You are what you eat.
- Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1826

The pandemic has brought into prominence the importance of my mental diet. Typically, I consciously and unconsciously assimilate a variety of external input: fashion trends, snippets of others’ conversations, unplanned dialogues with strangers or acquaintances. There is a stream of contextual data that provides a kind of grounding, whether I’m aware of it or not. 

But when the pandemic hit, my world became more of a closed circuit. External inputs had to be more intentionally introduced, and they tended to cause greater perturbation to the system. Reading about bad news made me disproportionately depressed. Fantasies gripped my imagination to the point where I had a hard time exiting to do real life. And if something I watched or read affected my mood, that had an even greater effect on my family—after all, they were living in that closed circuit with me.

I found myself facing a magnified version of a principle I had always known to be true: we are affected by what we consume, whether we want to or not. What we watch, read, and listen to inexorably changes our outlook, desires, mood, and character, in the same way that what we eat affects our body’s health and growth. Yet we don’t necessarily attend to our mental diet as closely as we do our physical one. How do we have a healthy mental diet?

mental candy

Probably the first thing people do when they want to eat healthier is cut out junk food—because, no matter what kind of diet you may believe in, everyone would probably agree that it should not consist primarily of ice cream and chips. Why? Because they are empty calories—they feel good to eat, but are filling our stomachs and blunting our appetites without providing the nutrition our bodies need to grow best (if that sounds like a speech we give to our kids, it is).

The same goes for our mental diet. There’s a lot of mental candy out there: books, shows, magazines or podcasts that are attractive and entertaining, but are not truly helping us grow. Worse yet, they blunt our appetites for more nourishing fare. Mortimer Adler describes this in How to Read a Book:

The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used . . . Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are . . . artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect.

Mental candy is an artificial prop. It gives the illusion of mental activity without providing true substance for growth. It can come to take up more and more of our attention until we lack the mental capacity or appetite for anything else—and like our physical appetites, our mental appetite is limited. We ought to be wary of squandering it. Some candy is delightful; too much is not so good.

ingredients that tell a story

Our food does not arrive in a vacuum: every dish is a story, a unique combination of ingredients that tells us something about where it came from or who prepared it. So with our media: some may carry more of an overt agenda than others, but all of it is telling a story. None of it is net-neutral. And it’s the stories we listen to that change the stories we live, because narratives are so foundational to how we think that they determine how we understand and live life itself. 

It’s impossible to read romance novels and not believe on some level that your happiness depends on finding the right guy (with whom you have constant sex). It’s impossible to grow up on Disney movies and not believe you just have to follow your heart to figure out what’s right. Our inherent beliefs about the problems and purposes of life are inevitably shaped by the stories we consume. How is what you consume shaping what you believe, or want?

We’ve gotten into the habit of asking our kids certain questions about any book they read or show they watch:

• is there a lesson here? What do you think that lesson is?

• what does this say about how you can be happy?

• what is the main problem this story is about, and how is that problem fixed?

• what would this story say is the main point of life? 
  

getting all the food groups in

Junk food aside, most healthy diets involve some kind of balance and variety, and the same is true of what we read and watch. Left to ourselves, we tend to consume what is most familiar and comfortable, but the media that enlarge our understanding, that make us grow, are often those we aren’t quite used to. As Adler puts it, they “must make demands on you. They must seem to you to be beyond your capacity.”

Perhaps this means reading poetry instead of prose, or articles instead of books, or watching a film with subtitles. Perhaps this means joining a book club where you have to read books not of your own choosing, or looking up a recommended book list. Perhaps this means reading an author with a different writing style, or tackling a challenging subject. Perhaps this means reading older books. C.S. Lewis suggests:

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones . . . We all . . . need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period.

As far as books go, I like to have one book related to the spiritual life, one comfortable novel, and one interesting experiment (most recently, those are The Divine Conspiracy, The Wizard of Earthsea, and The Professor and the Madman). I found Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing so beautifully constructed, in a way so different from modern young adult fantasy novels, that I encouraged our oldest to try it out.

conclusion: changing our cravings

Our appetites are malleable. If I were to eliminate salt from my diet, I’m sure I would find the food I normally ate to be distastefully salty. I’m convinced my husband’s tolerance for spicy foods comes from putting Sriracha sauce on everything he eats (and I mean everything). The point is this: to some degree, what we eat affects what we crave. It is possible to change what we find pleasurable or necessary. The less mental candy I consume, the less I miss it. The more true stories I hear, the more I want to hear. The more I read what feels beyond me, the more I’m curious about what more is out there. 

Our appetites are often not nearly so fixed as we make them out to be. That’s the wonder and the challenge of what our minds consume: the power they have to shape how we grow, who we are, and what we desire.