Last month I caught myself endlessly scrolling reels at 2 a.m, asking is it good or bad? and realised it wasn’t me doing it. It was someone else in my head: the Hungry mind.

My inner world has a management team. I thought I was the CEO - turns out, I’m not

There are uncountable members in our brains, today we will try to know one of them:

Hungry mind: The part of my brain that is an always-on driver, constantly craving for food, sex, safety, wealth, validation, status, health, happiness, etc. I often call them needs and wants.

Me: The reflective passenger who thinks I’m in charge.

For years I assumed I was the driver. Turns out the driver is fully autonomous and rarely waits for my instructions.

Before we proceed, I want to highlight. I am not a neuroscience or meditation expert. Whatever I am sharing are simple concepts from my own experience.

Energy budget

I’ve come to believe I am not given the driver seat because the brain operates on a tight energy budget.

Human brain gets 20 watts, the same as a dim light bulb, yet it performs some of the most complex tasks in the known universe.

For comparison, training large AI models like GPT-4 took 2.28 billion watts (just for training). This puts into perspective just how energy-efficient the human brain is.

Both, me and the Hungry mind, operate independently, often with different goals, speeds, and triggers. Hungry mind is driving on a route to a pre-planned destination (cravings) but I expect it to change paths in-realtime as I wish, which is an incredibly energy-intensive task. It’s like slamming the brakes on the car suddenly! The friction between the tires and the track is not only loud but deeply felt. Similarly, the friction between me and Hungry mind is perceived physically and emotionally.

You might be wondering then how did the Hungry mind learnt to be hungry for rewards? It started when I was in womb, all the prompts I got since then till now shaped my entire mind. 90% of the brain gets developed by the age of 5, so the heavy lifting happens when we were children. We also casually call it conditioning and assume it cannot be un-conditioned. But the truth is that is can be updated.

From this frame of reference, I began to understand that every decision the brain makes is first constrained by its energy budget. Based on this limitation, tasks are selectively executed. To optimize performance, the brain uses a clever trick: it delegates frequently repeated actions to the hungry mind, allowing them to run nearly on autopilot. This mirrors the concept introduced in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, where System 1 handles fast, automatic responses. It's estimated that only about 5% of the brain’s energy is reserved for deliberate, reflective thinking – the part I often associate with my conscious self: “me,” “I,” or my personality.

Stress Debt

Every time reality is better than my expectations, my brain is rewarded with a lot of happy molecules and every time it's not, I get a reward prediction error

So you might suggest the solution is easy, simply have no or less expectations. haha!

The moment I understood this concept I also understood I felt sad for being rejected by a talented potential employee, it is the reward prediction error at play. I expected them to join my startup but reality disagreed. I observed I spend a lot of my daily time in working with so many of these reward prediction errors.

These reward prediction errors if unprocessed pile up as "stress debt" in my brain. Think of it like a mental overdraft: every time you overdraw your energy budget (the brain’s ~20 watts) without replenishing it, the debt grows, impairing your ability to function optimally.

We reached a destination I didn’t expected, so who’s responsible? the driver or the passenger? or their relationship?

Maybe that's why some people define intelligence as the ability to predict the future accurately. The dreams, goals, desires, wants, needs etc all are reward predictions and everything I do, is an act to validate them and make them a reality.

Upon observation I found that winners manage their stress debt really well, in-fact they just don’t manage it they leverage it to their advantage. Signal for high agency.

Stress debt could be a great signal to identify if hungry mind and I are struggling. It's a signal of internal friction caused due to low watts. Neither of them is at fault, it's simply lack of watts and un-real exceptions.

So this is what happens:

I expect a reward
Reality disagrees
Reward prediction error!! Brain flags a training task - expensive!
I obsess, fire more predictions, burn more watts.
Stress debt balloons; motivation stalls.
Cut to me negotiating with scrolling reels at 2 a.m. like it holds the meaning of life.

