Consume mindfully: the four nutriments

Look at what you take in — food, media, intentions, the moods around you — as nourishment for yourself and for the world.

Por que funciona

The fifth of the Five Mindfulness Trainings, Nourishment and Healing, asks practitioners to look deeply into the four kinds of nutriments — edible food, sense impressions, volition and consciousness — and to avoid products that carry toxins, naming certain websites, games, programmes and conversations alongside alcohol and drugs. It also names the motive it is watching for: covering up loneliness, anxiety or other suffering by losing oneself in consumption. The Fourteen Trainings extend this outward, asking members to behave responsibly as consumers and citizens. The engaged move is that consumption is never private: what one takes in shapes one’s own mind, and what one buys shapes the collective body the training names alongside the personal one.

Como fazer

1. For one week, notice what you reach for when you feel restless, lonely or low — food, a feed, a show, a purchase.
2. After each, ask the training’s question: did this nourish me, or did it bring something toxic into my body or mind?
3. Choose one source of “sense impressions” that reliably leaves you agitated, and set a specific limit on it.
4. Choose one purchase you make regularly, and look into the chain behind it — who made it, at what cost to them and to the earth.
5. At the end of the week, notice what the limit freed up, and whether it changed your mood or your attention.

Evidência

The training’s wording is on the Plum Village Five Mindfulness Trainings page; the consumer-and-citizen language is the Eleventh of the Fourteen Trainings. Hunt and colleagues randomly assigned 143 undergraduates to limit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to 10 minutes per platform per day or use them as usual for three weeks; the limited group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression compared with the control group. (rct)

The trial tested a related modern practice — limiting three social media apps — in one group of US undergraduates over three weeks; it did not test the mindfulness training, and its result applies to one kind of “sense impression” only. Plum Village also has a separate mindful eating practice; this one is about consumption in the wider sense.

Fontes

• Plum Village. The Five Mindfulness Trainings (revised 15 June 2022), with an introduction by Thich Nhat Hanh. plumvillage.org.
• Plum Village. The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings of the Order of Interbeing (revised version presented by Thich Nhat Hanh, February 2012). plumvillage.org.
• Hunt, M. G., Marx, R., Lipson, C., & Young, J. (2018). No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 37(10), 751–768.

Erro comum

Turning the training into a list of banned things and a running score of failures — it asks you to look deeply at what each thing does to you and others, which is what makes a limit feel like care rather than punishment.