Of course y ’all know flossing as cleaning / clearing something!
As weird as this word mental flossing sounds to you, so it does to me! But it also makes me eager to know what it means exactly.
By definition, mental floss is inserting a length of sturdy wire through one ear and out the opposite ear using a needle. The flosser then pulls the wire from side to side to eradicate brain farts from the cranium. Aight! Sounds pretty nosy.
Ah! Typical, humans after all. Runs in our blood to explore every last bit of everything and anything.
Mental floss in this context is gonna be referred to as a locution. It can be defined as changing your thinking to get rid of useless info. In other words, it is a perplexing problem or set of problems intended to diminish one’s intellect by exceeding their cerebral capacities. A little too complicated to understand?
Expressly, these are bits and pieces of interesting conversation that remove harmful mental plaque from one’s brain. And trust me if you still haven’t understood the meaning, you need a mental flossing yourself!
Many of us resonate with the saying ‘my brain has too many tabs open’ — aka the overwhelming state of having a ridiculous number of simultaneous thoughts and ideas, and an ever-growing to-do list floating around in your head! The mental equivalent of having multiple browser windows opens on your computer screen.
It’s the new busy. It’s addictive and deceivingly easy to achieve, but extremely difficult to sustain. And it can be a daunting, draining and, for some of us, debilitating state of being — especially when all you want to do is focus on the task at hand or simply close a few tabs so you can get some shut-eye at the end of the day!
Are you nodding? Do I hear a ‘oh yeah, I know the feeling’?
From that heavily researched project topic that you had to submit at the university today to the meal you’ll cook up for dinner this evening, you put a lot of thought into every choice that you make — maybe too much thought. So take a seat back and enjoy reading these few tips and tricks to save your brain from decaying!
- Begin with the end in mind: If you don’t know where you want to go, how will you ever get there? Envision your end needs and write them all down. It will guide you like the Google maps does!
- Put first things first: List down the things in the matrix of importance and urgency. And now you know what to focus on!
- Multitasking: Stop it! It’s dangerous! It tricks you into producing subpar, incomplete results on a daily basis. Also reduces your efficiency and performance as your mind does one thing at a time unlike you!
- Remove distractions and time wasters: The worst offenders to good productivity are definitely fun websites and social media. Just 5 minutes checking out a post on social media will end up turning into an hour.
- Set deadlines: How amazingly the brain functions just before your exams. A timed activity will force you to organize your tasks in order of priority. Learn how to focus on your key milestones and just say no to the rest.
- Learn the Ostrich Style: That is the decision to ignore the unwanted and irrelevant information by “burying your head” in the sand like an Ostrich. There are attractive images and colors used to grab the attention which is not even relevant to you. Bury your head!
- Organize and not overwhelm yourself: The key to not getting overwhelmed is to be organized. Create your own bibliography; organize it by topic, type of source, usefulness, or any other criteria that may help you.
- Relevant searching: It’s interesting to see how a search engine tries to calculate the relevance of search results, and find related queries. Using right keywords and relevant terms for your search is definitely going to save you a lot of wandering time. So the search result is Amazon River or the website Amazon depends on your input!
And that’s about it! Happy mental flossing to y ’all!
If you’ve had enough of flossing, stay tuned for a little vacation. Confused? Don’t be. stay curious and read on…
Maansee Bakhrey
Content team
Zuperly
