How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times

Factors that put an unnecessary cap on how much you’re able to accomplish include many ideas from this book, including:

Calm is not a crescendo; it is a winding down, a returning to our true nature. It’s the state of our mind that lies beneath the layers of activity in our life.

There are countless ideas you can try.

There is a certain tranquil quality to devoting our entire capacity for presence to one thing. It’s a feeling of sinking in, of becoming the very thing you’re engaging with.

Analog activities give our mind room to think. When our mind wanders, it automatically unearths ideas, plans for the future, and recharges.

Today, most of our stress is mental—it doesn’t exist in our physical world. And we let it build up inside of us, because we don’t give it a place to go. Exercise used to be an outlet for stress—we walked an average of thirteen kilometers a day. Social connection used to be another outlet—we spent nearly all of our time surrounded by other people. W

Today, we’re forced to use this same primitive brain to live in a world that is unrecognizable to it.

If you’re looking for inspiration to lower your stimulation height through the analog world, here are some substitutions I found helpful.

One recent study found that loneliness is as damaging to our overall health as smoking fifteen cigarettes every day.