The Diet That’s Rebooting My Brain
The one-way flow of information to the mind doesn’t really silence our inner voices, but it suppresses them into snide commentaries on the current state of affairs or topics du jour. It simulates participation and engagement, but essentially it’s just reinforcing beaten paths in our infamous rumination circuit: the default mode network. This is a place of habit and restriction to the most efficient, least effortful, ways of thinking and acting and, incidentally, also holds our sense of self. Social self, anyway. Because it has to be alert to threats to our group status that might get us ostracized or unaligned with our internalized tribal mores.
A stream of prefabricated imagery in shorts and videos works in a similar numbing fashion on our imagination.
Most of us know this, or recognize it at work in our lives.
It finally sunk in with me that my thinking had pivoted far too much toward reacting and passive consumption, that simulated learning and exploring, but it is fool’s gold.
So I have disengaged from the various social media and algorithmic news content feeds that populated a chunk of my day and allocated one day a week for a “cheat meal” where I could catch up on friends and family activities, groups, news, etc. and the rest of the week I create, think and explore.
It has been revealing.