Twisting Your Mind Back to Health
Grab some nicotine and check out some art. Your right hemisphere needs the help.
You want to know why Cal Newport’s books sell faster than cheap whiskey at a NASCAR tailgate? Or why nicotine pouches are vanishing from gas station shelves like canned beans before a hurricane?
It’s because we’re starving. Starving for focus, a kind of attention that doesn’t dissolve into a TikTok scroll or a dopamine hit from the all-mighty algorithm.
Test yourself. Grab any book (doesn’t matter if it’s Thoreau or an owner’s manual for your manscaped lawn mower, you deviant). Read for fifteen minutes. No phone, no coffee run, no peeking at the clock. If your mind starts wandering to what’s for dinner or that email you forgot to send, congratulations: you’re as screwed as the rest of us.
But don’t cry into your craft beer yet. You can claw your way back. Start simple. Lock yourself in a room, pop a nicotine pouch if you need the jolt, and read those fifteen minutes like your soul depends on it. Do it daily, preferably twice (once in the morning and once at night), and you’ll start to feel the fog lift.
Some of you, though, are worse off. You’re not just distracted: you’re a mental vagrant, your default mode network shambling through life like a post-apocalyptic hermit jonesing for a signal from a dead satellite.
For you, the gentle stuff won’t cut it.
You need the hard medicine: crack open some poetry and wrestle with it like it’s a bar fight. Or try mindfulness meditation, sitting still and watching your thoughts scuttle by. Hell, even mindful listening’ll do: mentally repeat what someone’s saying, word for word, without chewing on what it means.
Think of them as mental push-ups.
There are tons of options, as varied as physical exercise. Scroll through your X feed long enough, and you’ll see every jackass with a kettlebell or a yoga mat preaching a new way to move. Every twitch, every twist, every grunt to failure is exercise if you do it right.
Same with your brain.
Take anything—reading, weeding the garden, shooting the bull or billiard balls—and do it with a pinch of wonder. Tell that nagging left brain of yours, the one whining about emails and errands, to STF-up. Lean into the moment with your right hemisphere’s quiet curiosity, and you’ve got yourself a focus workout.
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Eric Scheske
