I am a big advocate of shaving in a silent bathroom: no fan, no running water, no music, and no radio news. One reason is purely functional: the quiet sound of the cutting blade helps me optimize head angle. But another reason is the meditative aspect of shaving: a time in the day when you closely focus on one task only (with the focus probably even closer for men who shave with a straight razor) with full awareness of what you’re directly experiencing at the moment. Adding a distraction seems purely gratuitous.
And yet some seem curiously attached to distraction. I think some of that is because focusing on a task without distractions is a skill and thus has to be acquired through practice. A person who has little experience of distraction-free close focus on what he is experiencing in the moment suffers the usual negative feelings of any beginner: feeling awkward, not knowing how to do it, not liking how it feels so unfamiliar, feeling very conscious of mistakes, and so on. I understand how that would make one practically leap onto any distraction. But with practice it becomes easier and even, once you’ve learned how to achieve it, something worth seeking.
I just saw an article by Tom Jacobs in Pacific Standard on another factor that may be in play.
Which pastime would you prefer: Sitting alone quietly with your thoughts, or experiencing an electric shock?
The answer may seem obvious. But consider for a moment what it’s like to have no distractions from your ongoing mental chatter, which Buddhists refer to as “monkey mind.”
Thoughts pop up rapidly and randomly, like a sour, surrealistic movie we can’t turn off. Fears and regrets we’ve pushed aside reappear front and center, resulting in increased agitation and the desire for some form of escape—even, perhaps, a jolt of current.
That scenario may or may not sound familiar, but it clearly applies to a lot of people. A research team led by University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson reports that, in a series of studies, “participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think.”
What’s more, in the researchers’ most remarkable result, “many preferred to administer electronic shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts.”
“The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself,” Wilson and his colleagues conclude in the journal Science.
The researchers demonstrated our aversion to rumination in 11 similarly structured studies.
Timothy Wilson wrote Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, a book I highly recommend.
I included this post in the “mental health” category, but really it’s more “mental fittness”: being able to have your mind easily switch from one mode to another. Perhaps “mental agility,” but with regard to state instead of ideas: the mind as environment rather than machine.
Filed under: Books, Mental Health, Science, Shaving