Internal Freedom

Internal freedom is the power to choose what I think and feel, without needing the world around me to change. This happens when I don't need the driver to stop the car and I can still feel control over the ride. I think the closest flavour of internal freedom in my daily life is Flow state. In the Flow state, all my attention, emotion, and skill line up, losing track of time. A more technical defintion would be "Flow is the sweet spot where challenge and skill match so well that you become totally absorbed in what you’re doing, self-doubt drops away, the clock seems to vanish, and each move unfolds naturally from the one before."

During flow state, Hungry mind becomes my best friend

It's like perfect drive towards a mountain. The peak of the mountain is clearly visible. Hungry mind is driving the car, and I am sitting on the passenger seat. We both are listening to music and enjoying the view. Instead of making the driver uncomfortable while he is trying his best to drive, I become the best passenger.

Fully trusting and surrendering to the driver. That also might sound like “Listen to your intuition; it already knows.” - Steve Jobs. Think about it the Hungry mind is trained on the data points since I was born. Who else is best suited to take decisions?

You might be wondering but when will the driver actually ask for my suggestions? I might have some highly valuable data points for it.

Hungry mind is by-default tuned to the present moment, all the attention is in driving. In the flow state, I am not thinking about past or future, since I am fully engaged with the driver. I consider myself as a co-pilot during this state. All energy budget gets utilised in one direction. When the car is parked or I convince the driver to park, we have a conversation and we update the mental models. It could be during sleep, meditation or whenever Hungry mind and I have less friction.

So when I find myself overthinking now, instead of labelling it as a bad thing, which will cause friction with the Hungry mind hence more stress debt, I wouldn’t try to resist it at all. I would welcome the Hungry mind to collaborate in overthinking.

You know what, the overthinking turns out be such a valuable task if done without resistance.

Perhaps more than evaluating the task at hand as good or bad, what is more crucial is to not have unnecessary friction between me and Hungry mind.

I have experienced flow state many times, probably more consistently while I was child. But upon growing up I guess I collected a lot of stress debt, by firing unrealistic expectations which made it difficult to park the car and work of my relationship with the Hungry mind. I have experimented a lot, and I can conclude there are some algorithms that have worked for me:

Conscious constants - constant people, food, places, music, workouts etc
Needs or Wants
Pain or Pleasure
Meditation
Spending time in nature

Conscious constants

The reason I resorted to scrolling reels at 2 am was because the happy molecule reward was certain

Both me and Hungry mind were certain about the reward. Hungry mind learned to crave because some choices provided guaranteed reward during the time of unbearable conflict. over time these became my defaults. A lot of tasks like going to same property we call our homes, calling our best friends at midnight, playing a song for a specific mood, going for a walk on that specific road etc balanced out the stress debt

Constants add minimal or no stress debt and sometimes reduce it whereas variables that bring dopamine hits can create more stress debt

Conscious constants bring in the happy moments with the Hungry mind even if we are struggling rest of the times.

After much experimentation, I have some chosen some constant people who I would speak to regularly, constant food, constant exercise regime etc

It’s not boring at all, if you consciously choose them. In-fact I can go deeper in each one of them.

And sometimes I would try variables, by choice not compulsion. and all of that is simply cherry on top

They not only keeps my stress debt low but let me welcome the stress debt from the activities where I need it. Startups are extremely less predictable, so I need the capacity to welcome a lot of stress debt there.

Need or Want

Needs

Basic fuel. Without these, the car breaks down. The system crashes. No peak. No peace. No power. These are table stakes and takes the 95% of the watts.

Examples: Hunger (not gourmet craving - just joules). Sleep (not Netflix until 2 a.m.). Movement (not six-packs - just moving). Breathing. Peeing on time. Pooping regularly. Yep, that too. Talking to loved ones.

For these tasks, I am prepared to have a conversation with the driver during the drive, and stop the music for a while.

An extremely ambitious long term goal

This one thing is a deliberately chosen want that I treat as a need. I am ready to lose my peace for this one. As Naval says, “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want."

You might wonder, then having no desires is the solution? Theoretically sure but practically, having minimum desires might be a better approach

Wants

Good to haves. Brain can still be happy and peaceful without them.

