

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Stillness Is the Key" by Ryan Holiday. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Do you struggle with brain fog? What are some things you can do to help quiet the mental noise that prevents you from thinking clearly?
If you have difficulty thinking clearly, you need to eliminate the junk information that muddies your mind and reduce the noise around you. According to Ryan Holiday, the foundation of clear thinking is having a maintenance routine to keep your mind still.
With this in mind, here are some tips on how you can maintain mental clarity.
Maintain Your Mental Clarity
You must keep your mind clear in order to think deeply. While this may sound like a paradox, he explains that it’s not—it means learning to think right, about the right things, by quieting the incessant “chatter” in your mind and learning to consciously control your thoughts. He describes it as similar to fishing: You must be slow, still, and quiet to catch something. In this case, what you’ll “catch” will be creative insights, ideas, and solutions that otherwise would have been buried beneath the junk.
Quieting Your Monkey Mind The incessant mental chatter most of us experience is sometimes referred to in Buddhism as the “Monkey Mind” because it’s like a restless monkey swinging constantly from branch to branch (moving from thought to thought). This constant movement renders us unable to concentrate and have mental peace and stillness. In The Surrender Experiment, Michael A. Singer describes his years-long quest to quiet this chatter in his mind through meditation. But, as Singer would come to realize, we can’t banish the monkey entirely. We must train it to behave in a tamer way so we can live peacefully with it. This is the primary goal of meditation in Zen Buddhism. |
One practice Holiday recommends for maintaining clear thinking is journaling. A daily journaling practice is the mental equivalent of regularly clearing the cobwebs out of your home. It’s no coincidence that almost every creative or intellectual genius in history kept a journal. Many people journal first thing in the morning, and some write again at the end of each day. Just write down any thoughts that come into your head. Holiday says there’s no right or wrong way to journal, but if you practice some amount of freewriting like this every day, it will clear the jumbled thoughts from your mind, allow you to reflect back on your thoughts later, and make room for flashes of insight to come through.

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Here's what you'll find in our full Stillness Is the Key summary:
- Why stillness is not just the absence of motion
- How to cultivate stillness in your mind, body, and soul
- Why you should start ignoring the news