Healthy Habits For A Healthy Consumption of Knowledge

Learning to filter the information you feed your brain with these small changes.

The human mind is the greatest gift of all. There’s a lot in saying that body, mind, and soul are connected. Everything you consume therefore impacts all of you. You don’t need to be a nutritionist to know that eating a healthy diet affects not only your body but your mind positively. But what about the information you digest via your surroundings, work, and online?

When you finish official education, you do not stop there. You get a job, learn the ropes, go to training classes, and learn from experience.

You go home after work, put on the TV, learn about current affairs, politics, and general news. You talk to your friends and learn about their experiences, their dreams, their lessons.

You travel and learn about other cultures, traditions, languages. You indulge in different habit building and see what you like and what you don't like.

You take up hobbies or study again to better yourself because you crave mental stimulation while keeping up with life — partners, maybe kids, family, all of which you learn from daily.

The brain just takes it all in. It eats what you give it all-day-long. Everything you consume is what you learn, and that becomes part of your identity.

It Sticks to What It Knows

If you give your brain bad news all day, every day, your brain is being trained to consume more bad news all day, every day. You’ll be in constant shock at the injustices of the world and you’ll at the same time look for more. And since everyone else is doing it, it’s normal.

If you give your brain gossip, your brain is being trained to consume more gossip. You’ll ask your mate how it’s going with their bad neighbour, or you’ll start complaining about someone in your family.

What you feed your brain, it’ll crave, and subsequently look for, without you even knowing it.

The habits you let yourself continue to have become so ingrained you lose sight of what is or what isn't good for you. Some habits you will feed on autopilot without stopping to think about whether you want to.

Some people hate smoking yet continue to smoke 20 a day just because they have done so for years. They stick to what they know because they are not deliberate about what they do.

“95% of who we are by the time we’re 35 years old is a memorized set of behaviors, emotional reactions, unconscious habits, hardwired attitudes, beliefs and perceptions that function like a computer program.” — Dr Joe Dispenza

So, according to Dr Dispenza, we have just 5% of a conscious mind to work with and we need to use that to reach the other 95% of ourselves through the use of our analytical mind.

Not hard at all!

Thank God I’m only 31… right?

The Shift in Our Thinking

We are in a time where individuality and self have never before been such a focus in our society. The pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have given many of us time to stop and think about what we were doing with our lives before they got turned upside down. Mindfulness and self-love have reached our radar and many, including me, are exploring what it means.

Some of us are facing a pivotal moment where we question if the current way of working in society is the right way for us. Many companies in the UK shut down their offices and changed their policies to enable working from home permanently. Twitter encouraged all their staff to work from home indefinitely, not just during the pandemic. We have proven that working from home has many benefits, and some regard these benefits as greater than the benefits of working in an office full time. We are, as a nation, changing the dynamics of work vs life balance.

We are changing our thinking, and we are changing our priorities.

You Redistributed the Use of Your Time

The hour once spent on a commute to work scrolling through social media has been replaced with an hour of reading and/or spending quality time with your family.

The upgraded coffee machine you purchased on Amazon prime day beats the daily lattes from Starbucks you used to consume at your desk.

Your lunch break never quite pulled you away from your working brain but now you are sitting in your living room with your spouse watching half an hour of Netflix before taking yourself back to your home-made home-office.

It doesn't come as a surprise that you would next question whether the information you take in is healthy. You might be asking yourself what else you could do to strengthen your brain and improve your learning to reach your goals.

Marie Kondo Your Brain

Avoid head trash. Don’t be a garbage can for anything that does not feed your intellect, stimulate your imagination, or make you a more compassionate peaceful person. Refuse to open your mind to other people’s trash. Tune out anything that promotes conflict or controversy. This can infect you with a mind virus of cynicism or defeat, and you won’t even know it! — Les Brown

There is a hell of a lot of useless data we consume without realising it. To start filtering what kind of knowledge we want to ingest and what we can cut out, we really have to become aware of what our current habits do to add value to our growth.

Once we admit what bad habits we have and how they are not helping us achieve our goals, we can more easily make a plan to cut them out and set a few rules.

This article in Sparring Mind put it beautifully:

There is a real risk in “excessive passivity” — the habit of merely consuming information put in front of you, rather than actively cultivating knowledge in areas that are valuable to you.

It is based on the notion that the information we let “interrupt” us from our active learning harms our growth and distracts us from our goals. When we don’t control what we consume, we are deterring ourselves from the relevant information that could otherwise be learned and applied to our lives.

So how can we unclutter our brains and become pickier about what we surround around ourselves?

The Toxic Use of Technology

I get a lot of useless fluff from social media. I have recently changed my relationship with my phone because I found myself becoming a zombie at times. More importantly, my son noticed my absence as I sat next to him mindlessly thumb-scrolling and was sure to snatch my phone away. He’s not even 2. How powerful is that?

I don’t want to deny the usefulness of technology, however. The ever-improving technology can be a silent killer or it can be the greatest creation in the world. It really boils down to how we use it.

The trap I often fell into with my phone is that I did not consciously use it. I would set out to do one thing and end up mindlessly scrolling through social media and not really paying attention to what I read or looked at. Now, I make a conscious and deliberate decision to check my phone for a purpose, and I don’t get carried away.

