I have a horrible habit of checking Reddit constantly. I hate it, I wish I didn’t do it but I haven’t been able to quit as of yet. What’s worse is I check Reddit compulsively - if I’m on the train, sitting on my couch, watching a movie or whatever it is chances are I’m scrolling through Reddit.
I’ve noticed that as I consume content on Reddit (or on Facebook) my mind starts moving more and more franticly. Not necessarily in a panic, but my ability to focus goes down and down the more content I’m consuming.
I really started noticing this trend when I would commute home from work. I’d typically be listening to a podcast (usually a politics podcast because apparently I’m a sadist) and simultaneously scrolling through Reddit. I started to notice that by the time I got home I felt almost…winded? It’s hard to describe. It’s like that feeling you get when you’re eating so quickly that you’re actually out of breath. That’s what my brain would feel like - like I had stuffed so much content in there that it couldn’t keep up and was just gasping for breath.
It’s not a good feeling. And normally after I’d get home I’d either watch something on TV or play a video game or do something else stimulating. Which didn’t help.
I’d often end up going to bed that evening with my brain still reeling from all of the garbage content I pushed inside of it. That would then lead to this strange sensation where I’d sleep, but I’d wake up feeling like my brain still hadn’t had the chance to like…stop and recover.
What I’ve since found is that meditating, even if it’s only for ten minutes or so, gets rid of that feeling of windedness in my brain. Which makes perfect sense, right? If I was feeling like my brain hadn’t had the chance to actually process the information then sitting down and not consuming any more content would give it that opportunity.
Anyways the moral of this story is that consumable content aggregation, in all forms, is terrible and that meditation is a really good counter to it.