The Walking Dead

I started listening to podcasts during the times of Corona. It was good entertainment when doing mundane routine work like washing vessels, hanging out the clothes to dry in the terrace or cleaning the house. This practice of listening to podcasts slowly creeped into things like working out, walking, running and driving. Listening to podcasts also became a bedtime ritual. Fairly all the low complexity items.

Things were great for a while, I could get the boring stuff done while entertaining myself. It seemed like the perfect solution. But as a few months progressed, I started noticing that I was more stressed out than usual, more irritable. And even the mundane things were taking more time than it should really take.

Since the corona days I have slowly been unwinding from this practice, now I think I am at a point where I prefer to not even listen to music or radio on the car, I rather sing out loud whatever I feel at the moment.

If I had to theorize on why I felt stressed out while listening to podcasts and why I am more relaxed now while not listening to it, I would say it was mere indigestion.

These low mental complexity tasks like driving, walking, running, working out, cleaning, vessel washing, folding clothes seem to provide us with idle time for our internal cpu. All the stimulus uptill that day is best processed in that idle time. When introducing another stimulus, we take up a good portion of that idle time.

A mind with no thoughts to process is the most relaxed mind.

And even in this digestion process I think there are two types, the active and the passive. I think 99.9% of our processing is passive, us being in the thoughts of our own, unaware of why we do what we do, why we feel what we feel but going about doing the things that any stimulus nudge us towards. Going from one stimulus to another. I see it as our zombie mode.

Then there is the active processing where we are aware of our thoughts, more actively involved in resolving them, sometimes the processing itself is initiated by us, like the act of problem solving or creation or while playing games like cricket or football, where there is a certain focus towards getting something done.

It is so easy to get into zombie mode, rare instances where we do come out of it, we are automatically pulled back if we aren’t alert. Does being alert simply involve practice, is it a question of just mental stamina. Or is there a way to override the zombie mode completely?