Three questions to hack your brain out of isolation

In the midst of a pandemic and isolation, there are many ways you can bring happiness and joy to yourself. Even when you’re sitting alone in your living room, there are ways to beat the physical isolation and expand both your brain and your mind.

You can travel.
You can grow.
You can blossom.
You can evolve.

In order to do so here are three questions that you can ask yourself:

1) What can I learn or discover?
2) What can I remember?
3) What can I fix?

What can I learn or discover

Humanity and the world are filled with an infinite number of subjects, ideas and domains to be explored. You could dive into any particular theme or subject, perhaps even randomly, and enrich your knowledge. It could be about history, it could be about food or about a specific individual. It could be about skills or crafts. It could be about machinery and science. It could be anything because everything is within your reach. There are countless hours, days or even years that you could spend enriching your mind and your intellect. That way, you could travel farther than you ever did.

Intellectual curiosity will take you places you’ve never even suspected while blinded by the routine of everyday life.

This is an opportunity to grow and get richer. Furthermore, the more you know the more you come to realize how little you know and how much there still is to discover. Such an attitude will keep you hungry for more knowledge and more intellectual development. Read books. Watch YouTube documentaries or tutorials. Listen to podcasts. Strike a debate with a friend.
Write to experts, they usually are passionate about what they do and are more than willing to share their passion.

Time spent focusing on physical and material limitation is time wasted. Your body and space are finite, your mind is not.

What can I remember?

There are many things that we have learned along the way. Things we learned in school or college. Things we were once told and explained and that we have forgotten over time. Things we used to do or passions we used to have. Places we used to go or skills we used to possess. Many of these things brought us joy and happiness at a certain point in our life, and moving on to different endeavors they were lost along the way. This does not mean that they are less relevant or valuable today. Make time to re-explore them. Today I am a big fan of space science fiction movies, and I know that I attended astrophysics classes when I was in high school. However I have forgotten all the scientific notions that made me once understand the phenomenons I see in those movies. How do you measure gravity again? What’s a supernova again? I only have a vague memory of what the romantic movement in litterature is about…

There must be countless fascinating subjects that we did not value, or not pay sufficient attention to, that we could rediscover. Perhaps through time have you forgotten yourself.

Remembering and re-exploring is the perfect opportunity to find or define yourself again.

What can I fix?

Time, silence and solitude provide a perfect combination for self-exploration. They provide a vacuum allowing you to assess yourself, your habits, your behavior, your attitude and your mentality. Away from exterior perturbation, you are faced with your inner self and all its convolutions. As humans, we have flaws and aspects that could benefit from refinement and improvement. Is it your consummation patterns? Is it your negative mental reflexes such as pessimism, self-doubt or lack of imagination? At one point we’ve all desired for our lives to be different, better. Here is the perfect opportunity to get started on reaching that vision.

Such an endeavor is tricky however. Fixing something is much harder than purchasing something new. It’s harder than simply receiving a brand new working solution from someone else. Fixing sometimes involves a tremendous level of investment, effort, frustration, and often despair but above all resilience. Fixing yourself and improving comes from within. It’s a deeply personal journey through psychology, psychism, and behavioral change. It takes willpower and consistency, attributes that can be developed through self-study and self-awareness.

The more attention you pay to yourself, to your thoughts, to your actions and to your behavior, the more you are able to recognize problematics that you will want to fix.

The more awareness you have, the more corrective actions you can take and the more progress you can make to self-realization. There is no one that knows you better than you, so trust in yourself.

As Andy Dufresne came to realize, “Salvation lies within”.