In today's fast-paced world we are bombarded with information. Far more than our ancient ancestors would ever have been exposed to. Worse still, the majority of this information has almost no practical value, only serving to reduce our attention span, trigger our emotions and deplete our mental energy. The best way to combat this information overload is with a mental diet.
What is a Mental Diet?
A mental diet involves controlling the quality and quantity of our mental inputs. It's similar to a physical diet where we control our calorie intake and avoid junk food and unhealthy choices. In a mental diet the goal is to reduce the unnecessary, unhealthy or pointless sources of information in our lives while focusing only on the positive, necessary or uplifting ones.
Putting It Into Practice
Write down all the non-essential mental inputs in your life. Examples could include social media feeds, news websites, online forums, comment threads, text message groups, certain tv shows and email clutter. Next identify any which are sucking up your mental energy, reducing your attention span, distracting you from more important tasks, worsening your relationships or darkening your mood.
Then for one week, two weeks, one month, or longer see if you can eliminate these sources of information from your life.
How does this impact your mood? Your mental energy? Your sleep? Your focus?
A good mental diet can positively impact all of the above leading to significant improvements in the quality of your life.
Easily said but this is a very hard skill to practice.
Much of the modern economy relies on the sustained capture and hijacking of our attention.
And it’s very effective!
Even with well-informed intentions I’m still constantly being pulled into pointless phone checking and internet browsing.
Nonetheless low quality, high frequency information is like low nutrient, high calorie food.
The less of it you have in your life, the better you will probably feel.