The Digital Diet
Eliminating Online Junk Food from Our Lives
Every day we are faced with the important decision of what to feed our bodies and we make mostly conscious decisions about the types of foods that we will consume to nourish them. However, when it comes to the sort of information we consume to nourish our minds, we rarely stop and think about the downsides of our digital consumption and we often neglect the importance of being selective about what we allow our minds to feed on.
Building a strong body is imperative to our health, vitality, and longevity.
Building a strong mind is vital for the flourishment of our consciousness and our fulfillment in life.
It has become now, more than ever, crucial to maintain our mental well-being as much as our physical well-being. You wouldn’t feed your body junk food to stay physically fit and healthy, likewise, you don’t want to feed your mind with digital junk food to sustain its effective cognition. Thus, becoming intentional about the information that we feed our heads should be at the top of our priorities as a modern human in the digital age.
The digital diet is as important as the food diet.
The food diet: The diet of the body is imperative to our health, vitality, and longevity. We are all aware of the benefits that come from maintaining healthy eating habits and the downsides of consuming junk food.
The food diet is comprised of:
- The quality of the nutrition you ingest
- The quantity of food intake- The quality of hydration you maintain
The digital diet: Is the digital consumption of news, podcasts, and social media feeds, as well as exposure to role models, ideas, and a vast sea of information online.
The digital diet consists of:
- The type of media and content that you consume
- The amount of time spent online
- The variety of sources that you garner your information from
The quality of the nutrition you ingest greatly determines how well your body gets nourished. Diet is more than calories in and calories out, a developing child fed on an abundance of ultra-processed sweets is deprived of essential nourishment for his development. Similarly, when you feed your mind with trash entertainment or you bombard it with constant digital stimuli by mindless doom-scrolling, you only manage to numb your brain receptors, lower your dopamine baseline, and dysregulate your ability to process complex emotions.
Choosing to consume “digital junk food”, greatly contributes to the stagnation of the growth of our intellect.
Become the curator of your digital environment.
Avoid negativity and the news. Carefully choose where you subscribe to, who you follow and who you aspire to be like, what sort of ideas you allow to penetrate your consciousness, and consume content that aligns with your priorities and values.
Food often comes with labels that state its nutritional values. However, the information that you get online you don’t know if it is good or bad for you until you consume it. Practicing healthy habits for a balanced digital diet is imperative for your mental well-being.
The quantity of food intake is as important as what we eat. By not eating enough we become malnourished, deficient, and weak. By eating too much (mostly the wrong stuff but not only) we become fat, ending up compromising our immune as well as cardiovascular system. As our bodies become obese by eating junk food so do our minds become inflamed by the junk overload of information we are exposing it.
More it’s not always better. Adopting healthy practices of how much screen time we allow ourselves in a day can help us reduce the brain fog that occupies our headspace most of the day.
Imposing such self-limitations can be challenging for all of us, but becoming disciplined and restricting our digital use will allow the mind to take a break from the overstimulation that you expose it and begin to gradually heal back to its normalcy.
Go through a digital detox. Try digital fasting.
As I mentioned in my last post, start by taking a walk without your phone or by not listening to music while you work out.
Thanks to the attention economy, the amount of ads displayed online has become so abundant that their supply overtakes the demand, thus, making our attention a scarce commodity. The reason social media are free is because they are not the product and us the consumers. We, where we choose to direct our eyeballs, are the product.
Imagine everyone online fighting for your attention, with constant notifications alerting you of the next thing see, essentially trying to keep you on your device as long as possible so that they cash that sweet ads money.
Reflecting on your online use and stopping before the point of diminishing returns is requisite to reclaiming your attention from the grasp of your digital overlords.
The quality of the hydration you maintain determines your ability to regulate your body temperature, lubricate your joints, and your capacity to get rid of waste. In parallel, becoming deliberate about where you obtain your information from and selecting a variety of sources that will sometimes oppose and challenge your views, is as important as staying properly hydrated. We exist in digital bubbles in which we are exposed only to information that WE GET TO SEE from what the algorithms want to feed us and not so much of what we choose to see. By thoughtfully diversifying our sources we increase our capacity to determine what is good for us to keep and what we will get rid of as waste.
I have personally found myself in certain echo chambers that did a very good job of amplifying and solidifying certain existing beliefs that did not serve me well. I somehow got stuck in being exposed to “red pill” content that accentuated some assumptions that I held about the current dating market in the West. It turns up, that the truth is always more nuanced than some absolute statements that are forged to be controversial by people with skewed views toward the other sex.
Expose yourself to what “your enemies” consume. Be open to new information and challenge your limiting beliefs.
Question the intentions and interests of the sources that supply your information.
Stop trying to reaffirm your biases by blindly accepting what your party says as factual truth and develop a growth mindset that will help you flourish to your higher self.
Overall, striving for a healthy and balanced presence online is a must if we want to preserve our mental well-being.
The modern world makes the use of our devices inevitable and with the advent of AI, all the systems and methods that currently keep us hooked online now, will become even more captivating.
It is necessary to adopt more thoughtful and nutritious digital dieting habits now so that we have a foundation to rely on in case we decide to retreat from the online world in the future.
Stop being a passive doom-scroller.
Engage with content that helps you grow or create content that contributes to the betterment of others.
And don’t forget to assign time off from your devices.
Go meet your friends or read a real book.
