Quotes About Mindfulness

Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.

To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable.

Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.

Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.

Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it's instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you're doing with your time going forward—even

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century.

minimalists don't mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

It's now possible to completely banish solitude from your life. Thoreau and Storr worried about people enjoying less solitude. We must now wonder if people might forget this state of being altogether.

Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it's instead like a muscle that tires.

First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth.

He asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance—arguably the most valuable substance we possess—and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time.

If you're wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram—you're not really walking, and therefore you're not going to experience this practice's greatest benefits

to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn't mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it's sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. The simple strategy proposed here of scheduling Internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy. Work

There is a middle ground, and if you're interested in developing a deep work habit, you must fight to get there.

Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience. This

In this second part, I introduce a framework I call attention capital theory that argues for creating workflows built around processes specifically designed to help us get the most out of our human brains while minimizing unnecessary miseries. This

we need solitude to thrive as human beings, and in recent years, without even realizing it, we've been systematically reducing this crucial ingredient from our lives. Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.

To succeed with digital minimalism, you have to confront this rebalancing between conversation & connection in a way that makes sense to you.

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on." In

What's making us uncomfortable...is this feeling of losing control - a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child's bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.

In the middle of a busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it's tempting to crave the release of having nothing to do—whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations, and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment. These decompression sessions have their place, but their rewards are muted, as they tend to devolve toward low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and half-hearted binge-watching.

Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.