The need for daily mental flossing …

Do you floss daily?

Not just your teeth, but your thoughts?

We actually have as much need (if not more) to mentally floss our thinking each day as we do flossing our teeth. Not flossing your teeth consistently can result in cavities between the teeth, and potentially progressing to gum disease.

Not “flossing” your thoughts daily can lead to mental and emotional health issues, relationship troubles, and functional challenges, and all of that can negatively (even seriously) impact your physical and spiritual health.

The need for daily mental floss might be bigger than you think. Research tells us living in 2023 means the average American is exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 advertisements each day. Lob on top of that all those opinions and thoughts from other people you’re exposed to each day as well. Now add to that the fact research says we have thousands of our own thoughts every day!

That’s still not an adequate picture of what our minds deal with on a daily basis.

Sabine Heim and Andrea Neil reported this for Frontiers for Young Minds: “Scientists have measured the amount of data that enter the brain and found that an average person living today processes as much as 74 GB in information a day (that is as much as watching 16 movies), through TV, computers, cell phones, tablets, billboards, and many other gadgets. Every year it is about 5% more than the previous year. Only 500 years ago, 74 GB of information would be what a highly educated person consumed in a lifetime, through books and stories.”

God has gifted us with wonderful minds, but that amount of daily input is more than our minds can handle well.

Behavioral and data scientist, Pragya Agarwal, explained on National Public Radio, “The human brain can process 11 million bits of information every second. But our conscious minds can handle only 40 to 50 bits of information a second. So our brains sometimes take cognitive shortcuts that can lead to unconscious or implicit bias, with serious consequences for how we perceive and act toward other people.”

Other research shows that about 95 percent of all the thoughts we have in a day are experienced at an unconscious level.

All of that means there’s a lot of stuff rolling around in your mind every day! Some of that stuff is junk that isn’t good for you, but some of the junk will “stick” in our thoughts unless we purposely purge it from our thinking. Thus, the need for daily mental flossing.

There’s no set way to floss your thinking, but I’ll share with you several ways you can check your thoughts each day to maintain a healthy thought life:

The “3 C’s” mental floss exercise. This is using a simple “cognitive restructuring” technique called the “3 C’s” to purposely and consciously examine a thought or thinking. The three “C”s are step 1: Catch it, which means purposely take note of a thought or thoughts you’re having, then 2) Check it, to determine if the thought is accurate and beneficial, and 3) If the thought isn’t accurate or beneficial, Change it. This is a simple but effective way in helping you identify irrational thinking and then “floss” it when you find it.

Learn to have a heightened self-awareness. It’s common for us to hurl ourselves into busyness and not be very conscious of what we’re thinking, or feeling, or even sometimes why we’re doing what we’re doing. By working at becoming more self-aware, you’re able to think more rationally, better direct your thinking, and better regulate your emotions.

Learn to have a heightened other-awareness. Instead of getting the information we need to correctly understand and best engage others, we routinely try to take shortcuts by engaging cognitive distortions about others, such as jumping to conclusions, mind reading, fortune telling, labeling, etc. By putting in the effort to accurately heighten our awareness of others enables us to think more rationally about other people, and our interactions with them.

Use cognitive restructuring techniques to challenge your thinking. There are several very simple (even simplistic) techniques you can learn to help you challenge your thinking to ensure you’re thinking rationally and rightly; when you see when and where you aren’t, you’re then able to change your thinking. A competent counselor can help you learn these techniques, or they can be learned from a multitude of published and online resources.

Daily reconciliations. At the end of a business day, a business person reconciles their cash till and deposits to make sure all the funds they took in are accounted for. If not, it’s important to find and fix the discrepancy, and it’s easier to do that at the end of each day or shift than it is to try to reconcile the financial accounting a few days later. The same is true in our thinking, especially regarding relationships or experiences or activities. If you had a moment of snapping at and exchanging cross words with a friend during the day, it’s better to reconcile the matter the same day, or as soon as possible, than it would be to wait. The longer the wait, the more irrational thinking can become, the deeper wounds can become, the more distant a person can make themselves, and the harder it will be to actually reconcile the relationship to the same healthy place it was.

Daily unwind time. Some people have a temperament need for a daily unwind time – a time to think, dream, regenerate their mental and emotional focus and energy. But whether this is a temperament need or not, we all can benefit by making a little time to have uninterrupted unwind time to recompose and regroup to check our thinking and feelings.

Journaling can be a great way of working out your thoughts and emotions by working them out onto paper or an electronic device. In the process, we sort our thinking, increase our self-awareness, and can see where we might be thinking irrationally, thus needing to make some changes.

A safe and trusted conversation with a spouse or friend during the day or at evening time can provide opportunity to express (and examine) what you’re thinking and feeling, and have a safe and trusted person serve as a “sounding board” to help you check the wisdom and rationality of your thinking.

The Christian practice of spiritual disciplines can be a great way of flossing the mind of junk that shouldn’t be there by instead focusing it on worshiping and communing with God, spending time in the Word of God, having conversations throughout the day with the Lord (prayer). Prioritizing having an intimate and persistently nurtured relationship with the Holy Spirit is important, as it is the Holy Spirit who teaches us God’s truth, guides us in it in this life, and can convict us of sinful thoughts and otherwise ungodly desires that are a poison in our minds.

All of this takes us to a “bottom line”: we all need to floss our minds every day, and doing so isn’t a difficult thing to do. But we’re often lazy and just don’t get it done. What follows are the consequences of leaving junk in your mind to rot your thinking. Your life will be better, healthier, happier, and holier if you just exercise enough self-discipline each day to floss.

Scotty