Empty Calories for the Soul
What we’re feeding our inner lives, and why it’s leaving us anxious, numb, and unfulfilled
It’s all over the news: processed foods are bad for you.
We’re told to watch the ingredients list, avoid empty calories, cut back on sugar, and pay attention to what we’re putting into our bodies. The message is consistent and familiar. What we consume shapes how we feel, how we function, and how well we hold up over time.
“Make America Healthy Again” becomes a rallying cry, and for good reason.
But there’s a blind spot hiding in plain sight.
While we scrutinize our physical diet, we give remarkably little attention to what we’re consuming psychologically. We scroll, absorb, react, and stimulate ourselves all day long, then act surprised when anxiety creeps in, motivation drops, and a low-grade sense of depletion settles in.
We treat these states as personal failures or chemical glitches, instead of asking a more basic question:
What if they’re symptoms of what we’re feeding our inner lives?
Most people already understand how empty calories work in the body. They fill you up without nourishing you, spike energy and leave you crashing, and create craving while delivering less and less in return.
We do the same thing mentally: we fill our days, our attention, our time, and in the process, we starve something essential.
What We’re Actually Feeding
In early Buddhist psychology, there is a word that captures this entire inner domain: citta.
Citta refers to the whole field of internal experience. Not just thoughts. Not just emotions. Not something narrowly spiritual. It includes mood, perception, intention, attention, reactivity, and the quiet sense of meaning that organizes how you move through the world.
A Western parallel might be the psyche. A systems thinker might call it an inner ecology, an environment that can be nourished, depleted, inflamed, or restored.
Citta is not a part of you. It is the condition of your inner ecosystem. And like any ecosystem, what you feed it matters.
Living on Junk Food for the Citta
Just as sugar spikes blood glucose, we spike the citta with quick hits.
Short videos. Endless scrolls. “Just checking” the news, which somehow turns into a full-body stress response. Cycles of outrage, fear, stimulation, and urgency that feel important and impossible to turn away from.
You know the feeling.
You’re not enjoying it anymore, but you keep going. Thumb moving. Eyes dry. Jaw tight. When you finally stop, the room feels too quiet, like someone shut off a generator you didn’t realize you were depending on.
White bread sits in the gut like filler. Soft. Puffy. Turning into paste. We do something similar to the citta when we spend night after night on the couch, not resting, but avoiding. Killing time. Letting days blur together. Forgetting what you actually did with your life that week.
It takes the edge off. It fills the space.
And you still feel heavy when you stand up.
Salt, in excess, drives the body into pressure. We do the same thing in our heads with overthinking disguised as responsibility. Rehearsing the future as if rehearsal will prevent pain. Lists inside lists. Calendars inside calendars. A constant low-grade tightening that makes stillness feel unsafe.
Trans fats damage the body slowly enough that you can pretend nothing is happening. Toxic relationships work the same way.
Conversations where you walk on eggshells.
Dynamics where honesty feels risky and silence feels safer.
Interactions that replay in your head long after the call ends.
The damage is cumulative, not dramatic, which makes it easy to ignore and hard to heal.
Artificial additives create a false self. A mask that performs, adapts, stays pleasant, stays competent, stays “fine.” It helps you function socially, but it isn’t nourishment. Over time, it disconnects the citta from its own signals, because those signals start being treated as inconveniences rather than information.
Most people already know what isn’t nourishing their citta.
They can name it. They can feel it.
They just keep consuming it anyway.
What a Malnourished Citta Looks Like
The signs are subtle at first.
Busy but unfulfilled. Stimulated but ungrounded. Informed but disoriented. Digitally connected and psychologically disconnected.
Anxiety rises. Motivation drops. Loneliness deepens.
Depression often shows up not as drama, but as dullness. Exhaustion becomes baseline. A quiet “what’s the point?” settles in, not loud enough to be a crisis, but constant enough to shape a life.
This isn’t a failure of insight. It’s a failure of nourishment. This is what citta malnutrition looks like.
What Actually Nourishes the Citta
The citta isn’t fed by consumption. It’s fed by participation.
Nourishment comes from activities that ask something of you, that require presence instead of absorption.
Meaningful connection does this. Not contact, but presence. Real conversation that steadies you instead of overstimulating you, that leaves you more oriented to your life, not less.
Responsibility that builds strength does this. Being needed in ways that matter. The kind of tired that feels clean because it came from doing something that actually counts.
Creative expression does this. Writing, building, teaching, growing, making. Not for applause or validation, but because something inside needs movement.
Mindful and spiritual practices do this when they are not used to escape, numb, or manage mood. Not techniques to calm the vibe. Not nature as anesthesia. But practices that train the citta to remain present without tightening.
These things take effort. They require attention and participation.
They nourish. They build capacity. They restore alignment.
They don’t just fill time.
Where People Get Stuck
This is where many people stall.
They have insight, but no follow-through. They prioritize awareness over action. They can name their habits, their patterns, their unhealthy dynamics with precision.
They read the articles. They listen to the podcasts. They talk about the importance of change with their therapist.
And nothing changes.
Years pass. The inner diet stays the same, just with better vocabulary.
Insight does not nourish the citta if the diet remains unchanged. Awareness alone is not food. Reflection and introspection can easily become a hiding place.
Insight that never leaves your head is commentary.
Change doesn’t happen because you understand something. It happens because you feed a different system.
What This Looked Like for Me
Last week, I lost sleep over the political climate in this country. The kind of night where you keep checking the clock, and it’s always later than it should be.
The shootings in Minnesota rattled me in a way scrolling could not resolve. I felt the pull to keep consuming, refreshing, absorbing outrage and fear like junk food for the citta.
Wired. Hollow. No closer to agency than when I started.
Instead, I stopped. I slowed down. I researched. I wrote. I built something.
I stopped consuming the news and redirected that energy into meaning and agency. I created AuthoritarianDrift.com, a site that examines early warning signs, normalization, and acceptance around the political shifts unfolding in our country.
That shift changed everything. I didn’t just react. I metabolized the concern.
That’s the difference between empty calories and nourishment.
Another Example
Every Tuesday, I teach Tai Chi for fall prevention for people over sixty.
From the outside, it looks like service. Like I’m giving. But what actually happens is engagement. Full attention. Responsibility. Presence.
If my mind wanders, I lead people in the wrong direction, literally.
That kind of focus stabilizes the citta. Not because it’s relaxing, but because it’s engaging.
That’s what real nourishment does. It doesn’t anesthetize you. It strengthens you.
Feed Something Different
This isn’t about perfection. Or cutting out everything unhealthy from your life.
It’s about substitution.
One different choice. One small shift.
Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” ask, “What am I feeding my citta?”
Instead of consuming another article, have a real conversation. Instead of scrolling, build something. Instead of rehearsing change, enact one small piece of it.
You become what you consistently consume.
Not just physically, but in the condition of your inner life.
And if you don’t like how you feel, how you function, or who you’re becoming, the answer is rarely more insight.
Insight without action is still empty.
Feed something different.
