# Mental Food

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-sunday-afternoon-podcast-with-greg-reese-5721719/mental-food
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-sunday-afternoon-podcast-with-greg-reese-5721719/mental-food.md
Podcast: [The Sunday afternoon podcast with Greg Reese](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-sunday-afternoon-podcast-with-greg-reese-5721719)
Published: 2026-02-10T21:05:06+00:00
Episode link: https://gregreese.substack.com/p/mental-food
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/187409490/40b9e275baad6b54d7f8771dac102819.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-sunday-afternoon-podcast-with-greg-reese-5721719/episodes/mental-food
Duration seconds: 308

## Resource

The concept of “mental food” is simple: just as the food we eat shapes our body, the information and stimuli we consume with our senses shapes our psyche, our emotions, and our overall well-being. There is an ancient proverb: “The body becomes what the foods are; as the spirit becomes what the thoughts are.” The Buddha taught that feeding the mind with greed, hatred, and delusion strengthens those things, and that practicing mindfulness allows us to guard the “gates of the senses” and curate a more pure experience. Epictetus taught that the mind should be guarded like a fortress against external events to maintain inner peace and freedom. According to Rosicrucian philosophy, pure thoughts build finer vehicles. In James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh , the mind is compared to a garden that must be cultivated. By treating thoughts as seeds, individuals choose to plant positive, constructive ideas or allow weeds of negative thought to grow. This shapes the individual’s character and determines their outcomes in life. GIGO—”Garbage In, Garbage Out”—is a computing principle that simply expresses how the quality of the output is directly determined by the quality of the input. You don’t want to input garbage code into your computer, and you certainly don’t want to input garbage into your mind. And Social media, for the most part—along with much of mass media—is garbage. Studies show that habitual scrolling on social media causes desensitization, reduced focus, dopamine addiction, compulsion, anxiety, and depression. Exposure to political media, regardless of political affiliation, increases feelings of despair, hopelessness, and paranoia. And this psychology is very well known: when people are kept in this voluntary state of hysteria, they are easily herded in any direction the s…

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## Transcript

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