Insanity Lessons: Be Aware of Your Sensory Input

One of the things I've come to learn is that my environment Can affect my mood. 

For example, playing classical music or jazz or just something familiar can be much more comforting and calming then, say, playing Death Metal or - shudder - Talk Radio.  Of course, those are my personal preferences, and yours are likely to differ.  I think I might be the rare person who can appreciate both Phillip Glass and The Pogues.  You may also think of this as, "There's music to dance to, music to study by, and music to ease you into sleep."

This idea is not just limited to background music, though.  The temperature of the room, the lighting, the arrangement of the furniture, the presence or lack of clutter...  anything our senses key in on - they will, and that feeds back into our brain's processing and thinking.  One of the effective Buddhist meditation practices, in my humble opinion, is to sit, looking at a  blank wall - as that really keeps you from being distracted by visual input, like the other people in your Sangha.  Also, it's a lot easier to meditate when the background noises are minimal. 

So, I find I like to arrange my environment, when I can, mostly to reduce stress, but also to nudge my thoughts a little in the direction I want to go. 

I call this an "Insanity Lesson" because it's one of those ideas I picked up in the midst of a major mania.  Locked up in the PICU of Shoal Creek in '96, I noticed the difference in the behavior of our angry patient when we changed the radio station in the day room.