Mental hygiene means small daily habits that keep your thoughts in good shape, the way brushing your teeth keeps your teeth healthy. It is not therapy, and it is not for emergencies. It is everyday care.
Brushing your teeth is maintenance. You do it every day so you don’t need a dentist’s drill later. Most people have no daily routine like that for their mind, even though their mind is involved in everything they do.
What research says helps
Research on small daily practices shows how little it takes. In a classic 2003 study, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough asked people to write down a few things they were grateful for once a week. Compared with people who listed hassles, the gratitude group reported better mood, more optimism and even fewer physical complaints. Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert’s well-known study, which checked in with more than two thousand people through their iPhones, found that minds wandered nearly half of waking life, and that a wandering mind tended to be a less happy one. What you pay attention to affects how you feel.
Choose what your attention returns to
So the core of mental hygiene is choosing what your attention returns to. A morning journal page, a walk without your phone and a gratitude note all help. SOMOTE adds the easiest one: your chosen phrases on your screen, so that when your mind wanders, it lands on words you picked instead of whatever a feed serves you.
Put yourself on an information diet
Think of it as an information diet. Your feeds repeat things at you all day, and they favor alarming news because alarm holds attention. You don’t have to quit your feeds. You just need to add inputs that point where you want to go, so other people’s priorities aren’t the only things repeating in your day. Research on how your environment affects you shows why this matters.
Like flossing, none of this looks impressive on any single day. It works because it is small enough to keep doing on every kind of day. SOMOTE is the easiest daily habit for your mind that we know of, because after you set it up once, it needs nothing from you. Download it free and start today.