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精神內耗
There is a popular psychological concept from the Chinese speaking world known as 精神內耗 jīngshén nèihào, best translated as “wasting one’s internal energy.” 精神 jīngshén means vitality, vigor, or drive, your mental state, and 內耗 nèihào is a term that comes from mechanics and refers to the energy that is consumed by a machine without producing any output. So jīngshén nèihào is a state of psychological imbalance in which someone overthinks, hesitates, and worries about outcomes, possibilities, and performance rather than performing any action. Thus, opportunities pass them by.
Those who are susceptible to wasting their internal energy tend to have high (often unreasonably high) expectations of themselves and are sensitive to how they appear in the eyes of others. The anxiety that they experience in the process of considering an action, whether it will measure up to their own standards or with how they want to be viewed by others, eats away at their time and energy, leaving very little left to actually perform the action that they have been obsessing over. The result of this behavior is a self-fulfilling prophecy in which bad outcomes lead to increasing self-criticism, and a cycle begins of one worrying about bad outcomes, missing opportunities, and ensuring that those bad outcomes come to pass. So when we think badly of ourselves and perform badly, we thus prove to ourselves that we are not capable of reaching our standards.
平常心
The mindset that resolves 精神內耗 jīngshén nèihào is what is called 平常心 píngcháng xīn. This is a concept that comes from Buddhism, and though it literally translates as “normal mind,” it means taking a more casual approach to your life and everything you do. First of all, it is a state that a person cultivates through sustained cognitive-behavioral change (in Buddhism, they will suggest meditation to achieve this), and it is not so simple as the admonition to “stop overthinking.” It is sort of similar to the psychological concept of “flow state” but with less focus on excellence or creativity. The Dharma Drum Mountain 法鼓山 Fǎgǔ Shān (a Taiwanese international Buddhist organization) posted an entry on their website to provide a brief explanation of the concept: it is the ability to face risks without evaluating whether the result will be good or bad. Because life will always be full of crises and unpredictable, a person must cultivate steadiness in order to live without falling into psychological distress. Píngcháng xīn is a kind of path toward wisdom.
So there is no simple solution to the problem of wasting one’s internal energy. It takes a lot of effort to cultivate a more casual approach toward life, clinging less to anticipating what obstacles may appear, our appearance in the minds of others, and unreasonably high standards for ourselves that may not even be the product of our own values but rather the product of social conditioning, and all the other elements outside of our control.
I’ve rarely seen these two concepts translated into Western psychological terms, but I believe that the idea of wasting one’s internal energy, which is an anxious cognitive behavior, is incredibly common in the younger generations, as a result of increasing financial pressures and consequences. The idea that one’s life can be completely ruined beyond recovery by picking the wrong major in university, picking the wrong person to marry, picking the wrong career, having children too early or too late or not at all, fosters huge anxiety that prevents people from moving forward or taking any risk. As someone who has made all the so-called wrong choices in all of these areas (and sometimes more than once), it is incredibly tempting to fall into the bad habit of wasting my internal energy on agonizing over these choices and ruminating on past mistakes. However, when I take the time to look around me at each present moment, I find that my life is actually enjoyable: peaceful and relatively low stress, with a place of my own to come home to, always with plenty of food in the fridge, with mostly kind and low-drama people being a part of my life. I find that even after the “wrong” choices, I still have so much energy to enjoy this life, and nothing has been “ruined” by those experiences.
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