WB Yeats put it beautifully. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity," he wrote.

In the lead up to the General Election I witnessed more unpleasant, unnecessary and deliberately provocative messages on social media than I have seen for a long time. At one level it’s completely understandable. A huge amount was at stake at a Scottish, a UK, and of course, a European level. Some people feel passionately about certain issues, and have a fervent belief in the rightness of their opinion and the moral or logical righteousness of their cause.

But questions arise in my head for these people. In the classic words of Crocodile Dundee, don’t they have mates? Or more importantly, don’t they have family to be with, or places they can go out and walk around?

Yet I find myself doing it too. At a spare moment we just check to see if something new has come up on Facebook or Twitter, then get caught up by our negative reaction to someone’s post. The annoyance or a desire to retort stirs up in our mind and we type it up and hit the send or post button.

Job done. Or so we think. But for every retort we write there is likely to be at least one reply coming our way. The reply is likely to dispute our view, which probably annoys us again, and the temptation arises to respond in kind yet again.

Moreover, other similar comments start to grab our attention.

Meanwhile time slips by, our mood tightens up and feels negative, and there is no final victory in the tit for tat messaging unless our side finally wins, giving us the opportunity to finally stick it to our online rivals, mocking them for the defeat they have just suffered.

All of which is of course within our rights to do. My point however is about wellbeing, a happy, fulfilled life, and choosing what to do in each moment. The internet is full of good things, fun things, harmless things, but it is also full of evidence of people unthinkingly reacting and thus being blown this way and that by whatever content they come across. The result: wasted time, tiredness, and a sense of emptiness because the activity has been so bereft of anything that actually matters in your life.

Mindfulness asks us to become so good at noticing what’s actually going on in our lives, that we are finally able to discern between the rubbish around us and that which nurtures our very being. The more rubbish we intake or participate in, the less developed we become as a person. Our energy wanes. Our enthusiasm drops. Our sense of love and joy for others and for life itself ebbs away. We not only forget that we have blinkers on, we tighten them further and further, becoming more and more narrow-minded and conditioned with every passing day.

Part of restoring a sense of freshness and mental energy to your life is to put into place some degree of self-restraint. Instant self-gratification and knee-jerk reaction do satisfy, but only for a very short time, while dealing with the consequences of our self-indulgence can last a lifetime.

Practise trying to notice. It’s very easy to do so every so often, when the mind remembers, but it takes a lot of time and effort to cultivate that way of being, so that your mind is able to notice more and more moments in the day. The more moments you notice the more you start to be able to catch yourself in those moments when your mind has gone completely off-track, wasting precious time on trash, or worse, causing hurt to yourself through slipshod, mindless actions and reactions.

Here's an extreme example. The average person in the UK now spends around four hours per day watching television. Being conservative, if you stopped watching television altogether and studied instead you could get a university degree every six years. So if you are 40 years old, you could achieve a doctorate, change career, read all the world’s top thousand classic books, and still spend more time with your family and friends if you live the average lifespan.

Add given the time we spend on Facebook, Twitter and so on, and there’s almost nothing we couldn’t do with the time we’d save. So rather than arguing with the political opposition online, or pressing the Like button on messages that we agree with, we could actually stop and think how we might help create a better society or improve the lives of people, animals, or the environment, whether your focus is local or global.

It’s about that time in an article when the liberal in me thinks – I’ll have to add: “Of course we don’t have to give up all of our down time or the little things we enjoy.” But actually when you look at it the way I’ve just explained it, the opposite is true. We should actually give up all the time-wasting we do. The gift of life deserves better treatment. The astonishing reality of being alive, able to sense with five senses, reason with the brain, and feel myriad emotions and passions and enthusiasm, demands that we are mindful enough to make the most of the miracle of our own existence.