this is how i (try to) avoid mindless consumption

4 ways to distinguish mindfulness from mindlessness

I still remember the exact moment when I realised I had stopped living my life. I described to the therapist sitting across from me that everything felt the same, every day was just another day, I felt like a passive audience member in an auditorium watching my life go by on a giant projector.

I’ve since understood what I needed to do to stop my life from feeling like someone else’s I was watching on film, but that feeling still creeps up sometimes in a different way. I find myself in times of passiveness, of not wanting to do much of anything, and other times I feel like I’ve come back to life a little. Sometimes I am ready to be mindful, and other times I am mindless. But I’ve come to learn that that is okay. Like the wind, I come and go.

What I’ve found to be important is honouring these two states of mind. I used to beat myself up during my mindless phases, berate myself about being too lazy to work hard for my goals and constantly feel bad about myself. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t just get up and do the things I wanted to do. And when I was in my mindful phases, I always thought it would last forever.

Now that I’ve recognised these states of myself, I am kinder to myself and know how to fill my days to suit my needs. I make sure to have clear distinctions between mindful and mindless mode, so I can respect my internal ebbs and flows. When I am feeling mindful, I start my mornings with stream-of-consciousness journaling, reading for an hour and walking on my treadmill for 30 minutes. When I’m not feeling so good, I might head straight into a session of diamond painting with a YouTube video on in the background and remember not to give myself grief for wanting to lie down on the sofa in the middle of the day.

But it can be easy to slip into long bouts of mindless mode with how the world is set up around us. Everything is conducive to long periods of mindlessness. It’s too easy to waste a day on TikTok or scrolling through your recommended feed on YouTube. It’s too easy to feel defeated after looking at your Instagram feed to the point where everything else in life looks like someone turned down the saturation a little. I now give myself permission to be mindless when I need it, but it can take a little bit of effort to pull myself out of it when everything pretty much tells you to stay on that couch and consume.

This is why I make a point to be an active participant when I am feeling mindful, so that my breaks feel equally as productive. When I rest, I feel as though I am truly taking a break from the effort I make when I am an active participant in my own life. Sometimes you just need to throw a frozen pizza in the oven and call it a day. Sometimes binge-watching Love Island is a fine choice. We all need moments to be mindless and rest, but it’s how we distinguish and switch between the two that counts.

Here are some ways I avoid mindless consumption:

only using the subscriptions feed on youtube

I think I’ve genuinely spent longer scrolling through my recommended feed on YouTube sometimes rather than actually watching a video. And then ended up not watching anything at all. If I think about all the times I’ve done that and how much time I have wasted, I will absolutely have an existential crisis. So I won’t. But I will tell you to make the most of your subscriptions feed instead. Because your subscriptions feed, unlike everything else, will eventually come to an end.

Everything is endless. There may be a finite number of things to watch on Netflix, for example, but it sure doesn’t seem that way. People upload 2.6 million videos to YouTube every day. (Does that make anyone else feel a bit queasy?) You could quite literally scroll that recommended feed forever. But you will start to see the same videos pop up on your subscriptions feed (and your recommended feed to be honest, it is shockingly bad but that’s not the point right now) signalling the end of your interest and that is the point where you may close your laptop and do something a little more productive.

It’s my own little way of bringing chronological following feeds back into my life. And this applies to other places like Substack. As soon as I see a Note I’ve already seen on my following tab, I know it’s time to close the app.

making notes after watching or reading something

It’s very easy for me to sit for a long time and read back-to-back essays on Substack. Some of the stuff on here is just too good. But I don’t want to read these pieces, or other pieces online in general, in vain. There’s nothing more annoying than hearing something come up in conversation and knowing that you read a piece on that recently, but have nothing to give because it’s muddled up in the other 26 articles you read that day.

The world is overflowing with content (like “productivity”, I need another word for “content” I really hate it now), and it’s no longer about trying to find what’s good but rather what to ignore and what to give your attention to. And when you make the effort to only give the things that matter to you your attention, you don’t want those things to fade into the background.

I’m currently reading all about love by bell hooks and in the same way that I leave a sticky note after every chapter to consolidate what I’ve just read, I like to do something similar after watching a video or reading a good article. This way, I’m not just attending the lecture and forgetting about it when I get home; I’m taking personalised notes that I can look back on multiple times and feel like I’m actually taking in the information I just consumed. Otherwise, I’d just move on to the next and completely forget what I just learned.

creating art out of the things i consume

I’ve mentioned this one before here, but creating bullet journal spreads after reading certain books has helped me to remember just a little bit more about what I read. This is also a great alternative to feeling like I need to write an academic-grade essay on a particular theme of the book and try to sound really smart while doing it because I’m doing it for performative reasons. Instead, I can just write a couple of basic sentences on my general thoughts on the book and concentrate on making the pages of my bullet journal coincide with its themes and, most importantly, making it look pretty.

It’s a lot easier to avoid mindless reading by no longer setting reading goals, but by making time to write or create something about the books I read, I don’t just put one down and pick another one straight up again without thinking. Creating art in between books helps me to slow down and enjoy the process of engaging with art.

One of my readers mentioned how they’re thinking of making collages after reading books, which I think is a lovely way to make something creative while engaging with someone else’s art. You could even just draw a simple picture or write a story based on one of the characters. Find ways to stay immersed in the world of that book for just a little longer. Just because you’ve finished reading the book doesn’t mean the story has to end.

reading back on the notes i’ve collected

When I realised that school was basically just about memorising a bunch of facts and knowing how to insert keywords into exam answers, I was really annoyed about it. This isn’t learning! I’d yell—in my head. What’s the point in just memorising all these useless facts I’m never going to use in my life? Now, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely still feel this way about maths. I don’t care how stupid or ignorant I sound, I will never care about numbers, and to this day, I have never needed that blasted quadratic equation.

That being said, exercising that old hippocampus is the only way you’re going to be able to piece ideas and thoughts together and appear like that master’s degree wasn’t a complete waste of time and money. It’s all good and well taking a load of notes after interesting YouTube videos and jotting down ideas from books you thought were intriguing, but writing them down doesn’t mean you’re done. You have to revisit the notes, reread the notes, make new notes even. You can’t leave these ideas to sit in the notes app; you have to drop in every now and again with a cup of tea and see how they’re doing, whether new connections can be made, whether they still make sense to you or not.

This is the one I struggle with the most, if I’m honest. Sometimes I look back on notes I’ve made and find that I actually don’t understand whatever it was that I understood at the time. This opens up another opportunity to learn.

And isn’t that what is so magical about life? There is always something to learn, and I, for one, want to find every excuse to do that.

a mindful morning (2025)

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hello quiet readers, thank you for reading today’s post! do you also agree that it’s much too easy to be a passive participant in life nowadays? the pull of consumption seems to be growing, but on the bright side, i’ve been seeing a lot of people try to make the effort to disengage from overconsumption, whether that’s with our shopping baskets or time spent online. i’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

also, if you’d like to hear more about how i’m trying to live a more intentional life (and you also crave a little bit of creative writing on substack!), consider upgrading your subscription to gain access to my journal series where i share more about my slower-paced life and lots of nature walks!

thank you for being here, i’ll see you next week <3