Mind Wrinkles
How easily our minds our influenced and what we can do about it.
To be human is to be impressionable. Our minds are so easily influenced by the world around us. And this week I had an experience that brought this truth home in a powerful way. I was doing a casual ‘news scroll’, looking through different news sites to see what’s cooking, and I stumbled across an article in the Guardian that interviewed 11 people about their approach to ageing, asking them: ‘Be honest…have you had work?’
I read about 40-year-old Dr David Jack who listed the fillers, Botox and other injections he had done. I read about Daphne Selfe, 96, the world’s oldest supermodel, who never had any work done and only uses Nivea cream at £5.99 a piece. I finished reading the article, went to the toilet, and found myself looking in the mirror, zooming in on my receding hairline, worrying about ageing, and planning what to do about it. As I left the bathroom, I was preoccupied with fears about my now rapid-onset decrepitude, and it wasn’t until a few minutes later that I caught my neurotic mind in action and awoke from this trance.
I was seriously shocked. How could reading one article have shifted my perception so instantly? After all, I’m a veteran meditator, a psychotherapist, a reasonably self-aware and supposedly wise guy. How could one bit of content create such an impression on my mind?
The truth is that our minds are constantly being shaped by the world around us, and we really don’t take this seriously enough. Every conversation, every piece of content, every fleeting moment leaves an impression—what in various schools of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy are called samskaras. Samskaras are the wrinkles etched into our consciousness by experience, shaping how we perceive ourselves, others, and the world.
Sometimes, the smallest thing—a message, a look, an article about ageing —can instantly and radically shift our perception. To witness this truth requires humility: we are porous beings, far more impressionable than we like to believe. Our minds are like ponds, with a capacity for profound stillness, but even the lightest touch—a falling leaf, a single raindrop—can send ripples outward, stirring up silt.
Our porosity is both our strength and our vulnerability. It allows us to be moved by the innocence in a baby’s eyes, by a song, by an act of kindness. But it also means we are shaped by forces we don’t always see or would not want to be influenced by. The question is not whether we will be shaped, but how—and by what. What impressions do we allow to linger? What boundaries do we set to protect the sanctity of our inner landscape?
And to take this insight one layer deeper, what if even the most basic assumptions we hold about ourselves and the world around us are not truly ours. This does not mean there is no such thing as truth. The truth is that we age. Our faces gather lines, our hair thins or changes colour. These are facts. But the meaning we attach to those facts—the stories we build around them—are not inherent. They are born from the impressions we allow into our minds, and we often mistake those stories for truth. This is a subtle process - the wrinkles in our mind form quietly, without our permission, and suddenly we’re living in a story we didn’t consciously choose.
In the 21st Century, as I mentioned in my last article, we are drowning in content, producing as much information in 15 minutes as we did from the dawn of civilization to 2003. Every email, Whatsapp message, social media post, YouTube video, news item—they are all creating wrinkles on our consciousness, shaping our perception and our beliefs, shaping who we are and how we show up in the world. If one article could alter my perception so radically, imagine the cumulative effect of hundreds of digital inputs each day.
This week, I gave a talk about the impact of digital technology on young minds and the statistics are alarming. In 2024, the average time spent online for kids in the UK and US was 5 hours a day (not including any schoolwork). Young minds are even more impressionable than adult minds, so just imagine how many samskaras in a 5-hour period are rippling into those young minds. We shouldn’t be surprised that 66% of young people in the UK now want to change their facial features; or that children as young as 4 are starting to show anxiety about their body image; or that there is a steep rise in body dysmorphia and cosmetic procedures amongst our children.123
So this is a big deal. Through millions of impressions a day, we are being conditioned to hate ourselves and to hate each other. We are being conditioned to have dreams that are not our own, to chase goals that belong to someone else. We are being conditioned to live in fear and not love. We need to wake up from this trance.
So what can we do? How can we protect both ourselves and our children from the wrinkles we don’t want to carry?
There are five steps that can help us wake up:
Be humble: Recognize that your mind, like a pond, is easily stirred. Humility begins with seeing how often the ripples are not your own.
Create space: Stillness is essential. Give your pond time to settle, free from the constant pebbles of digital noise. In the quiet, the ripples fade, and clarity returns.
Use discernment: Waking up means asking: Where did this wrinkle come from? Is it mine? Let the wrinkles that don’t belong to you fade, and keep only the ones that reflect your true self. Buddhism is a good friend for us here. The Buddhist concept of anatta (‘no self’) is sometimes turned into a powerful mantra - not me, not mine, not myself. When you find yourself suffering, use this mantra like a spiritual Botox injection to remove all those samskaras that do not belong to you.
Practice clear seeing: there is a way of looking at things without judgment. It is not easy to do (I’ve been working on it for 35 years!), but it is the only way I know to bring our minds back into some proximity with reality. You can try it right now. Look at your right hand for a moment. Can you just let your eyes receive the image of your hand without any story about them? If a story or judgment arises, just notice this, let it go, and come back to clear seeing.
Choose your grooves: once we wake up to how easily influenced we are, it creates that space between stimulus and response. In that space, we can choose our grooves, which means we can choose what things we will allow to impress themselves upon our minds, and which we will choose to block.
In the end, our minds will always be shaped by the world around us—it’s part of being human. But we don’t have to be passive recipients of every impression. The wrinkles on our consciousness may be inevitable, but we can choose how they shape us. No wrinkle is so deep it cannot be softened with loving awareness.
But unlike Botox for the face, this is no quick fix. Waking up is an ongoing process—of noticing the wrinkles, tuning into the stillness beneath, and choosing, moment by moment, which impressions to carry forward and which to let go.
If we don’t, we are letting our minds (and therefore our precious lives) be shaped by the pebbles others throw, living as echoes of someone else’s intentions. But with space, discernment, and stillness, we can reclaim our minds—and perhaps even our true selves.
For those of you who want to dive deeper into this practice, I’ve recorded a short Heart Note—a mini meditation for paying subscribers I’m calling Spiritual Botox For The Mind - it’s a practice to help you remember that underneath all those wrinkles on our consciousness, there’s a smooth, unchanging, loving awareness waiting to be found.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/young-children-concerned-body-image-study-dove-b1187745.html
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10471190/
https://news.sky.com/story/the-love-island-effect-driving-up-demand-for-cosmetic-surgery-13206066