Our Mind need to go on a diet

Our brains never gets a chance to think in peace, introspect and meta-coginition becomes close to impossible. We fill it up with our busy lives - from emails, blackberries to news, politics leading to overload of bull shit. Neuroscience tells us having a quite time to reflect on helps us find what is important in life (and meaning of life, if anyone is interested). That is why meditation is so necessary for our mind. But having said that meditation is not easy (don't get me started on this!!). Simplest way to meditate is to think of someone who brings smile to your face. Feeling of peace and serenity that encompasses our mind literally tells us that someone is the most important thing in the world. The fringe benefit of this is we find peace, boast our creativity and that "famous" happiness. Most people don't get a chance to contemplate even this simplest fact of life.
Splendid piece by Alain de Botton:

"One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows. We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave a movie theater vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening, our experience is well on the way to dissolution.

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting."