What detoxifies the mind

I was recently reading Michael Pollan’s book on psychedelics, How To Change Your Mind. One of the most interesting aspects of the book was how, in the clinical studies of psilocybin conducted at Johns Hopkins, subjects were told that during their experiences on the drug, they were to be open to anything that happens. They were to go with the flow. If they saw a door, open it. If there was a stair case, they should go up it. And so on. This was not just a way of enhancing the experience but rather because resistance to what was happening generated fear which could result in a “bad trip” as it were.

In ordinary life, this is likewise a useful maxim. When we are presented with experiences, it is often better to go with those experiences rather than to judge or resist them. Many if not most experiences in life are, after all, beyond our control, even those that occur in our own mind.

Our emotions, for example, are much like the weather. They are somewhat predictable but often not. Sometimes what we think will just be a small rain shower turns into a squall, and likewise the threat of a major storm turns out to be a mere dousing. In a complex society with interacting emotional beings, we have a planetary emotional climate that helps determine what happens in human society more than anything else.

Despite the usefulness of the maxim, people, including myself, find it hard to just go with the flow. We want to control that which we cannot control. Even when things are outside of our control, we judge.

When it comes to actions, this is perfectly legitimate. We should judge our actions. At the same time, our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that make up our conscious experience are, while not entirely outside of our control, not like actions at all. We can hold on to them, judge them, or try to generate new thoughts based on them. Or we can just let them go on their merry way and let the next experience take their place.

In most cases, the last option is the one that most leads to contentment. As with the weather, it is perfectly fine to try to predict it, prepare for it, and take actions to protect oneself from its consequences, but in the end the weather will be what it will be and the same is true for the inner phenomena.

Yet, it turns out to be easier said than done. The self-help industry, by and large, fuels us in the opposite direction in its drive to make us better at a cost. We need to see certain feelings and thoughts as “negative”, to be replaced with “positive” ones. We try to achieve this through affirmations, mantras, drugs, or machines. Countless books, seminars, and influencers are dedicated to this drive towards a kind of detoxification of the mind to go along with similar wellness products intended to detox the body.

Of course, we have a perfectly good way of detoxifying the body. It is called the liver, and, as long as your liver is healthy, there is really nothing, other than avoiding ingesting toxins, that you can do to help this along.

Likewise, our brain has its own way of detoxifying the mind. One of them is sleep.

It’s no wonder that there are countless products being sold today that are intended to give us better sleep. The sleep tech industry is worth about $12B and that doesn’t include the $17B US mattress market.

If you’ve ever had or have disturbed sleep, which is most people, you know how bad you feel the next day, so it makes sense.

Sleeping, like breathing, is one of those bodily functions that, if you sleep well, does best when left alone. Overthinking it is a good way to keep yourself awake all night. Yet we have as a society managed to collectively overthink ourselves into a massive sleep deficit.

A lot of this can be blamed on technology itself, which purports to be its solution. Prior to the proliferation of electric lights and screens, people got sleepy because it got dark. If you have gone camping with minimal electric light, you probably started feeling sleepy must earlier than you were used to. That might not just be from hiking or other outdoor activities. Most screens now have night modes to try to combat this effect, but the sheer abundance of stimulation may be the real problem.

Sleeping doesn’t detoxify your brain by judging your thoughts as good or bad. Some of its function is physically removing toxins from the nervous system. It also is believed that dreaming helps us sort through the events of the day, potentially changing our perspective on what happened. This may have the outcome of changing negative into positive, but it is fundamentally different.

I propose that when we divide our thoughts, feelings, and experiences in this way we are engaging in closed minded, one track thinking. We get stuck in a rut where we are constantly trying to steer our minds in the right rut instead of the left one.

If we just go with the flow, accept what is happening to us and keep an open mind, however, our minds learn how to fly. I think this is fundementally what psychedelics have allowed some people to achieve, but I also think that given the danger from these drugs (anyone with a family history of mental illness or mood disorder should never take them because of the risk of permanent psychosis) there are other ways to open the door to new ways of thought.

We can’t think ourselves to accepting what comes our way. Thinking, by its very nature, suggests judgement which cries out for action and control. Our actions need thinking. Our experiences do not.

Sleep is probably the simplest way to knock the mind out of a rut. Meditation is another. Any activity that is engrossing enough that one gets into a flow state can do it too. (Music, mathematics, and programming all do this to me.)

Thus, the best supplement you can take for your brain is to take your hands off the wheel. This won’t stop you from thinking, feeling, or perceiving. Nor should it. But it does help to stop you from ruminating on them which is where toxic thoughts tend to originate.