I’ve decided to change my diet, and cut out everything that stresses me out.
This means that anything with caffeine or alcohol in it has to go, and all the B-vitamine robbers are off limits, too (sugar, etc.).
Does anyone here know of any diets specifically geared toward calming people down and restoring their strength and resourcefulness?
I’ve been through a few mentally exhausting years, and want to make a fresh start.
The process of thinking causes psychological stress: can we explore the cause?
The symptom maybe a psychological focus of attention upon a ”desire to eat”, which in turn leads to ”eating when not hungry”, and ”eating more of one thing in a given time than is healthy”. What is the cause of this symptom?
Enjoyment of any activity tends to get translated into the mental image of pleasure, after the feeling of delight has passed. This translation process turns our sensual experience into a neural pattern: this is the process of identification.
Enjoyment is quite natural, but the worship of a lingering image in memory leads to the psychological desire to re-enjoy that pattern, unconnected with any physical need.
Like any mental image (such as brushing ones teeth in the morning), the image of pleasure can become associated with daily routine, to the extent that certain associations will always illicit attention to that mental image of pleasure. That’s why advertisers spend so much money on TV ads.
All foods and drinks are toxic at the wrong dose, including water.
Your body knows when it is hungry and thirsty, as it will grumble.
So the next thing ones psyche opts to try is: "not eating till you get hungry" and "not drinking till you get thirsty". This ”try” thing is a reaction to ones existing habit, so trying is an academic concept to the human mind, and as such it becomes a mental image in conflict with your other habit patterns which you’ve long cultivated. Ones brain tries to strive toward the ideal concept, whilst trying to escape from the vicefull resident habit.
So you’ll no doubt find (or have already found) that whatever method or approach you try, at some point, your vicefull habitual patterns will take over when your concentration is spent for whatever reason. That is why replacing old habits with new habits only works temporarily.
What ever path you try to adopt to change (even the path of ignoring all habits) will eventually fail: why? There is some friction in attempting to conform to an ideal habit, which saps ones energy. It is akin to stretching elastic: the longer your brain attempts to conform to an ideal desire, the more tension grows until your brain has no energy to maintain that stretch any longer. The recoil just sends you back into the reverse of that ideal, the pattern of vice.
So the question arises: is there a state of mind in which habits don’t operate at all (even thought the machinery exists); a state of being which is born only of the bodies natural needs?
Normal human psychological approaches intend to remove unnatural patterns/habits by: 1) changing them into a good habit (creating ideals) 2) attempting to destroy the pattern by attacking our old habits with criticism (self denial) 3) to replace our old habit with another bad habit (sublimation).
All that "trying to change" sustains the habitual pattern in our attention; those approaches are therefore doomed to fail.
So is there a state of mind which ones brain does not attempt to: fulfill, attack, mutate or replace the desire/habit when our attention flows into that neural pattern?
We can watch a sunset, but never give attention to the desire to see one every night: can we be like that with our other enjoyments, detached?
Any effort to achieve detachment is doomed to fail, for detachment is the absence of any mental agitation of any kind. A state of effortlessness cannot be reached by effort.
The question is: can you live with your desires without trying to change them or fulfill them? Can you live with yourself without judging/criticizing or priding/condoning your habits, desires or fears? Can you live with your questions without attempting to synthesize a solution?