Doomscrolling, social media feeds, podcasts – sometimes the flood of information makes us passive and out of tune. But what happens when we become active gardeners of our thoughts? With this method you cultivate your ideas, become more creative and strengthen your mental health.
Thoughts bombard us from everywhere: from social media feeds, from articles, videos, books, conversations. We are more connected than ever – and full of ideas. Does it sometimes make your head explode? In the flood of impressions, it is difficult for us to concentrate on individual thoughts or to develop our own. It’s like someone is constantly screaming in your ear while you’re trying to listen inside.
How can we deal mindfully with the many digital contents? They are part of our world and our lives. How can we deal with them creatively instead of just consuming them and cluttering up all our brains with them? “Mind Gardening” offers an answer. Translated, this means something like “thought gardening” or “tending the garden of the mind”.
Dealing with the flood of information through mind gardening
Mind gardening is all about thatto find a healthy way to deal with the flood of information – by consciously cultivating good thoughts and ideas and pulling out unnecessary or harmful ones like weeds. The gardening metaphor makes sense. It’s about planting, cultivating, caring for and pruning. This is well known to gardeners, but the method is also obvious to anyone without a green thumb:
- Think of your thoughts and mind as your garden to tend to.
- You are careful not to let weeds grow in your garden of thoughts. When it gets out of hand and threatens to suffocate everything else, you pluck it out or at least contain it. This is about negative thoughts, harmful patterns and everything that makes you passive and paralyzed. Pay attention to what feelings the information triggers in you, this is your compass. If a thought constantly triggers your fears, cut it out and choose to cultivate another one.
- You plant seeds by cultivating your curiosity. Pick the ideas you want to plant in your head. Pay attention to what inspires you and engage more with those things.
- You make trees grow by expanding your knowledge. Actively engage with thoughts, look for interesting connections between different ideas.
- The new thoughts you produce are your fruits, that you harvest. And ideally share it with others.
“It’s a much calmer way of dealing with information,” says Anne-Laure Le Cunff from Ness Labs, a learning platform for mindful creativity, in Hapers Bazaar. she is PhD candidate at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London and the creator of the term “mind gardening”. She describes the goal of the method as moving away from passive consumption and experiencing yourself as an active participant. But how exactly can this work?
7 tips for your creative “mind gardening”
Of course, Anne-Laure Le Cunff has some suggestions on how to cultivate your garden of thoughts:
- The first step when scrolling through the internet is to… Taking time to pause when you find something interesting. Ask yourself: What do you find exciting about it? Does this information remind you of other experiences or thoughts you’ve had recently?
- Take notes, when you read, hear, or see something that interests you. No matter whether long or short, analogue or digital – the main thing is that you formulate it in your own words. This is how you let the plants and trees grow in your thought garden. Important: Of course, you shouldn’t write everything down randomly, that would only cause stress and also litter your garden. Choose consciously what suits the plants in your garden and what could fertilize them.
- “Instead of just copying paragraphs from articles or highlighting them, capture what you can already associate with some of your ideas” advises Le Cunff in an interview with Amplifying Cognition.
- Be conscious of your social media feeds from time to time. Actively ask yourself: Who do I want to follow? What areas of knowledge interest me and what ideas do I want to explore?
- Journaling can be a good method to run your mind garden. Write down your thoughts and impulses in a nice notebook. There you can also address specific questions such as: What are my creative goals, what fruits would I like to harvest from my garden?
- For people who prefer to record and sort everything digitally, there is numerous note-taking and research apps.
- A start can be to first pay attention to what kind of books you read, what podcasts you listen to, what videos you like to watch and what visionaries you follow. These are all seeds that you plant in your garden. The question is: do you want to take care of them and let them grow?
No matter how intensively you practice mind gardening, make sure that it doesn’t become stressful for you. Sometimes just a small change in focus and awareness of what content you consume is enough to make a difference. This is how you can break the pull of the externally determined spiral of thoughts. And use the information available in your environment to allow the creative person in you to grow. Just gardening.
Sources used: harpersbazaar.com.au, amplifyingcognition.com, stylebook.de