Limit Your Mental Junk Food

There is a quote I saw floating around social media a while back and I have been thinking about it a lot lately. It’s attributed to someone named A.R. Bernard, who is, according to the internet, a pastor in Brooklyn.

I have no idea who that guy is, but it doesn’t matter.

Anyway, here is the quote…

“The quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life.”

At first blush, this seemed to me like any other bland platitude you might see painted on a piece of driftwood in some basic, Gen X mom’s family room.

But then I really started thinking about what it meant. Specifically, I thought about what it meant for me.

Thinking through this quote made me realize that many of my day-to-day thoughts were, what I like to call, mental junk food. They took up space but didn’t provide much, if any, real nourishment.

The thoughts that were naturally flowing in and out of my head as I went about my day were not “high quality” and this was affecting my overall happiness. Let me give you some examples…

I, like many of you other dads out there, have a lot going on. Work, kids, unexpected expenses. It’s a lot to juggle. One of my little guilty pleasures was fantasizing about winning the lottery.

This started off as a fun little diversion here and there, but it started getting pretty detailed.

How much am I imagining I won? How could I gift some of it to my extended family? Wouldn’t it be awesome to pay off my student loans? What would be the first house project I would do?

This “little fantasy” grew and grew to the point where I thought about it most days when I had some down time.

Then I saw that quote about the quality of my thinking determining the quality of my life.

“Wait a second”, I thought. “I shouldn’t be wasting time fantasizing about winning the lottery.”

As fun as it was to think about, this kind of fantasy didn’t encourage any sort of movement or growth or action. It was all passive.

I should be fantasizing about crushing my day job and moving up in the company. I should be fantasizing about building a successful website. I should be fantasizing about hitting my fitness goals. I should be fantasizing about attaining the life I want THROUGH MY OWN HARD WORK.

I should be fantasizing about the person I will be when I hit my goals.

These thoughts were of much higher quality than my lottery fantasy. These thoughts encouraged dynamic action.

And guess what? I am much more energized to tackle my days because I am fantasizing about being a better version of myself. I can see the goals I have set out before me and now I fantasize about attaining them.

The moment I started making a concerted effort to improve the QUALITY of my thoughts was the moment I started moving more quickly and purposefully toward my goals.

I improved the quality of my thinking and the quality of my life improved.

I’ll give you another example.

I tend to be, by nature, somewhat pessimistic in my day-to-day thoughts. It isn’t intentional. It might be my upbringing. It might just be my natural personality.

It’s nothing too terribly serious. I just need to be intentional about addressing my life in a more positive way, as I tend not to gravitate toward that particular energy.

Because of this, my thoughts sometimes tend to skew “downward”, for lack of a better word. Without effort, I tend to think about bad scenarios or rehash past frustrations. The thing is, though, that I didn’t even realize I was doing that or that I had that tendency towards negativity.

It was when I read “the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life” that I really understood what was going on. It caused me to reevaluate what I chose to think about as I go about my day.

I discovered that my thoughts were… kind of crappy. They didn’t make me feel good. They didn’t put me in a good mood or motivate me to do anything. They just flowed through my mind like dirty water and made me feel pissy.

Now, I try to engage with higher quality thoughts: thoughts that bring me joy, or improve my life in some way. Instead of being annoyed that I forgot to run the dishwasher because the kids distracted me, or something, I’ll let it roll off my back and think about what article I’m going to write next. Being pissed at the dishwasher (or my kids) doesn’t help me. Using my energy to improve my site, however, does.

Don’t mistake improving the quality of your thinking with “thinking positively”, though. When people say “think positive” or “be positive” they are missing the key fact that humans can’t just turn their happiness on and off like a faucet. Sometimes we are going to think about bad or upsetting things.

But those bad or upsetting things can still be high quality thoughts. Maybe you need to address something upsetting in order to move past it. Or maybe there are some difficult things on your plate you need to tackle. You probably don’t feel positive about those things, but you can’t not think about them. But thinking about them and moving past them IS an example of high quality thought. Being frustrated and bitter is not.

I think about this quote almost every day. One thing I am mindful of, however, is to not be too rigid. Just like eating junk food is ok once in a while, it’s ok to sometimes engage in silly, frivolous thought. But, just like junk food, I am conscious of limiting how much I do it. I realize now that if I indulge too much in low quality thought I’ll feel like crap.

It’s no different than eating junk food all the time and wondering why you feel gross.

I feel a little silly writing a whole article about how a motivational quote (of all things!) I saw on social media (of all places!) has impacted my life.

But here I am.

And just like in my article about guiding principles, you can take life advice from anywhere if you are introspective enough to see how it can benefit you.

So, I challenge you: make an effort to improve the quality of your thoughts. Limit your mental junk food and you might be surprised at the results.