Physics of the Mind

In school I had a habit of going to the evening bath after 6:20pm, the next ten minutes were a blur for me every single day because we had dinner at 6:30 and not only did I not want to get late and do 100 squats before dinner as punishment, but I also did not want to get accidently get locked inside the locker room. Thanks to my skills 😂 I was on time almost every day, but this post is not about getting ready in ten-minuets, nor is it about time management, or about the benefits of getting almost late for dinner 😂, it is about the law of inertia and how it applies not only to physical objects, but also our minds.

The exact definition of inertia is ‘Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to any change in its velocity. This includes changes to the object’s speed, or direction of motion’ (Wikipidea.org). Why the dinner example? Because, for the first five minutes I ate as if I had only five minutes to eat and was not going to get food for the next couple of days. I often did not even realize it for the first couple of minutes, when I did realize that I was eating like there was no tomorrow, I had to and take a couple of deep breaths to calm myself down. You see, the inertia of getting ready in haste was affecting the speed with which I ate. This is when I realized that the law of inertia was applicable even to our minds and affects our actions.

Being unaware of the application of law of inertia in to our minds is why many people fail to stick to their New Year resolutions, have trouble working efficiently and struggle to focus. Instead of ‘warming up’ we make ourselves cold, as a result the limbs of our minds are stiff. Take New Year Resolutions for example, if one decides to eat healthy from the coming year, they pig out on junk food on the days leading to the new year because in their mind they won’t get to eat junk after December 31st. They slip up easily because going all out with junk food created the opposite inertia and their limbs of will power are cold and stiff. It’s the same with focus, we spend hours on our smartphones which requires passive focus and doesn’t require us to put in effort to focus, it sets the wrong inertia and instead of warming up our limbs of focus we warm of the limbs of distraction, later on we wonder why is that we are having trouble focusing.

Life is the marathon we need to run at the speed of a hundred-meter dash, if you don’t warm up your limbs, you might not be able to run at your full potential and the cold limbs might also get injured making you stop for longer than you will like. Let us start warming up, and don’t forget to leave limbs similar to that of distraction cold, surgical procedures to have them removed will also be useful because they are extra limbs we grew, which hinder our efficiency. Though like stubborn weeds they will grow back, we just need to drive nutrition (energy) towards the useful limbs instead of the weeds.

Good luck!