of all the things worth tending to in life, what’s more important than your mind?

There are many things worth and not worth doing in life. Identifying what’s worth doing is a lifelong project in itself. There is a virtually infinite pool of choices, and your time and cognitive energy are finite.

What you decide to focus on is your choice, and it stems from your current and past circumstances, intellectual tendencies, personality traits, social desirability, and many more factors. The more you believe you choose to do something, the higher the chances that you will like that thing. This is how the IKEA effect works too. By building your own furniture, you develop a sense of attachment to it. You are the hero in a story that you can use in your socially-desirable small talk at the next group gathering or family event. That fuels your sense of self, and you will probably like your closet more than if you bought it pre-made.

Consider this, as neuroscientist Sam Harris suggests: of all the things worth tending to in life, what’s more important than your mind?

When you feel anxious about a future talk you will give in front of your first audience of 200 people, that is your mind. When you experience happiness for the birth of your child, that is your mind. When you ruminate about the past or dream about the future, that is your mind. Your mind is your control center. The distributed system of relational databases. Your conscious and unconscious processes behind your actions.

Tending to your mind means onboarding on a lifelong journey to understand it better. Because unpacking the mechanism in your mind helps you understand yourself and the world around you more deeply. You may gain insights into why you choose to do what to do, and why the people around you respond to you in a specific manner. All of that is your mind.

Tending to your physical health is also important, one can argue. But is it more important than developing your metacognition? If you injure yourself while running, squatting, or playing tennis, you will be incapable to nurture your body for a certain period of time. During that time, the only thing left in you is your mind. The way you process your injury and sit with it is born out of your mind and how you can control your emotions and rationality.

One way to tend to your mind is by practicing activities that increase mindfulness. Mindfulness is the ability to become aware of your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and situations around you at any given time. Mindfulness can be practiced at any time, anywhere—or by sitting in meditation. The crucial point is to recognize your thoughts as if you were a policeman from the outside looking in.

Another essential way to tend to your mind is by understanding and internalizing philosophical concepts that decrease your sense of self and fogginess about the human condition. One such helpful philosophical school of thought is stoicism. Stoicism can help foster an abundance mindset that is rooted in recognizing and accepting reality for what it is—instead of trying to bend it and make it what you would like it to be. Your mindset determines how you attend to life in every moment.

If you could only choose one thing worth tending to, why not make it your mind?

RESOURCES:

• Do what’s urgent, skip what’s important — the urgency trap
• Attention, not time, is your most valuable resource
• Johansson, P., Hall, L., Tärning, B., Sikström, S., & Chater, N. (2014). Choice blindness and preference change: You will like this paper better if you (believe you) chose to read it!. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, *27 *(3), 281-289.
• Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of consumer psychology, *22 *(3), 453-460.
• Mindset at your service