When I’m on my phone for anything other than talking to someone on the phone (is that really its primary use?), it’s for one of the following reasons:

• To research and learn (when my laptop is out of reach).
• To post something related to my writing — my career is online after all so this is necessary.
• To engage with and build connections about something that interests me, namely writing and success.
• News catchup (though extremely brief — headlines are usually enough).
• Comedy (usually news-related, and way better than the actual news — Trevor Noah via Youtube is my go-to).
• Following relevant business bosses — I learn from and become inspired by seemingly normal people who have become successful at building a following by doing what they love. Laura Clery, Ladbaby, and Tired ’N’ Tested are comedy entertainers I love to watch on Facebook and Instagram. I follow Tim Denning on LinkedIn, and Ayodeji Awosika on Twitter. The one similarity between them? They add value to my life in some way.

The results? A much more productive person in me and a much happier toddler because he doesn't see the hypnosis I used to fall under.

The key is in the mindful and deliberate use of technology.

Cut Out Negative Gossip

I cannot stand gossiping about people I know, and many rightly claim the same. However, I have only recently put my principle into practice because it is so hard to actively shy away from it.

Firstly, if the person being talked about is not in the room to defend themselves, it’s simply unfair. When we gossip and talk negatively about somebody without their presence, we are wrongly judging a person by making assumptions without context, no matter how informed we claim to be. It’s a waste of time, and frankly, a waste of my brain space.

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

But that’s not even the bad bit. Imagine the amount of anxiety it would give you to learn that people you know are judging you behind your back. One of the leading causes of bullying roots back to gossiping and rumour spreading, not just in children, but in adults too. It’s no joke. Gossiping can ruin lives.

The saying “if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all” is one I take very seriously.

A study researching gossip and burnout in hospitals in 2014 by Elsevier GmbH found that,

negative gossip is positively associated with burnout, in terms of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization.

We can take from this that gossip can negatively impact our work and our job satisfaction, not just in hospitals, but in all work establishments.

This is where I now apply Socrates’ Triple Filter Test.

One of Socrates’ disciples agitatedly approached Socrates to tell him something he had heard about Socrates’ friend.

Before Socrates let him carry on, he asked if the information he was about to divulge about his friend was true. The disciple said he was unsure. The first test of truth failed.

The second question Socrates asked was if the information he was about to share was good, to which the disciple said, on the contrary. The second test of goodness failed.

The third and last question was whether the information would be useful, the answer of which was no. It failed the third test of usefulness.

“Well,” concluded Socrates, “if what you want to tell me is neither true, nor good, nor even useful, why tell it to me at all?”

Saying that, not all gossip is negative — we often spend time talking about current affairs or other people without complaint. However, just because the subject itself wasn't negative, discussing it doesn’t necessarily add value to our lives, so we can begin filtering out the small talk that isn’t beneficial to us.

Limit News Consumption

One of the top priorities of most news broadcasters and papers including the ones who claim to be neutral is entertainment. Those who don’t seemingly choose a political side still choose what to broadcast, and that, is what will get most views.

That’s why I watch comedy late-night shows — their main goal is to entertain, and they happily admit this.

News channels and papers are emotionally charged to reel you in and get you hooked on their shows. They use extremely powerful and misleading vocabulary to help persuade you into thinking that the world is against you.

As Mark Twain said:

“If you don’t read the newspapers, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.”

Denzel Washington quoted the same line and spoke about how the prioritisation of getting news out is to be first, not true.

According to licensed psychologist Logan Jones, PsyD, for VeryWellMind,

“Unfortunately, a lot of the news we consume today isn’t so much reporting as it is a way of keeping people addicted to the news cycle,”

We have to be really picky about what we consume for news because while it is ideal to stay updated, it shouldn’t emotionally shake us — and according to many experts, there is a limit that everyone has to stay up to date before people start to be affected by it negatively.

According to Annie Miller, MSW, LCSW-C, LICSW, an overexposure of negative news can have an impact on our brain and can lead to mental health issues, such as anxiety, fatigue, and depression.

There are a few things you can do to secure your mental well-being while staying up to date with the news:

• Ask friends/family for an update as opposed to consuming the news yourself.
• Read the main headlines and concluding sentences of an article — you don’t need too much detail.
• Stick to reading news from reputable newspapers to avoid seeing graphic video footage from news channels.
• Add a little comedy into your life. A saying I often use to joke about the realities of the world is “if I don’t laugh, I will cry”.
• Ask yourself what you can do to benefit from the news you’re watching and turn them into something positive. It’ll help you be more selective of your news consumption.

Takeaway

You are in control of our mind and you can learn to filter what you let into it. You can start setting your future surroundings and better your circumstances by cutting out the noise that distracts you from your goals.

You can use technology to your advantage by being more selective about what you use it for and how. You can invest in your friendships by nurturing them with meaningful conversations. Lastly, you can learn to limit your news consumption to avoid becoming emotionally affected by them.

It is all about becoming aware of your reactions to your surroundings. When you start to acknowledge how certain things make you feel, you can make some changes by choosing to focus on things that make you feel better and help you reach your goals.

Good luck!

Sylvia Emokpae, thinker and philosopher, is passionate about self-love, motherhood, and pro-race. See more work like this.

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