Book Freak 134: How to Think Deeply
Four pieces of advice from Johann Hari's "Stolen Focus"
Book Freak is a newsletter with mental tools you can use to improve the quality of your life and the lives of others. In this issue: four pieces of advice from Stolen Focus by Johann Hari.
The role of sleep in flushing out toxins from your brain
“One of the things that happens is that during sleep, your brain cleans itself of waste that has accumulated during the day. “During slow-wave sleep, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open up more and remove metabolic waste from your brain,” Roxanne explained to me. Every night, when you go to sleep, your brain is rinsed with a watery fluid. This cerebrospinal fluid washes through your brain, flushing out toxic proteins and carrying them down to your liver to get rid of them. “So when I’m talking to college students, I call this brain-cell poop. If you can’t focus well, it might be you have too much brain-cell poop circulating.” That can explain why, when you are tired, “you get a hung-over sort of feeling”—you are literally clogged up with toxins. This positive kind of brainwashing can only happen when you are asleep.”
Understanding and modifying habits can change your life
“The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns.”
The key to change lies in modifying habits
“We can change habits. The way we change a habit is by understanding what the internal trigger is, and making sure that there’s some kind of break between the impulse to do a behavior and the behavior itself.”
James Baldwin's lesson: confrontation can lead to change
“The writer James Baldwin—the man who is, for my money, the greatest writer of the twentieth century—said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
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