Conditioning your mind to have better experiences

[An young being]

Many people come to a saturation point after arriving at the conclusion that they have experienced everything in life. For some people, this turns out to be good as they stop seeking new experiences and try to lead a quiet and peaceful life, by trying to live in the present and cherishing the life they already have. But many other people get bored out of life, especially when it seems like there is nothing more to experience. For such people, there are few ways you can use to find new and infinite experiences, all fresh and hot.

Before knowing the ways, it's important to know how our mind gets conditioned and becomes bored easily. Our mind adapts to any experience and make it as the standard to compare to for all future experiences. While this is helpful as a survival mechanism for scientific and technological development, by helping us constantly seek out better experiences and thus better ideas, it is nowhere helpful to let us having fun with new and already available experiences. Here are some ways you can break such conditioning:

1. Recognise that your beliefs affect what experiences you can have in a tremendous way. In other words, be open minded to new experiences.

People are exposed constantly to new experiences from childhood. What we are exposed to depends on various factors such as culture, family upbringing, language, religion, etc. Based on our exposure, we tend to develop a liking to a particular set of experiences and make it as hobbies or source of entertainment or even work of passion. For example, if you are in US, you are mostly exposed to Hollywood films. If you and your father watched sci-fi films together, you will further restrict yourself to Hollywood sci-fi films. If you develop a liking for a particular actor, this will further be fine down to watching Hollywood sci-fi films of that particular actor. While it's not a bad thing to have favourites, your mind might try to restrict yourself to those particular titles without giving a chance to explore others. We make a judgement that something is not good based on our conditioning without experiencing it first hand. You may never have watched a Korean horror movie, but yet have already decided that it would be bad and I wouldn't watch it at any cost.By forcing ourself to explore new experiences, by pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zone, we can find that there are many more things in life we like, and would like to experience. You don't have to watch the horror movies further if you don't like, but without watching them at all or by watching one or two movies, if you come to the conclusion that all horror movies are bad, you will be missing out a lot. The same applies to all kinds of experiences.

2. Forget what you have experienced to experience it anew

Imagine eating your favourite food for everyday in a week. The food no longer gives you the same joy that you had when you first tasted it and it may even go out of your favorites list. Imagine travelling to your favourite location every day. It no longer stays your favourite as you get bored with living the same experience again and again. If you leave a good gap between such experiences, the experience would look fresh and new. So, the less often you indulge in your favourite experiences, the more joyful it would become.

3. Diversify your experiences

Now, if you follow the first advice, you would have been open to enormous choices and found new and multiple experiences. Now, the trick is not to get addicted to a single thing and avoid all other experiences. Allocating some fixed free time each day for each experience or hobby is a good way to diversify your experiences, as overdoing or restricting yourself to a single experience might lead to boredom and won't give you the same happiness as having multiple experiences. There are some exceptions, especially if you can be in a flow state during the experience. For such experiences, allocating more time for them and less time for other experiences might help. This also helps you to forget, and achieves the goal of second point.

4. Start from the average ones and from the past

We mostly seek out the best experiences to be had, if it's available to us through time and money. If there is very limited time available with us and if we choose the best experiences to relish during that time, it's not a bad idea. But for those with more time, seeking the best experiences right away is an ideal way to get bored. Take the example of video games. We always see the reviews of which is the best ( and there is a lot of bias within these reviews) and select the latest and the best ones. After playing all of that, when we move to less rated and old ones, we judge it comparing to the best ones or find the experience to be less satisfying or reject them. This is applicable to a variety of experiences such as movies, travel destinations, adventure activities, books, YouTube videos, forums, websites, hotels , food and many others. The best way to experience everything with equal enthusiasm is to start from the average and the oldest experiences, depending on how much time you have, and move towards the best ones. Before that, you have to forget what you had already experienced as the best by fasting yourself without that experience for a few weeks to months, depending on how good you are at forgetting. If you feel missing out the best ones, you can choose experiences randomly instead of choosing only the best ones, or you can experience the best ones once in a while.

That's it, hope you find new and interesting experiences with these ideas!