collapsing flow of useless material and information overload.
Here is an additional trick. Suppose you do see an ad and feel like clicking on it, don't. Instead, identify the brand or product, open a new browser, and enter the name of the brand/product you want to learn about. This is another way of sabotaging the attention traps because you will not drive any revenue for the platforms since you are not clicking on the ads, but you will still be able to see the details of the products that interest you.
Re-Contextualization
And finally, another fundamental part of the process is to try to put things back into their context. Instead of going from one information or post to the next and the next, just calm down, breathe, and focus on only one post at a time. Then try to put the information back into its context. Take, for instance, the example of a friend's post about moving to a new place. To truly grasp the situation, you need to ask yourself why your friend is moving to a new home. Is it out of difficulty or opportunity? Is the person happy to move or sad? Could it be that your friend is moving in with a partner because they're starting a family, or is it due to financial strains?
Only by putting the information into context can you truly begin to understand what's going on.
To properly comprehend the information at hand, one must contextualize it meaningfully. This applies to nearly every facet of life, for it allows the mind to derive significance from each piece of information that enters it and create a complete picture. By doing so, we can gain valuable insights that would otherwise remain elusive to the incessant scroller, who fails to contextualize. Such a practice is paramount to maintaining sanity in our current social media-saturated society.
I invite you to take immediate action and apply the TPAB framework. Doing so will not only yield obvious benefits but will also save precious time and energy. Let us re-frame our understanding of the digital world and maybe even unlock hidden treasures.
Let's recap!
The great inner realm shield integrates two principal axes.
Use the methods explained above to protect your primitive brain from all abuses. Think of it as installing antivirus and anti-phishing softwares to protect your precious mental faculties from the malicious actors seeking to hijack them. But I would go even further than that - let us embrace this computo-morphism and imagine that we are upgrading our very neural circuitry, fortifying it against all manner of nefarious attacks. Don't let anything negative enter your precious mind; reject it aggressively. Focus on what is constructive. Only then will your brain rewire to a more robust and healthy state.
In the second part, use TPAB to take your attention back from those abusing it while sabotaging their effort. This process not only allows you to reclaim control over your attention but also enables you to navigate social media with greater efficiency and intelligence. And let me tell you, this newfound efficiency will be a game-changer. With that said, we must also exercise discipline and monitor the overall time we spend on social media. Several good software tools exist to help you track, limit, or block sites and apps for definite periods so you can stay fully focused on the tasks at hand. I can recommend “Freedom” having used it with great success, and there are many others such as “AppBlock,” “Stay Focused,” or “minimalist phone.”
Of course, if your work involves using social media for marketing, sales, or otherwise, then it's understandable that you'll need to spend more time there than the average person. However, even in such cases, we must strive to maintain a healthy balance.
It is time to elevate our defenses to new heights and protect our minds as we would defend any other precious resource. It is time to evolve toward the future with more control over our attention so that it can be redirected to building dreams and undertaking spectacular projects. I have no doubts that you can do this. I have faith in this theory, and I look forward to seeing you on the other side of the shield.
Disclaimer: The contents of this article and blog should not be considered medical advice. Please ask your practitioner prior to implementing any of the advice, techniques, or product into your treatment plan.