Mental "vitamins"

Source: Waskyria Miranda/Pexels

There are two things to know about vitamins: First, we only need small amounts of them, and second, they help other processes in the body (unlike carbohydrates and proteins, which we use directly as energy and building muscle).

Mental vitamins—my analogy, not actual substances—are much the same. We don’t need a lot of them, but we need them to help our minds work in healthy ways. To extend the analogy, consider that we have major mental vitamins—say, the B-complex, C, and D of the mind—such as mindfulness, relaxation, and humor. There are also minor ones—the Zinc and Magnesium of the mind. Unlike the major vitamins of the mind, these receive little attention. They are things we've probably heard of but (wrongly) don’t consider as necessary ingredients for a happy, productive mind.

Vitamin 1: Daydreaming. Daydreaming is defined as thinking that is detached from what is going on around you. It attends to your internal states, feelings, and ideas. Daydreaming has a bad reputation because of its association with poor attention. But in the right place and time, it serves important functions.

In our era of misplaced attention, much of the time that might have once been spent daydreaming is devoted to following a thread on our phones or listening to a podcast. We leave little time to let our minds wander. This is unfortunate as daydreaming enablescreativity, emotional processing, and planning, and can be a release from boredom. Scientists who study sleep now believe that daydreaming partially serves to tag our emotions for later processing during normal dreaming.¹ Not allowing this process to unfold may disturb our sleep and contribute to our national fatigue and emotional difficulties.

With earbuds in our ears and phones in our faces, our thoughts get no time off to wander the world and do the work of creativity and emotional digestion.

Vitamin 2: Chit-Chat. Chit-chat is what I describe as the informal talking we do with people we see throughout our days.² These could be neighbors, store clerks, or fellow commuters rather than people we know well. These chit-chats make up the most common relationship we have in our lives.

Our chit-chats are rarely substantial; they deal with weather, recent news, and “How’s your day?” check-ins. In my view, chit-chat provides a form of tension release by connecting with others and even passing on bits of negative news.

It's fair to say that people chit-chat less these days. It may be because the type of people we would chit-chat with are far fewer than a generation ago. There are fewer neighborhood butchers and bakers, for example. But I believe this goes deeper: Renowned political scientist Francis Fukuyama considers our fellow chit-chatters to be a vital resource.³ They comprise a pool of people from which we find new friends, business partners, and even spouses. They also help with small crises when no one else is nearby. For Fukuyama, these relationships are lost due to a loss of trust. The inherent comfort we once had talking with people we barely know is gone. We shun strangers for their comfort and our own.

By adding chit-chat to our lives, we can expand our circle of trust, get to know more people with potential friendships in the mix, and relieve stress by sharing the frustrating and humorous parts of life.

Vitamin 3: Favors. There is a lot written about favors, mostly about asking for them. This is an important role of favors, but I think there is a larger issue, as illustrated in the following story: A few years ago, I was at an airport when a woman asked to borrow my cell phone. I happily let her. Afterward, she insisted on giving me a few dollars. I refused, explaining that even if I were counting (which I wasn’t), it cost me nothing as I paid a fixed amount for phone service. She nearly begged me, telling me it would make her feel better if I accepted the money. Finally, I asked her to give the money to charity, which ended things but left her unsatisfied.

As sincere as she may have been, I do not think this episode reflected her gratitude for borrowing my phone. She seemed to be trying to relieve guilt or some other unpleasant feeling.

Favors have simply become too much of a big deal. We often feel we intrude on others if we do something for them or accept a small favor. And when people receive favors, they make a fuss with thank-you cards or some other manner of "repayment." I am not advocating a lack of thoughtfulness and gratitude. But we should promote favors to a common occurrence as they are good for us to do and receive. They build connections, meet needs, and improve mutual good feelings. It should be easy and not require an emotional balancing act.

Vitamin 4: Wonder. Lastly, we come to wonder—this is a sense of surprise and admiration when something beautiful, unexpected, or unexplainable appears (also referred to as "awe'). Wonder makes you feel both smaller and less important while part of something much bigger. This makes us more curious and open to things that do not fit our usual ways of thinking.

In modern life, wonder plays an increasingly minor role: Less and less amazes us. We believe science has figured out all the important stuff and is now mopping up the details. Nothing could be further from the truth. The more we discover, the more we sense the vastness of the unknown.

Wonder can give us more than goosebumps. People who routinely experience wonder feel less stressed and generally have more life satisfaction. We don’t all need to be scientists to have these very human experiences. Just watching the orange light from sunset beaming through your window, children learning to talk, and plants knowing when to pop out of the ground and which way to bend for the sun all speak to the beauty and magic of our everyday world. We need only to take a moment to notice.

There’s no need to have these vitamins in your breakfast cereal. You can stop a few times a day when a vitamin opportunity appears, as they will. Chit-chat and favors appeal to our need to trust one another and nurture even the smallest of connections, while daydreaming and wonder invite us to throw open the windows of the mind and let the breeze flow in.

We need only pause from our don’t-waste-a-minute lives and allow these smallest mental vitamins to do their powerful work.