My last post was on the physical aspects of my 4 day fast. Today I am going to discuss the “Mental aspects”!
Should you do a 4 day fast for mental clarity? This is an interesting question. I have heard many people say that they have clarity and better decision making from longer fasts, but honestly it wasn’t an area I had thought much about before.
During my 4 day fast, I continued my daily meditation practice, as well as had the opportunity to hang out on separate days with two like minded friends. Not only in deep conversation with them, but also in reflection on my own, I had some serious insights.
I could write a few thousand words on what those insights were, but for now, I’ll just mention a handful:
a) the primal human need for connection and relationships,
b) the fact that we as individuals make thousands of decisions a day, and every one of those has the ability to change the trajectory of our pursuit of our goals,
c) how we justify a decision to do something else that may be more rewarding in the short-term but actually detrimental to our long-term goals
d) how many suffer from deep cognitive bias that any view point that is different from their own is too difficult to deal with, that they avoid it altogether
e) was I trying to prove reliance or something to myself or naysayers by embarking on this experiment
Some pretty heady topics for sure.
What I hadn’t anticipated from this 4 day fast was the clarity of decision making and the insights that came to me on the later days of the fast.
Did I have some of my insights because I was in a fast? I am not sure, but I can swear that they did come to me while I was fasting. This is what I found most interesting about the experience.
It made me look into if longer fasts can result in more focus. Some studies suggest that is in fact the case, and reinforces what I had heard from other people.
The mental clarity that came was in all areas of my life, beyond what I listed above, I saw business decisions differently, I viewed my friends differently, I saw world events differently, I even shed some new light on various relationships.
It also made me question why people go through periods of being unclear in the first place? I have begun to look at different aspects of my everyday life to analyze what contributes to unclear thinking and what helps me optimize my thinking and decision making.
That mental clarity was absolutely worth the 4 day fast to me, and aside from the physical challenges I wrote in part one, why I think you owe it to yourself to give it a try at least once. If you would like to learn how to incorporate fasting into your life for overall health, mental clarity and better decision making as I did, lets connect.
