My inner world has a management team. I thought I was the CEO - turns out, I’m not
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.
Energy budget
I’ve come to believe I am not given the driver seat because the brain operates on a tight energy budget.
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.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.
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?
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
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
Pain or Pleasure
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
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