Lessons from 30 years of living

The introduction to this article series can be found here;

Chapter One can be found here;

How to use this book

This book is intended to guide you towards a better life, one that enables you to be happier, more resilient and more loving. Chapters are short for a reason; it is better to get straight to the point than to beat around the bush. You can read this cover to cover and explore some of the ideas as they come up. Or if you would prefer, pick it up anywhere, open a chapter that sounds of interest to you and see if the ideas help you to figure out what is going on inside your head.

Information Diet

The health and nutrition world has a lot of extremely opposing views all backed up by their very own science and facts that prove why x diet is better than z. We spend a lot of time and energy choosing the right food for our bodies and minds, with hopes of getting closer to vitality with each mouthful. People go to extreme lengths to feel the “best” they can even if that means drinking blended spinach, and I think most of us know the difference between how we feel when we have been eaten correctly for the last two weeks, instead of stuffing our faces with processed fast food. Being conscious and considerate of your dietary choices pays off, not just in the short term but in the long term too. You are often granted better vitality, more energy, greater sleep and a radical change in mindset. Why then, are we not more conscious of the information we ingest? The answer is relatively simple.

First, it is difficult to see upfront the detriment of too much information, or too much useless information. If you stuff your face with cake and ice cream you genuinely feel it in your body and I would argue that when you stuff your face with social media and advertising you also feel it, albeit just much less pronounced. We have not developed a good sense of the negative aspects of ingesting too much information, but we can feel it ever so subtly, it presents itself as a narrowing of views, a slight headache, less energy and a more temperamental focus.

You become, ever so slightly, day by day, that which you focus on. You can see these changes inside yourself due to whatever information you have been consuming over the past few days, weeks or months. I, for example, have been very interested in neurobiology as of late, for weeks I have been learning and consuming several hours a day of digital content about how the brain works and due to this information, I now find myself thinking of how my hormones are affecting my behaviour and when I go about my day, I apply this lens to my tasks and discuss these things with friends.

This morning I had a cold shower upon waking up, I did this because cold exposure helps stimulate dopamine production in the brain and offers a pretty long arc for dopamine production, meaning I won’t get an immediate drop-off and therefore won’t need to find another way to produce dopamine for at least a few hours. Dopamine is the hormone of motivation, not pleasure. We need dopamine to feel good about the tasks we are completing and to want to do more, so when I sit down to write in the morning, I use cold exposure to help boost my alertness and keep me motivated to write.

However, if I had been spending hours a day over the last few weeks consuming information about scandalous affairs celebrities have been going through, or endlessly scrolling social media as if each post was a potato chip and I just stuffed them into my fat face, or spending hours a day watching serial killer content on Netflix, then I would most likely be hyperaware of my image and be extra concerned about what other people thought about me or I may even be sleeping with a knife under my pillow awaiting the murderer that is hiding outside in the shadows.

I am not telling you not to do this stuff, by all means, do whatever it is that pleases you. Eventually, though, we all have to look in the mirror and decide if our dietary choices are working for us. If you are 350lbs and you don’t like what you see, maybe avoid that next big mac, and have a salad instead. If you are ultra concerned about your image and what other people think about you, maybe put down the social media apps and pick up a book instead. The point is to be conscious of what you consume so that you do not end up in a position you did not intend to be in.

It's easy to get swept away by the news, by negative information, or down the rabbit hole of advertising. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself what kind of value is this adding to your life? Does ingesting this information make me a better person? How do I even gauge what being a better person is in the first place? A lot of us our moving through life on auto-pilot, oblivious to the world around us and the impact that the information we are ingesting has on us. We can see it in other people, but not so readily in ourselves. There is a lot of difference in the mentality provided by a high-quality information diet. To understand this though you have to ask yourself what kind of person you want to be and then compare yourself to who you were yesterday.

What are you trying to improve? Let’s say you want to be less bothered by what people think about you and the impact that other people’s opinions have on your mental state. One of the ways you can start to work towards this is to fill your day with as much good information as possible on the topic. That means going and looking for new information that fits your new scaffolding. This can be by following certain influential people that hold the qualities you want to build. It can also be by reading books about the topic you are having difficulty with, or by having these conversations with friends that don’t appear as bothered by the thing you are trying to overcome. In essence, you search for the right information and you learn how to deal with these issues through the use of other people’s experiences.

Then you move on throughout your world and when you come up against the issues you are trying to defeat, you apply the new knowledge you have gained. Keep doing this over and over again and it becomes second nature to you.

It is that simple. We are the collective consciousness of the people we spend the most time with and the information we ingest. Do you want to change yourself for the better? Start by ingesting better information and see how it affects your behaviour, keep doing this time and time again and before you know it you are looking back on who you once were and who you are now and you can see the difference in yourself.