Albert Wenger

Psychological freedom is just understanding that our brains evolved over millions of years in an environment where when you saw a cat, there was an actual cat.

And now I can show you an infinity of cat pictures, right?

And each time your brain sees a cat, it's like, oh, it's a cat.

And so, so much of our brain circuitry is...

susceptible to cheap prompts whether it's cat pictures or whether it's some highly emotional video or even the emotional headline and our brain also has the capability of rational thought and it rational thought and language um which just makes us unique i mean you know

Dogs are amazing, but they don't write books.

And whales are incredible, but they don't write books.

So that part of the ability to write a book, to read a book, and so forth, that part of our brain is a part that requires a certain amount of effort.

And so psychological freedom is all about living in a world where you can constantly be bombarded with information that all it tries to do is hijack your attention, hijack your emotions,

put you in some kind of emotional state that will then keep, as you pointed out, will keep you engaged with some system, whether that's YouTube or Facebook or whatnot.

Psychological freedom is what is it that you can do as an individual to not be so susceptible to that?

And, you know, it's become a cliche word, but I do think mindfulness is sort of the single key to this, which is have some kind of mindfulness practice for yourself.

And

What that is for any one person, I don't want to prescribe because different things work for different people.

I've tried meditation for years, couldn't make it work.

I now do very simple breathing exercises.

I do them every morning, every evening.

They've transformed my life.

So...

I think there are other tricks.