May 25, 2020
Our Mind’s Immune System
This post is in response to gstine9’s post “Letting Your Guard Down in a Time of Crisis.” First off, I want to mention that I love the idea of depicting the ego as the mind’s immune system. In many ways it really is. It protects our mind from incoming criticism and failure, to keep it from getting too hindered by possibly negative influences, just like our immune system fights off sicknesses for us.
just like our immune system fights off diseases, our ego fights off criticism. image via portugalresident.com
Our body’s immune system can be strengthened by a good diet, exercise, and enough time spent in the fresh air. Originally, for early humans, those things all came naturally, to some degree. Their diet was balanced because the nature around them was balanced, and that is where they got their food from. They got sufficient exercise from hunting and gathering food, from traveling on foot their whole lives, and they were outside enough because, well, that was all there was. But as us humans evolved and changed our environment around us to our “benefit”, we brought it all more and more out of balance. Our lives rarely exist outside anymore to a point where leaving the house becomes an activity. We have to actively make sure our diet is balanced, simply because we have too many options. That reminds me of the pictures we looked at in class, of families around the world, sitting behind the food they would eat within a week. Families from cultures where life is less urbanised tended to have more fresh food, local food. And families from highly commercialised places had more packaged and preserved food, a lot of it seeming to be imported from other countries. It was easy to see which families were healthier, and probably had more stable immune systems. I believe that our ego is affected similarly. To come back to the early humans, back then our ego depended mostly on how strong you were, how fast you could take down an animal, how good you are at gathering food and providing safety. But as we evolved everything got more complicated. Our ego now depends on new concepts and new factors, on our grades, our clothes, our money, our humor, our looks, most of which didn’t even exist in our species’ original times. While all those things boost our ego, their absence or fluctuation from the norm can really hurt it. So I just hope that, during times like these, we don’t only take care of our physical immune system, and don’t forget to look after the mental one.