Being loved, respected, understood by everyone. Million followers. Million dollars. Prove a point to the school-mate I was jealous of. Six-pack abs (my kidneys are like, “we don’t care”). One more reel for a huge dopamine hit. Getting invited to powerful parties. Validation from strangers on Twitter. The list is endless, because due to mimetic neurons I have unintentionally copied desires from everyone. Many times I observed, these desires which are not even mine, were mislabeled as needs and I was behaving accordingly. Whenever I get the opportunity, I upgrade the labels of these desires to wants.

So instead of fighting them, I welcome them all with a simple promise:

Whenever the expectation is not a need, I will not loose my peace. My relationship with the Hungry mind is much more important than the wants getting fulfilled

The promise was made both by the hungry mind and myself, not while driving but a conversation we had when the car was parked. During the drive, it’s simply acts as a reminder to both of us until it becomes our defaults. There is no pressure of fulfilling the promise every time there’s a reward prediction error. There are zero consequences if I miss it one time, 10 times of even 100 times. All what matters is understanding it and trusting that I will learn to apply it.

Pain or Pleasure

Sometimes, I as a passenger need to change the destination or simply add a stop. This framework comes really handy for doing that.

Pleasure: the activities both Hungry mind and I together enjoy doing.
Pain: the activities both Hungry mind and I disagree and commit

Not work-life balance but pain-pleasure balance

I have experimented this a lot throughout my journey as an entrepreneur. Whenever I equally deploy watts to both pain and pleasure, my performance is better. It could be spread across days, weeks, or hours.

But I would know that I have given enough watts to activities that were painful, and then I would consciously deploy on pleasure activities.

If I scroll reels from a perspective of balancing pain and pleasure, then suddenly I start making it more valuable. I start playing around with the kind of content I am watching, simply because both Hungry mind and I are together, everything I do becomes valuables and win-win.

It also took a lot of experimentation to figure out which activity was pleasureful for me. Think of it like choosing the song both driver and the passenger would enjoy. This is what can be done while driving since you’ll know either the driver is getting sleepy, tiered, or excited.

Meditation

Meditation in my opinion is arguably the most efficient method to the madness. Meditation is the cheapest, fastest RAM-clearing utility I know

If I want to clear up my stress debt? Unlock flow state? Want to make hungry my friend? Any where, Any time. No dependencies. Just me and my mind. Absolutely no resources required.
Mediation mediates the relationship between me and Hungry mind

If I’m in a phase of life where I’m actively seeking help and on the verge of giving up – where the pain is unbearable and I’m desperate for relief – both me and hungry mind, though not aligned or friendly, instinctively agree: find a painkiller. In such a state, I’m open to trying anything because my current default is worse than whatever discomfort the new path may bring. But when I’m not in pain – when I’m simply exploring – the key that unlocks both me and hungry mind is curiosity. That’s the beauty of curiosity: it seduces both systems by promising potential rewards. It whispers just enough intrigue to trigger action.

Painkiller mode – When life hurts enough, both scream “do something!” Vipassana was my reset button.
Curiosity mode – When I was curious to dive deeper and unlock beyond friendship with the hungry mind, Jhana called me in.

Summary

So if I catch myself bargaining with a cheeseburger at 2 a.m., I try to remember: I'm not broken, just low on watts

The brain isn’t a battlefield; it’s a car with one engine and two seats. Let the Hungry mind drive. And when the dashboard light blinks, that’s your moment to co-pilot. I can promise you, the journey from auto-pilot to co-pilot is extremely fun.

Concepts that could be valuable:

Hungry mind is the driver! It is power-saving feature, not a bug
My relationship with Hungry mind is more important than me controlling the wheels
What reward am I predicting now? Is this a need or a want?
Stress debt is the signal of internal friction caused due to low watts
“I forgive myself for not understanding” is the exact prompt that works for me. I hug the driver, clear the stress debt, and watch the road open up
The natural state of the brain has zero stress debt
The brain tries to fuel all its parts, including “I", and keep them working as one team

Thank you for reading. Sending more joy and peace towards you!
Awareness about these concepts wouldn't have been possible without so the exposure from people and books I interacted with. Sending gratitude and love for all of them.
KT