Trying To Be A Better Person At 10pm

Training the mind is a daytime job. So if evening free time means telly, don't feel bad.

If you’re like me with a full time job and kids, you only rarely get a moment to yourself.

But, every now and then, lightning strikes. There’s no-one around. The dishwasher is unloaded and loaded, all the clothes are put away (except the socks - all of them are now in the odd socks bag where they can stay forever), the surfaces are clean (mostly).

Great, you think. A rare bit of me time.

Now what?

Probably shouldn’t sit and scroll. If you’re an office worker, you’ve been looking at screens all day. Your mind, you’ve heard, deserves some rest.

Great. Rest the mind. Will do.

But how?

You dream up Instagram-worthy images of relaxation. Almost certainly you should read a book. But you don’t have a book on the go, and it feels tiring to start one now. Could run a bath… but somehow the phone always finds its way in. Even if you’ve lit a candle to ward it away.

So after a bit of indecision, you go for a compromise: telly.

But as you enjoy Yellowstone or one of its many spinoffs, there is a nagging unease. A better person than you would have done something else. Is Yellowstone resting the mind? Probably not.

But another day you’ll be better. One evening soon you’ll rest your mind. Like you’re supposed to.

---

The Great Late Night Podcast Debate

Last week I wrote about silence. I wrote about how phone use, whether through screen or earbuds, could fill all the incidental gaps in life. I mentioned the trend of more and more people listening to a podcast to help them to get to sleep.

That part in particular clearly hit a nerve. A LOT of people shared it was something they did, including a life coach and a neuroscientist. So if this is you and you were feeling at all bad about this, don’t - you are in the company of experts.

It made me think a lot about evenings, and the pressure (to which I’ve clearly now contributed!) to have the right kind of rest.

Fortunately I have a lot of time for thinking things through. Hours and hours of it. It’s one of the biggest advantages of Phone Free Commuting.

And, here’s my deeply personal, but earnestly held view…

And it’s good news! Do what you like in the evening. Watch telly and then listen to podcasts (as long as it’s not disrupting your sleep of course). Go nuts.

It’s during the day that you might want to think about making a change.

---

What Is Resting The Mind Anyway?

I used to jumble up silence with resting the mind. But while silence is easy to define, resting the mind really isn’t. (Despite all the smug images suggesting it just involves staring wistfully out of that window cradling that coffee.)

I read a brilliant piece by Katherine May a few weeks ago which was one of the few to recognise that resting the mind is actually formidably complex.

For a second let’s put aside sport, exercise, conversation and come back to that dilemma at the start: at home, late at night, on your own.

Rest is an idea from the physical world. To rest your body, you just stop. You flump on the sofa and stop using your muscles, and they rejuvenate and repair. I am good at this. Never had any trouble here.

Obviously not really an option with the mind. Your body might stop, but your mind is like a shark that keeps on swimming. For me, any attempt to “stop” just led to convoluted overthinking about work.

Which doesn’t feel like rest.

To combat this overthinking, I can distract myself in all sorts of ways. And I found I was never satisfactorily distracted by knitting or reading a book or the things you are supposed to do, so I turned to a screen. Which, as we all know, is stimulating - and therefore isn’t actually rest for the mind after all.

Some contemplative traditions argue that the closest thing to resting the mind is being present. Being where you actually are, hearing the sounds around you and seeing what you are seeing. There’s a lot in this I agree with.

But I’ve always found it irritating that people urge you to “be present” like it’s immediately achievable. But it’s not something you can actually choose to do. Oh right, I’ll just stop with the intrusive thoughts. Great. They’re intrusive.

So back to distraction again to get rid of it. But that’s not allowed.

So really it’s no wonder we’re at a loss as to what to do in the evening.

---

Resting Your Mind Is Surprisingly Hard Work

A well-rested mind is a mind that defaults happily to the sights and sounds around it. Rather than having to struggle to be present, it just settles into it naturally. The mind feels accepting rather than uneasy and jumpy, and the volume of negative overthinking gets turned down. This is a mind that hasn’t been amped up by 24/7 phone use.

Unfortunately this isn’t a mind you can just decide to have on any given evening. But it is one you can train to rebuild. I found it took me around four to five weeks.

I do it by daily intermittent digital fasting and patiently teaching the mind to be present. I’ve written a lot about that training already. If you’re interested, I’d recommend this post about training to be present, and this one about how to hear the mind’s endless calls to use the phone.

But the key thing I want to stress here is that it’s really hard to start this in the evening.

We might imagine we have to do it in the evening because evening is for rest, or we’ve “looked at a screen all day”. But while the evening is a great time for resting the body, it’s a rubbish time for resting the mind. A tired brain has less energy for executive function, meaning it just defaults to pre-established well-worn behaviours. And a tired brain is easily besieged by intrusive thoughts, making distraction far more attractive.

(I’ve written about how the overthinking/distraction loop gets worse over time - unfortunately those worries keep coming back louder and louder. It’s connected to the need for the brain’s Default Mode Network to “breathe”. Ending this vicious cycle is not easy.)

And so returning to the dilemma at the start… do what you like in the evening.

And if like the neuroscientist and the life coach I heard from this week, you find you’re doing it to drown out the demands of the day, don’t feel bad about it.

If you want to change things up, set aside some time when you’re most awake to repair your brain. Schedule intentional silence during the day. If, like me, you happen to commute by public transport, I’d argue that’s the perfect time. Otherwise, go for a daily walk, or try driving in silence.

Each day I do it, I find that in the evening I feel less guilty about kicking back in any way that suits me - even if that’s cowboys locked in a vicious, endless property dispute.

Mindworld, as I’m learning, is upside-down. You learn to rest not during the evening, but during the day. Because learning to rest can be hard work.

That’s been my experience anyway. I’d be really interested to hear if it’s yours.

Next week - More from inside Mindworld. I’ve now clocked up over 70 hours of silence on the commute. I’m getting to know my mind pretty well - and coming to some unsettling conclusions.

[Images by AI, words all human]